Basically, “5 things to remember when watching TV“, or “10 things to do when on vacation in Maui” type of post will give something for the reader to read, comment on and pass along to the web.  If you get it just right, you are looking at a possible social media explosion and will win out with a popular post read by many.

For my list post I am going to write about the “5 Things NOT to Do if You Want To Make Money Online”.  These items are from my own experiences over the last couple of years and of the 5 on the list, I wish I hadn’t done any of them.  Enjoy.

5 Things NOT to Do if You Want To Make Money Online

1. When you have a blog that is set up with inlinks and getting paid monthly, do NOT let the domain expire because you are not paying attention to the emails.  (cost:  $100/month)
2. While spamming your blog link all over comment sections, make sure you do NOT misspell it.  (cost:  unknown, but traffic for sure)
3. If you are going to buy an old domain name because it has some awesome keywords in it, do NOT buy one that has been banned from everywhere on the internet.  (cost: $10, to date)
4. When signing up to hundreds of affiliate networks, do NOTforget your login information, especially to the one that has $$ sitting aside for you!  (cost:  ~$100)
5. Whether you are in affiliate marketing on Facebook, using EPN, Google or Clickbank, make sure you do NOT violate the terms of service.  (cost:  can be more than you think!)

So, there you have it.  I have been able to whip up a “list” post in a matter of 20 minutes, by just thinking about some of the things that I have messed up on in the last 2 years.  What do you think?

When I first started blogging for the sole purpose to make some “extra” money, I was trying to learn everything possible.  I was reading shoemoney, problogger and a couple of the other top blogs, staying up all night and trying to setup up blogs that “make sense” to readers.  Trying different tactics to get the Google to see me in the sea of millions of blogs.  And all of a sudden, it clicked and although I didn’t realize it until it was almost too late, I did take advantage in one major way.

I thought about giving the ebook away as a prize to a subscription contest, but I have also been talking about creating a newsletter for 2009.  I don’t really think that I have enough information to spread around the net every month or even bi-monthly.  Without that constant information, I really am not sure that I can keep the newsletter going.  I will try and plan a series of longer posts that I can just stick in the newsletter, but for now, I am going to just stick to posting on the blog.

You can download the PDF file through a link in my email feed.  Subscribe today and the link will be sent to you.  If you download it, please consider reviewing it by commenting on this post.  Thanks for the feedback!

My friend Matt at BlogAboutYourBlog, wrote up a little post about the deal at Kontera.  It’s pretty straight forward, see below.

How to do it?
1. Join Kontera by Jan 15th.
2. Sit back and relax.
3. Reach $75 in your account, and we’ll send you a check for $100!

Seems very easy.  Take a look on the website and see what kinds of benefits the publishers get with Kontera!  Happy New Year!!

What Chance Do You Have?

Well, think about it for a minute.  Most companies that are advertising through affiliate networks what their product or service “out there”.  Do you think they are only going to advertise through the network?  I don’t think so.  If you go directly to the companies website, you might be able to find a link to their affiliate program.  That’s right, you are not going to have to throw your blog away now.  When companies use large networks they are just looking for affiliates, but are paying the networks for finding you.

Now What?

Well, if you get to the website and find a link that says “partners” or “affiliate program“, go ahead and click it.  Most of the time you might be directed to the network that is handling their affiliate program, but SOMETIMES you are taken to a sign up page.  There you can sign up directly for their program.  The best part?  The payouts are usually better because they are not paying any network.

What Do I Think?

Go for it!  I have done this with companies like Uniblue, Ashley Madison Agency and travel agency companies.  The payouts for the 3 that I just listed were higher than through a major network.  You have already read that you should join as many affiliate networks as you can to get premium payouts and offer exclusive to these sites, why not take it a step further?  With a simple Google search you can find a TON of information regarding private affiliate programs.

What to Look For

Don’t forget that sometimes when a company is using a top affiliate network, it might be because they don’t want to deal directly with affiliates, stat tracking or affiliate newsletters.  So, before you get to excited to join all kinds of affiliate programs that are not in a network, make sure that you can find the help or FAQ section.  It pays, in more ways than one, to get all the information you can before wasting your time.

DealDotCom places ONE product online for sale at midnight, every night.  The products include digital downloads, ebooks and things like that.  You can get things from Wordpress plugins and web site builders and scripts.  The thing is that you will be getting them at a deal, sometimes over 60% off retail price!

What’s In It For Me?

The DealDotCom affiliate program is like any other, with a couple key exceptions the work for the affiliate.  First off, the program is two-tier.  What does that mean?  Well, you get a percentage (35%) for everyone you refer to the web site AND you get a percentage (15%) for  everyone THEY refer.  This is the good part.  The commission is paid for the life of their account! 

That is right, you can be making money the whole time they are ordering items from DealDotCom.  The more they are interested in the more money you make from your referrals.  You can get paid by Paypal, which is nice and easy, anytime that you get over $20 in commissions.  Payments are sent out the first day of the following month.  Everyday the web site gives away ONE Deal-of-the-Day and every registered user is included.  To claim a prize you just have to login.

Promotion

Another excellent thing about their program is that you can promote the web site any way that you want to, except for ONE.  NO SPAM!  You cannot spam IM’s, forums, etc.  So, as long as you can keep from spamming your entire family and group of Myspace friends, everything should be ok.  Oh yea, and did I mention they have a Facebook app?  Check it out here.

I wanted to take this free money and make the most I could from it.  So the planning started.  What affiliate network would I use and what type of offer could I peddle to FaceBook?  I know most college students are all over the website so I thought I would pick an offer that might grab the attention of 18-24 year olds.

I choose a couple of different offers because in the past I had a hard time getting an ad approved at Facebook.  If you are thinking of advertising with them, READ the terms and conditions, it will save you TONS of time.

Since you get to choose your audience, I wanted to try and get one that was targeted for a specific offer.  I thought I might be able to get more clicks that way.  Going with a larger audience for a more general ad doesn’t seem to work well.

I went with a GameFly trial offer that I found on RocketProfit.com.  The offer was for $22 on a successful trial sale.  Plans started at $8.95 and it includes a 10 day trial.  With free shipping both ways I thought it might be a good seller for college age Facebook users.

Let’s take a look at the stats:

I targeted men between 18 and 24 in the US that liked computer games, Nintendo Wii, PS3, Video Games or Xbox.  I thought it was a nice chunk of users.

The ad was paid for by my Facebook coupons, so I went all out at $1.00 per click to start.  I realized later the coupons flooded the ad space with outragous per click costs because everyone was getting free clicks, more on that later.

After about 330,000 impressions I have a total of 85 clicks!  I thought it was going pretty well.  I really didn’t think the CTR would be good, but .02 was looking real bad.  Then I looked at my RocketProfit.com account and say a total of $22!  I was shocked, but was glad to see SOMETHING, plus, it was free money so it was $22 profit

So I spent about $72.54 of my coupons on a 3 day ad and I think I will be skipping it as part of my money making experiments, at least for now.  It would be a total loss if I was using real money.  Maybe the target wasn’t good enough or the legnth of the campaign was too short.  Facebook also has a long list of “no-no’s” that really limits what ads you can show, I recommend reading those all the way through.

I will have to look at it a little deeper and see if I come up with any reason to give it a try again, especially with my money.

Have you had any success with Facebook ads?

So far my sites haven’t made all that much, but I am sticking with the “100 sites that make $1/day” goal, I guess.  I will replicate these as niche domains popup and as long as I can manage them.  For the most part they are automatic, so I should be ok for at least 20 of these types of sites.

The main issue I am having right now is whether or not to pay for promotion, if so, how much and where do I do it?  I am really struggling with the fact of using adwords to get traffic to these sites.  The search traffic is excellent, so maybe I should focus more on direct linking campaigns.  I will make a note of that and move on.

I have a couple more ideas for niches to get into, but I always want to make sure that I have a nice domain for these things.  I guess it’s a thing that I have a domain name I am happy to associate a website with.  In case it takes off you want to make sure the name is somewhat brandable and that sort of thing.  You don’t want to be stuck explaining to people what Sukosaki.info has to do with affiliate marketing

PayPerPost.com was the first website that I was paid to post for.  It might be one of the more popular websites and has been around a couple of years.  The website basically will rank your blog and show you opps that are available to a blog with your rank. 

At first, they used PR to rank blogs, but then Google was like “nope, *smack*, don’t even think about it, *smack*” and that forced them to create their own ranking system, known as RealRank.  The system works well for them and your blog must be established, so don’t think that you can join and are making money by the next day.  Take a look at the terms before you think of joining, always!

SocialSpark.com is another website that will pay you to blog.  This is the newest “version” of PayPerPost by Izea.com.  This website uses many different ways to rank blogs and offer up opps to post.  There is a large community and the website is very interactive. 

You have the chance to get your blog sponsored as well and if you have a popular blog, could be paid $$ per day to have the sponsorship.  It took awhile for Izea to get this one off the ground, but it’s going pretty good now.  The RealRank implementation seems to be ranking blogs fairly and the options you have as a blogger are quite endless.

SponsoredReviews.com is the last one that I use.  I really just signed up for this one about 2 months ago and haven’t been able to bid on a review that was accepted yet.  I really like the layout of the site and it seems the marketplace has plenty of opps in it. 

You can bid on opps and your blog is ranked by link popularity.  From there you can set how much you charge for a review.  I guess once I am able to get a bid that is accepted, I will post more about how it all works at that time!

I know there are plenty of paid to blog websites on the web and more popping up all the time.  I just wanted to outline the 3 that I DO use and my 2 cents on them.  I don’t use them all because I like blogging and I don’t want it to become a pain in the neck just to post everyday.

I try to keep my posting on topic, but if I see a paid post that I can incorporate into this blog, I am all over it.

Do you use paid to blog sites?  What has your experience been so far?

TTZ has sent me payment one time so far.  You have to earn over $25 to get paid via Paypal.com.  Right now I have another $11.63 in my account and am earning about $10 per month.  This amount is not a lot, but mind you, it is with a small amount of traffic.  If you have much more traffic coming to sites you might be able to gain more and more every single month you have the widget on your site.

TTZMedia.com was started by John Chow and it really works like ShoppingAds.com does.  You setup an account, create a couple of channels for your sites.  Choose keywords of products you want to show on your widget and paste the code into your site template.  It’s as easy as that.

From that point on you are paid when a user clicks through your widget.  You can make up to $.25 per click

if you are sending 4000 clicks or more.  Or you can refer members to the program and earn 10% of their earnings for one year!  Basically you can start to earn once you have the widget placed and your traffic comes across it.

There are 15 sizes and you can create a custom widget of any colors you want.  Create a widget that matches your template and it will blend in just like any other advertisement.  You can choose a size, font, keywords when you create your custom widget.  Once you have your keywords picked you will always see at least ONE product on your widget.  The javascript code will match any keyword to find something to show your readers.  This makes the ad space valuable because it is never empty.

If you have a niche blog or website you can target that niche and increase your clicks and earnings quite easily.  The payments are made 30 days from the day you crossed the minimum payout of $25.  I currently have this widget running on my technology blog and consumer electronics website.  With a maximum of 1,000 visits per month, it has made just over $35 so far.

Do you have a niche blog or website?  If so, are you running these ads?  Tell us your thoughts on the TTZMedia system.

Amazon.com has the largest inventory of products on the internet.  What would you do if you had access to every single product to sell, but didn’thave to carry the inventory?  Do you think you could make money with Amazon.com’s products?

AmazingWebStores.com has teamed up with Amazon.com and they bring you Amazon.com Niche Stores.  I am sure that you have seen or even read about the large amounts of money that people are making on the eBay.com niche stores.  Well, picture the same results, only you can use Amazon’s huge inventory and technology database to power your new niche store!

4 easy steps

1. Setup Your Account
2. Design Your Amazing WebStore – customizable themes and features
3. Select Products to Sell
4. Start Selling!

and you are minutes from a fully functional, custom designed Amazon Niche Store.  You get access to over 66 million products to sell and you do not even need a merchant account.  With your niche store you will also get features including Top Sellers and Customer Reviews already integrated in your store.

What is a Niche Store?
A niche store is a simple, keyword targeted store that sells products that are similar in brand or type.  eBay stores have been popping up for years and they are so easy to set up quickly that many people have 10 or more!  A niche store focuses on one type of brand of product and usually relies heavily on search traffic.  The best part is that if you are getting traffic, it’s almost always targeted.  Visitors finding your site using keywords related to it are more likely to buy.  AmazingWebStores.com does most of the work for you.

Amazon.com Associates
You already know that people are aware of Amazon.com.  Did you know they had a type of affiliate program called Amazon Associates?  The program pays on a tiered commission scale based on the volume of sales.  They have so many tools, widgets, link and banner creators, it puts other programs to shame.  All you have to do is think of some products that you want to sell and you could be earning in not time.  Not having to deal with customer service, inventory and web design, you will have plenty of time to promote your store.

The sign up process is simple and the current offer includes a 7 day free trial with a payment of $1.95 for instant access.

Since I don’t like to promote products that I don’t use myself, I signed up for the 7 day trial and I am going to walk you through what I saw within minutes of signing up.

As soon as I paid the $1.95 I was given a username and password.  On that same screen there was a bunch of information regarding 24 hour customer service and PDF’s to get me the help I needed to get started.

As you can see from above, they do provide some excellent information regarding your new webstore.

From there, I logged in and the dashboard was pretty straight forward with links on the left and basic information in the center.  A step-by-step guide to get you started.  At this point, the only question that I had was whether or not I was able to use my own domain name.  That question was answered right away. 

Here is a screenshot of the links available in your login.  Basically if you follow them from top to bottom, your store will be all set by the time you are done!  So, I cruised through all the links and provided the information they wanted for each one.  Then I go to “Select Products”.  There I entered my Amazon Associates ID and was able to select the categories of products I wanted on my site.  At this point I didn’t see anywhere that I could choose a search term.  I chose a couple of categories to see how everything and moved on. 

The next thing I noticed was the I could enter domain information.  I was able to use an exisiting domain name, but the nameservers had to be changed before it could be associated with my new Amazon Niche Store.  I went through that simple process and within 24 hours I should see my domain pointing to my store. 

Now that I have my own domain name pointed at the webstore, I should have my very own Amazon Niche Store up and running within 12-16 hours.  Packed full of products, a shopping cart and custom logo, my store is ready for the search engines.