Unlocking the world to financial success requires the right tools. Lacking the proper tools makes the journey that much harder and takes that much longer
I am going to show you the tools that I use, tools that actually improve your chances of making money online. Simply scroll through to learn which tools can help increase your online income!
Choose A Professional Theme
When blogging for money the most important item on your list should be a professional theme because like it or not they're going to judge you on how your blog looks. If you're like me you will want a theme that not only looks good it has to be easy to use as well.
I use theFlexSqueeze theme because I found it can do all the things I wanted it to do. This post gives you a sample of what FlexSqueeze is capable of.
Making Money With Amazon
The reason many people join Amazon as an affiliate is because of the range of products they have available for sale. My tool of choice as an Amazon affiliate would have to be WPZon Builder!
The post Why I Love WP Zon Builder gives you a sample of what this exceptional plugin is capable of. In short the main positives would have to be the ease of use and the ability to import the customer reviews into your post.
Choosing The Right Affiliate
Most people who make money online have hit on the right affiliate to promote. This particular Post will direct you to other posts that highlight some of the ways that I have made money online!
They also say the secret to making money online is choosing the right niche. One of the niches I've chosen to add to my online income has to do with the growing Online Lottery industry.
Subscribe To WassupBlog
There are many reasons why you should subscribe to my list, but the most important one being you will never miss out on an important update.
When they say the money is in the list they are right on the money! The moneyis in the list but the problem is that most of the time it’s your money and not the other way around. If you think about it, most of the time, the person whose list you’ve just joined doesn’t care about you at all. The last thing on their mind is making you a fortune because all they’re really interested in is increasing their own.
It’s like when you used to get those phone calls telling you that they can show you how you can make a couple of thousand dollars a week. Now they ask for your email address so they can send you the information promising you a followup call. What do you think that followup call is going to be all about? They’re going to try and sell you something, that’s what!
How Not To Get Sucked In By Lists
Send Me Your Money (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The way I look at it if those guys were making so much money why are they bothering me with it. It’s not because they want to share their good fortune, although that is what they want you to believe. Nope, they need you to buy whatever they’re selling so they can continue to live the life they’re used to.
The guy behind almost every list you’ve joined is just the same as the guy making those obnoxious phone calls. They don’t care about me, they’re only interested in getting their hands on my hard earned money. If they really were interested in me they would do more than just send me some generic email in the hope that I would buy whatever it is they were selling. You’d think the least they would do would be to personalize it somewhat. I don’t mean that they should send a different email to everyone on the list either. Nope, what I mean is they should personalize it by writing something that tells me exactly what it can do for me. Most won’t though because they have no idea what the product their selling does because they haven’t actually outlaid the money to buy their own.
But never mind all that. You want to know how not to get sucked into buying stuff from lists you’ve subscribed to. Read the rest of this entry
As an affiliate you play a very important part because if you do your job well you’re making whoever you’re affiliated to a lot of money. That being the case you would think they would treat you properly wouldn’t you? Generally companies who are looking for affiliates to help sell their products will make sure they offer fair compensation. They may even offer other incentives to entice people to join as an affiliate. After all, the more affiliates you have working for you the more potential for increasing the money in your coffers.
This leads me to the crux of this post. The other day I was approached by someone to design a website for them. Knowing I couldn’t design a professional looking website I convinced them to let me start up a blog for them. It wasn’t too hard to convince them once I explained how easy it was to update a blog as compared to a website.
As these guys belonged to a non profit organization I told them I would do the work for free, thinking that the money I would get from using products I was affiliated with would be enough compensation for my time. The first thing I did was email HostGator as they offered a great product at a great price. I explained the situation and asked if I would still get paid the commission if I licked on my own affiliate link? Their reply.
Hello,
Thank you for your email.
No, you will need to have them setup and pay for their account using their own details simply using your affiliate link in order to receive credit. Thanks again!
Please feel free to let us know if you have any further questions.
Honestly, if someone was paying me to set up a site for them they would expect me to set it all up from start to finish wouldn’t they? So I wrote them back explaining how I was expected to set it all up for them and saying that I had no option other than to source another host to which they replied;
Hello Peter,
Thanks for the consideration, understandable. Unfortunately that policy is in place for numerous reasons and isn’t able to be lifted. We wish you the best of luck and if anything changes we hope you’ll bring them our way! ;)
Thanks again, have a good one!
Please feel free to let us know if you have any further questions.
Sorry people but that makes no sense to me. As far as I’m concerned I can’t see any reason why an affiliate can’t click on their own link. What’s the difference if someone else clicks on that link or I do? They make exactly the same amount of money don’t they? And what’s wrong with giving their affiliates a little discount for buying their product.
Another case in point; you all know about my Lottery site? Well, I wanted to write a post on how easy it was to Buy USA Mega Million Ticket Online and the best way to do that was to actually buy one. I figured why not ask the guys at MyLotto if I would still get my commission if I joined by clicking on my own affiliate link. They said not a problem, and true to their word I got 10% of the sale. You see that is what looking after your affiliate is all about. By letting them join, or buy a product, under their own affiliate link not only are they making money their affiliate get’s a discount. By not allowing them to do so only costs them a sale.
As it is I still needed a host and so I asked the guys at BlueHost if they were OK with it and they said they were which just goes to show there are people out there who know what good business is all about. As for the theme, naturally I’ll be using FlexSqueeze and yes Ryan has given me the approval to click my own link.
All I can say is that when I finally have products for sale online and I’m looking for affiliates I have no problem at all if they click on their own link when buying a product. What about you, are you willing to reward your affiliates buy letting them purchase under their own link? Read the rest of this entry
Most people who become bloggers do so with high expectations of striking it rich. You can’t even blame them because the net is full of people promising they can show them how to make a whole lot of money online, saying that all they need is a blog or a set of websites. A few have actually done it and they get a whole lot of traffic because people think if they stick around long enough some of that fortune will rub off on them. Others haven’t come anywhere near making a decent online income but they write as if they hold the key to financial freedom. Unfortunately they manage to fool a lot of people, all those newcomers who come online to hopefully improve their financial status.
Many who fail to reach their dream of financial freedom continue the online life because they’ve come to love blogging. After all it has so much to offer, you get to express yourself, to share your knowledge with others and the interaction with your commentators is truly sublime. Unfortunately the rest will give up in disgust once they’ve come to realise it wasn’t as easy as they were made to believe.
Now, I’m not here to tell you that I have the secret because I haven’t and saying any different would make me as dishonest as all the rest. However, over the years I have discovered certain things that every blogger needs to know if they want to make their blog a success.
Traffic
This is the most important part of making money online and yet most of those people selling their ‘secret to success’ fail to mention it. All they tell you is get your niche online and the money will start to flow in. Start up another ten and you will increase your income tenfold. Unfortunately no traffic means no customers which means no money and ten times nothing is still nothing.
Getting traffic is possible though but it takes a lot of work and a fair bit of time to drive traffic to your site. What makes things worse is you don’t want just any traffic, you want targeted traffic. This means if you have a blog that is selling computers you don’t want people coming over who are looking to buy dog collars.
The way to get targeted traffic is all tied into the keywords you use in your domain name, your headings, blog titles and posts. Even that is not going to work unless the search engines think you have something of value, and the way to do that is by getting backlinks via blog commenting, forums, writing articles but most importantly by writing brilliant content so other will link to it. My post How I Am Marketing My Online Lottery Niche highlights some of the strategy I’m using to market my latest blog.
A Product To Sell
Most everyone will tell you to make money online you need something that you can sell, preferably your own. Unfortunately most of us don’t have that and so we do the best we can by placing Adsense ads on our sites or by promoting other peoples products as an affiliate. I’ve had a bit of success selling products like FlexSqueeze (a brilliant blog theme), Market Samurai, web hosts and a few others. The problem with those products is once you sell someone a product they’re no longer a potential customer, at least not for that product, which means you’re forever looking for new customers.
In my post The Secret To Online Success Is Passive Income I outlined a few methods I used that were making me money on a regular basis. I also spoke about my latest venture, one that I am confident will be my biggest earner because I am now selling a product that people buy on a regular basis, lottery tickets. I am now in the process of driving traffic to Buy Online Lottery Tickets with the knowledge that every time I gain a customer I will make money whenever they purchase a lottery ticket online. I’m also offering others the opportunity to become a MyLotto affiliate giving them the same opportunity to make money online, knowing that I also make a percentage of their sales.
Building Your Brand
At the beginning of the post I said the most important facet of making money online was driving targeted traffic to your blog, well that’s not quite true, there is something way more important. The most important part of your online businesses is YOU! You are the face of your business as everything you do online affects the way others perceive you. That being the case it doesn’t matter how much traffic you drive to your blog because if your online profile is suspect you’re screwed.
By everything I’m including blog commenting as this is by far the most popular method used by bloggers to market their blog. I’ve known this from the beginning and I am constantly surprised by the amount of people who fail to use commenting to their advantage. This is probably because done properly it takes time and many prefer quantity over quality failing to see that a lot of poor comments only serves to hurt their brant. If you’re not sure what constitutes a good comment I suggest you read Teaching People The Proper Way To Comment as I used this post to grade people on the quality of their comment.
One thing to remember while online is that unlike the offline world you have time to think before responding to any negative comment, or feedback on one of your products, that you may receive. Never, ever, let anger cloud your replies because once you blow up online you reveal to everyone your loss of control and lack of professionalism. Two posts taking about this subject that you may find interesting ate Kristi’s 3 Questions To Ask About Offensive Content On Your Blog, although you can apply this to a lot more than just blogging.
Social Media
Social media is an important facet of your online business and one that I still have a long way to go as far as online promotions go. It’s also very important as far as branding goes and so you have to be very careful how you conduct yourself when using them. Something that many people fail to realise is that almost everything you do online is open to public scrutiny and that being the case acting in a manner that can be seen as untoward by others can cost you business. So be very careful what you say online or even what you link to. You may think that something you saw online was extremely funny and so you tweet the link to all your followers not thinking that many of them may find it very offensive.
When it comes to social media it’s my opinion that ChingYa would have to be the online social media guru, blog posts like her 7+ Major Tips In Enhancing Your Upgraded FaceBook Page just goes to show the wealth of her knowledge. You could do a lot worse than going over there and learning from what ChingYa has to say.
Phew, I don’t normally rave on like this but I reckon I just had a lot to say, and even so there is probably so much that I left out. This is where you guys come in by using the comment section. What are you doing to make your blog a success? What have I missed out and how can we help each other to attain our goals.
It was only about a week ago, Monday the 28th of February to be exact, when I did a post telling everyone how I discovered a new method of getting traffic, one that also acted as a revenue raiser. That post was simply called Put Money In Your Pocket And Generate Traffic To Your Blog. From the comments it received I got the feeling there was some scepticism as to whether it actually does generate traffic, ergo this post.
You may remember that you needed to collect 20 clicks on your widget before it would generate any traffic, well I reached that milestone on this blog on the third of March and I’m here to tell you that it actually works, as you can easily see by this image.
This shows that in the few days since reaching the threshold, although I’ve only sent 64 clicks I’ve received twice that number in return, that’s 200% which is on the bottom range of their claim of 200 – 250% proving it to be completely accurate.
Another issue that some of the commentators were having was that you wouldn’t get quality traffic thereby increasing your bounce rate. Well that all depends on the teaser you use. By teaser I mean the ad you submit after reaching the threshold, the one that gets placed on their traffic network. If your ‘teaser’ accurately displays the right content to your visitor you should only get targeted traffic.
For example this one directs traffic to my What Affiliates To Promote To Blog For Money post. The image itself is a screen shot of the landing page when someone clicks my ad, the image that says Learn To Earn’ and as you can see from my teaser they know exactly what they’re in for when they click the ‘Read More’ icon and so I’m really generating targeted traffic.
This next image is the landing page after clicking on my latest ad and generates traffic for my Market Samurai Update post.
Again I’m not using any tricks to get them to my blog as the teaser is an accurate description of the landing page and therefore should only bring targeted traffic. In other words overtime you qualify for a new teaser you’re able to generate an ad which points to a specific post, and if you’re using the FlexSqueeze Theme that could be to one of your squeeze pages.
In case you’re wondering how much money I’ve generated since using Zaparena, in just over a week I’ve earned .60 Euro, and considering I was more interested in the traffic network I see that as a bonus.
As this post proves the Zaparena Traffic Network actually works there is one thing to keep in mind, and that is for it to work you do need a site that is already generating traffic as it won’t generate traffic on its own. The more traffic you have the quicker you’re likely to reach the threshold thereby generating traffic to your site.
Would you use this for your blog and if not I would love to hear what’s stopping you from implementing it?
A while back I did a post on how Not Clicking On A Link can cost you and I’m not just talking about money as you may be missing out on golden opportunities as well. Basically I was trying to work out why certain people were not clicking on some links that were presented in a post. I figured the best way was to have a poll and the first part of this post is to discuss the results.
It wasn’t the most popular of polls as only 23 people took the time to vote, yet even so there was a trend.
Not enough time and will come back later (35%, 8 Votes)
I ain’t afraid of no links! (35%, 8 Votes)
The credibility of the author (13%, 3 Votes)
Scared of being sucked in by a scam (13%, 3 Votes)
It’s just too hard (4%, 1 Votes)
Fear of failure (0%, 0 Votes)
It seems that most people didn’t have the time, they’re just blog hopping and leaving a comment. Perhaps they liked the idea and made a mental note to come back later, unfortunately I reckon most of them would just forget about it. Lost opportunities.
I ain’t afraid of no links, scored equal top and these are the people who will click on a link if they thought they saw something interesting. These are the adventurous types, like yours truly who realize that you have to sample all that life has to offer you in order to be able to sift the good from the bad.
The credibility of the author, only scored 3 votes. This did surprise me as I thought it would be on the top of the list. Heck even I wouldn’t click on a link if I thought the authors credibility sucked. Although I love to sample life I don’t like wasting my time.
The other two points didn’t really matter as I just stuck them in to make the poll bigger. That was a mistake and from now on future polls will only include relative points. There were a lot of interesting comments so you may want to have a look to see what people actually said.
My next poll is all to do with Lists. In my post Why The List Hater Has His Very Own List I told everyone how I succumbed to the list building idea. I also said how I would not spam them and that I would only email my subscribers when I posted a new article on this blog. The thing is I’ve noticed over time that less people were opening my emails and it got me to thinking, was I sending out too many campaigns?
Unlike other List builders I am concerned about my subscribers and wherever possible I want to make them happy and if that means sending out less emails then I am quite happy to do that. I don’t want to be like those internet marketers whose only concern is to suck people into buying some crap and in order to do that they’ll continue to send out emails, sometimes on a daily basis. Their only intent is that people succumb to their Call To Action!
So, the question for this poll is ‘How Often Would You Prefer To Receive A Newsletter?’
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This isn’t just for my list subscribers either, it’s for everyone to get involved. You may even want to promote this post by doing all the normal tweeting and stumbling things so that perhaps some of those email marketers out there get an idea of how often you really want to receive their newsletters. Naturally there are three calls to action to this post, one is to answer the poll, the second to leave a comment and the third would be to subscribe to my list by using the subscription form over there on the right.
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who realize that you have to sample all that life has to offer you in order to be able to sift the good from the bad.
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