So you want to ditch your corporate cubicle and join the ranks of web workers? But you have a mortgage, maybe a dependent or two, and a taste for Venti Mochas from Starbucks? You can make money in the new economy, though it might not be as easy or cushy as keeping your old economy job.

I’m not talking about advertising or affiliate marketing or selling your junk on eBay. Those are so last millennium! I’m talking about the new new economy.

1. Offer your professional expertise in an online marketplace.These days, you can do more than just sell your old books via Amazon and your old Coach handbags via eBay—now you can sell your professional capabilities in a marketplace. No longer are you limited to looking for a permanent or contract job on Web 1.0 style job sites like Monster or CareerBuilder. The new breed of freelancing and project-oriented sites let companies needing help describe their projects. Then freelancers and small businesses offer bids or ideas or proposals from which those buyers can choose.

Elance covers everything from programming and writing to consulting and design, while RentACoder focuses on software, natch. If you’re a graphic designer, check out options like Design Outpost or LogoWorks–you don’t have to find the customers, they’ll come to you. Wannabe industry analysts might sign up for TechDirt’s Insight Community, a marketplace for ideas about technology marketing.

2. Sell photos on stock photography sites. If people regularly oooo and aaaaah over your Flickr pics, maybe you’re destined for photographic greatness or maybe just for a few extra dollars. It’s easier than ever to get your photos out in front of the public, which of course means a tremendous amount of competition, but also means it might be an convenient way for you to build up a secondary income stream. Where can you upload and market your photos? Try Fotolia, Dreamstime, Shutterstock, and Big Stock Photo.

3. Blog for pay. Despite the explosion of blogs, it’s hard to find good writers who can turn around a solidly-written post on an interesting topic quickly. GigaOM is always looking for bloggers with great content ideas and solid writing skills. How do you get noticed? Comment and link to blogging network sites. Write blog posts that are polished and not overly personal (although showing some personality is a plus).

4. Or start your own blog network. If you like the business side of things–selling advertising, hiring and managing employees, attracting investors–and have the stomach to go up against the likes of Weblogs, Inc., GigaOmniMedia, b5media, maybe you should make an entire business out of blogs. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’ll get a lot of time to write yourself though.

5. Provide service and support for open source software. Just because the software is free doesn’t mean you can’t make money on it–just ask Red Hat, a well-known distributor of Linux that sports a market cap of more than four billion dollars. As a solo web worker, you might not want to jump in and compete with big companies offering Linux support, but how about offering support for web content management systems like WordPress or Drupal? After getting comfortable with your own installation, you can pretty easily jump into helping other people set them up and configure them.

6. Online life coaching. Who has time to go meet a personal coach at an office? And don’t the new generation of web workers need to be met by their coaches in the same way that they work: via email, IM, and VoIP? You could, of course, go through some life coaching certification program, but on the web, reputation is more important than credentials. I bet Tony Robbins isn’t certified as a life coach–and no one can argue with his success. For an example of someone building up their profile and business online as a coach, check out Pamela Slim of Ganas Consulting and the Escape from Cubicle Nation blog.

7. Virtually assist other web workers. Freelancers and small businesses desperately need help running their businesses, but they’re not about to hire a secretary to come sit in the family room and answer phone calls. As a virtual assistant, you might do anything from making travel reservations to handling expense reimbursements to paying bills to arranging for a dog sitter. And you do it all from your own home office, interacting with your clients online and by phone. You can make $20 and up an hour doing this sort of work, depending on your expertise.

8. Build services atop Amazon Web Services. Elastic computing on AWS is so cool… and so incredibly primitive right now. Did you know that you can’t even count on your virtual hard drive on EC2 to store your data permanently? That’s why people are making money right now by offering services on top of AWS. Make it easier for people to use Amazon’s scalability web infrastructure like Enomaly has with elasticlive, a scalable web hosting platform built on AWS.

9. Write reviews for pay or perks. If you blog for any length of time on a particular topic–parenting, mobile phones, or PCs, for example–you will likely be approached to do book or product reviews. You can get free stuff this way, but are you selling your soul? Is there any such thing as a free laptop? These are decisions you’ll have to make for yourself, because no one agrees upon what ethical rules apply to bloggers. Even less do people agree on services like PayPerPost that pay you to write reviews on your blog. Check out disclosure rules closely and see whether such a gig would meet your own personal standards or not.

10. Become a virtual gold farmer. A half million Chinese now earn income by acquiring and selling World of Warcraft gold to gamers in other countries. If you’re not a young person living in China, this probably isn’t a viable option for you. But what’s intriguing about it is the opportunity to make real money working in a virtual economy. People are making real-world money in Second Life too.

Source: webworkerdaily.com

When I first started this blog and added Google Adsense I thought I would at best make a couple dollars a month. At first it took me almost a month to make a couple of cents. I got a bit discouraged but I kept at it. I kept at it for a YEAR and was still only managed to make a couple of dollars a month. It was a difficult time in my blogging career but it was a necessary step.  I was getting disappointed but I knew I wouldn’t give up until I made a successful website. From all the websites I read they all said you have to keep at it or you will never become a success and thats just what I did. I thought to myself that if some ‘ordinary joes‘ can make tons of money online I can too! I am a smart guy and I can do it as well.

Anyways you are probably asking what the point of this post is about. Well the point is that you need to keep motivated and never give up. Just keep at it and before you know it you will be making over $50 a month like me! For me this is just the very beginning of the earnings I soon will be making. I know and can feel my websites will explode soon enough. You just need to keep working on it and you will start to make lots of money.

All you need to do to be success is:

• keep at it. Never give up!
• be determined you will one day start making a lot of money
• research! research! research! – learn from other people in the same niche
• advertise! let everyone and anyone know about your website. Post it online all over the place and watch the search engine traffic come in
• write quality content! It isn’t so much about quantity as it is quality. I now only write a couple posts a week at most and still see more earnings now then I’ve ever seen in the past.

So this is just a reminder to all those people who are struggling out there to just keep at it! You too can earn a lot with Google Adsense if you just keep at it! You can start to make $50+ a month. If you really keep at it you can possibly one day quit your day job and just live off your earnings. I know its possible and that is my plan someday!

Keep at it everyone! Feel free to share your success stories here too about Google Adsense and how your earnings are growing each month.

So you want to learn how to make money at home. If you’re like most people in your position, you will waste hundreds or even thousands of dollars trying to learn a process that will provide you with income from home. See, there are thousands upon thousands of money hungry, selfish, and unethical people who are looking to take advantage of a person on your position. They see you as nothing more than an easy way to make a quick buck.

You may think that you are immune. You may think that you can smell a rat. If this is what you think, I would recommend going ahead and trying some of the worthless garbage that’s out there. At some point, you’ll figure out that you get about 500 emails per day from people that aren’t telling you anything worthwhile. At that point, come back.

I can tell you that less than 5% of you will make it. Why? Because most of you are looking for easy money. Most of you are probably too lazy to make this work. What will you do? You will keep looking around for the easy money. I hate to be the one to break it to you, but you will probably spend more than you make. You will keep buying crappy products that are supposed to make you rich. Trust me, they will make someone rich, it just won’t be you.

Learning how to make money from home in reality isn’t that different from the process any business owner goes through. You will have to find something that is in need, and figure out a method that you can use to fill that need. That might sound difficult right now, but I think that I can help you with that process.

Why Learning How To Make Money at Home Is Freaking Hard

1. 99% of the supposed ‘teachers’ are mad scammers, that happen to be extremely good at what they do.
2. Working from home requires supreme discipline.
3. You will have to learn something from the ground up – this will take a lot of time and energy.
4. Running your own business takes a remarkable amount of patience.
5. You may be working with absolutely no results for a year or more.
6. There can be constant distractions from kids or a spouse.

For the last three years, I have made 100% of my income working from home. I’m not going to fill you full of fluff and tell you that it has been an easy process. During almost an entire year, I spent more than I made. That was freaking hard. Part of me wishes that I had created the income while working on the side, but that’s another topic altogether. The point is, I made it and you can too. However, it’s going to take a lot of work and a commitment to excellence.

How I Make my Money From Home

I have a very strange business. I provide free information that brings people to websites, and then sell ad space on those websites. It works great for me because I have a knack for filling needs that aren’t being taken care of very well. Once I have identified an area that could use some good information, I create a website and start posting that information.

You probably found this article by doing a search for ‘how to make money at home’, ‘how to make money from home’, or something similar. See what I did to bring you here? I created some useful information and what happened? You and hundreds of other people find me in Google, or Yahoo, or MSN. You come to this site, where I can sell ad space to advertisers who are looking for people like you. Interesting, isn’t it?

As you read this article, I am probably asleep or messing around with some friends. I still make cash because I have created a valuable asset. This time last year, I went to Cabo with some friends. We had a really fun week. I made more while I was gone than it cost to go. What happened to my friends? They lost money because they took work off. Hmm… I took work off and made money.

This is where other people will start to butter you up telling you how freaking smart they are. They will tell you that their ’system’ is the only way to internet millions. Their system probably is a way to internet millions – to them. $100 or so dollars at a time taken from good people like you gives them all the money they will ever need. They will even provide you with proof.

I’m not going to blow smoke – if you want to learn this business it will be hard. I will show you the basics of what you need to know, but it won’t be that easy. The first thing you need to do is read about SEO on my site – it all starts there. Without knowing it, you probably found this article because of that concept. You searched for something related to making money from home and bam, I came up in Google in a location where you could find me. I teach people how to do that.

The series of articles I wrote about SEO have become so popular that I’ve summarized them in an easy to read email mini-course. It’s called “5 Days to Success With Keywords.” I promise you’ll find some highly valuable, thought provoking information in the course. If you apply what it teaches, you will create your first significant income from home. Just fill out the easy form below to get the first installment – and don’t worry – I’ll never sell or share your information with anyone.

Source: courtneytuttle.com

For more information on how to make money online check out my make money online section.

So you’re looking for easy ways to make money? You aren’t alone, who wouldn’t want to make a lot of money the easy way?

Are There Really Any Methods To Make Money That Are Easy?

I have spent the last few years of my life seeking for methods that I could use to make money and actually have been able to find some easy ways to make money, in fact they are dang easy now that I think about it. The difficulty was actually in finding them, not in the actual use of the methods.

Part of my struggles to find easy ways to make money was that I only cared about finding ways to make money online because I knew that online methods for making money would provide me with huge amounts of leverage – how else can you make money off of people on the other side of the world?

Sorting Through The Junk Ways Of Making Money

This led me to try hundreds of different methods for making money online, most of which were a total waste of time. The methods that actually worked for me were found through trial and error – I created literally hundreds of websites and tested and tested and tested.

In time, I really found an approach that worked out great and I have been following it ever since. One of my sites has already produced close to six figures this year, and others are making me a nice residual every month. Now that I understand the process, it’s truly one of the ‘easy ways to make money’ that we have all looked for.

Learning This Approach To Making Money

Here on the site, I have written over 400 quality articles that will help you learn to make money. Please feel free to use the site. There are quite a few different resources that are available for this but you really can’t trust all of them. I have solid stuff here and at The Keyword Academy.  If you want to learn a little more about how Google works, you can go here: google pagerank, Residual Income, and keyword tool.

Source: courtneytuttle.com

“Expensive keyword” (high CPC) isn’t equal to “profitable keyword” (high earnings) due to the low volume of traffic expensive (niche) keywords produce. The best way to find really profitable keywords is to rank keywords by cost/day (cost per click X clicks/day) rather than cost per click.

Almost all AdSense publishers are looking for the most expensive keywords. Let’s have a look at the top 100 most expensive keywords. But first let’s add 2 extra columns to the list: clicks/day and cost/day by Google AdWords estimation:

Have you noticed that keyword price result in ZERO profit if there are no clicks? It’s cost/day (keyword price X clicks/day) that makes you rich, not keyword price itself.

Now let’s look at the list of the most PROFITABLE, not the most expensive AdSense keywords!

The per day list of most profitable keywords.

Source: Wisdom-of-adsense.org

So if you are wanting to make a profitable blog/website you are going to need to focus on the profitable keywords instead of the expensive keywords.  It doesn’t help to put the most expensive keywords on you website when no one will click on them.  It won’t generate any income and you will be left scratching your head wondering what happened. So take a look at the lists above and get started! Make a website about one of these keywords in mind and have good rich content that people are interested in.  Good luck with your earnings with Google Adsense.

Feel free to share you stories of success if any of the above keywords work for you!

• “AdSense Earning = Impression-count x Click-though-rate x Cost-per-click x smart-pricing-factor. Viewing your on website will not get you banned. Just make sure you don’t click on the ads.
• However, repeatedly reload your page to jack up page impressions can get you banned. Click-through-rate (CTR) is ratio of clicks per impressions. It can range from 0.1% to 30%, but most commonly around 1% to 10%.”
  [100 Google Adsense Tips]
• “First impressions count: make sure the ad unit with the highest CTR is the first ad unit in the HTML code of your page. Keep in mind that the first ad unit in the source code is not always the first ad unit that your users will see when the page finishes loading in their browser.”
  [Inside AdSense: First impressions count]
• “Ads placed near rich content and navigational aids usually do well because users are focused on those areas of a page. on pages where users are typically focused on reading an article, ads placed directly below the end of the editorial content tend to perform very well.”
  [Where should I place Google ads on my pages?]
• “Format is important for multiple ad units, display your ad units where repeat users will notice them, place a leaderboard immediately after the last post.”
  [Six AdSense optimization tips for forums]
• “The middle, above the fold location performs the best. Best performing ad format is the large rectangle, 336×280. So the wider ad formats are doing better than the other ones and the reason is that they actually take up fewer lines. And so with every additional line, you have a chance of losing that interested user.
• So the wider formats do best so specifically, the top three formats are the 336×280 that you see on the page; the 300×250 medium rectangle; and then the 160×600 wide skyscraper.
• We have a feature in the AdSense account where you are able to multi-select different color palettes that blend with your site to add some variety and freshness to the ads. And that also will help decrease ad blindness.”
  [Google AdSense Optimization Webinar]
• “The second most active placement in terms of click-throughs tends to be the right-hand rail or margin”. “Skyscrapers” and vertical banners do well when placed next to the content in the main body. Square and rectangle ads placed within the center column also do well, provided they are placed in context to the content. Ads placed below the fold tend to perform least well, although that isn’t a hard-and-fast rule.”
  [Yahoo! Publisher Network: Location, location, location...]
• “I found the most success in placing the Google Adsense medium rectangle either right in the middle of the page or in a middle right column as long as it has content above and below the ad unit. Its is fine to use Adsense Ads on a forum however expect a very low CTR.”
  [Google Adsense Tips for Webmasters]
• “Post Adsense ads on text rich pages, avoid titles like the approved ‘Sponsored Links’ and ‘Advertisements’, place Ads above the fold, Match the colors of your ads with the colour scheme of your site, Blend ads with your page – remove the borders by having a similar color as your background.”
  [How to Increase Google Adsense CTR]
• “To remove Public Service Ads (PSA) in Google Adsense develop sufficient good content with keywords, Ensure that META tags like ‘title’ & ‘description’ and the headings tags like h1, h2 etc. have content which matches the rest of your site.”
  [How to Remove Public Service Ads (PSA) in Google Adsense]
• “You can now run AdSense on the same page as other contextual ad programs.” (January 2007)
  [It's official! You can now run AdSense on the same page as other contextual ad programs]
• “Google AdSense Policy: We ask that publishers not line up images and ads in a way that suggests a relationship between the images and the ads.”
  [Inside AdSense: Ad and image placement: a policy clarification]
• “Section targeting uses certain html tweaks to force the google adsense bot to focus on specific content. Section targeting is the latest and most effective addition to AdSense”.
  [Display Relevant Adsense Ads Using Section Targeting]
• “Over the weekend, I decided to change the number of ads units on my blog based upon where the traffic is coming from. I have a small PHP function that checks to see if the referrer is a search engine, and if it is, I display and additional 2 ad units. My Adsense revenue increasing by 284% on Saturday, Sunday and Monday!”
  [Positive Adsense Experiment]
• “Never click your own adsense ads or get them clicked for whatever reason. Never change the Adsense code. Do not run competitive contextual text ad (2006) or search services on the same site. Do not mask ad elements. Avoid excessive advertising and keyword stuffing.”
  [ 15 Common Mistakes that Violate Google Adsense TOS ]
• “Putting ads on your site won’t hurt your traffic. There are 6 sorts of bloggers’ income: Google Adsense, Donations (e.g. PayPal), Text Link Ads (sold for a fixed amount per month), Chitika eMiniMalls ads (pay per click), affiliate programs like Amazon, Advertising sold to individual advertisers (three-month campaigns or longer)
  [How to Make Money From Your Blog - a VERY extensive article]
• “A number of factors come into play when AdSense tries to determine what the page is about: The URL of the page, the page title, the anchor text of links, the keywords that appear most frequently within the page, search engine queries that lead to the page or to another page that links to the page”.
  [How to Get Relevant AdSense Ads (Especially For Bloggers)]
• “Ask yourself if you are willing to compromise your blog’s layout and over-all feel by adding ads in them. Look at your traffic and see if it’s enough to draw the crowd. Make good use of the Ad Channels. Give it time.”
  [Tips on Blog Adsensification]
• “You can put upto 3 AdSense units on a page. For short articles, CTR is best when ads are placed just above the content. For long articles, CTR improves if ads are placed somewhere in middle of the content. Go Wide – the large rectangle 336×280 is the best paying adsense format.”
  [Adsense Tips, Layout Optimization Tricks for HigherCTR]
• “Google AdSense folks have unveiled another useful feature for Adsense publishers – Section Targeting. The concept is simple but the advantages and possibilities are endless.”
  [Display relevant Ads in Blogs: Just suggest Google]

Source: Smashingmagazine.com

On one hand, starting a blog can be outright one of the most effective ways on the planet of establishing an online presence. The entire nature of a good blog encourages interaction from readers and creates a presence that people and search engines love. Blogging can help a person to establish credibility in most industries, in fact many industry experts have become known as such through blogging.

On the other hand, the sad truth is that by percentage, most bloggers create nothing more than a frustrating time-suck. Do you guys remember the 1986 movie “The Money Pit“? Walter Fielding, played by Tom Hanks, and his wife buy a beautiful mansion at a remarkable price. It turns out that the Fielding’s beautiful home falls apart, and the Fieldings are forced to spend all of their time and life savings to get the house into decent condition.

I created this article so that you can learn to create a successful blog while avoiding the traps that would make you continually frustrated and lacking in positive results. Please consider it as a discussion, I will be answering questions in the comment section at the bottom of the page.

I’m going to assume that since you have reached this article, you are interested in starting a blog. Some of you may have a blog and want to make sure that you haven’t missed any important steps in your blogging journey. Regardless of your level of knowledge and experience in this arena, I sincerely hope that this article will help you to achieve your goals.

This post is one that may take you a few days to process, so feel free to come back as often as you need to. Since I originally posted this, I’ve found that many of my readers and students have a hard time understanding some of the simple and powerful keyword strategies that make blogs such powerful marketing tools.

To help create the proper foundation for anyone looking to create a passive income with a blog, I’ve created an email mini-course called “5 Days to Success With Keywords.” In the course I explain how my blogs make money with keywords and search engine traffic.

The whole point of creating an article like this is to give you a resource you can use to learn about blogging. That means it will help you to get a blog set up and will show you how you can make money with a blog.

Since most of my business is online, I am asked this question almost daily, “How do people get started on the internet?” The first section of this enormous article will help you to see why you should be starting a blog if you’re new to internet marketing and why you should consider starting one even if you’re an experienced veteran in the online marketing world. After we go over why you should consider starting a blog, we’ll go over how to start one that doesn’t become a time sucking money pit.

Why Starting A Blog Is Probably Your Best Option For Online Success

The nature of blogs give you some very specific advantages over other types of sites. To best illustrate what these advantages are, let me explain in detail what a blog actually is. In the following paragraphs I want to go over important characteristics that make blogs different from other types of sites.

Blogs show the newest addition to the site on the homepage. This makes for quite a few specific advantages including:

• Ability to bring readers back for more information or more entertainment. Placing the newest material on the home page makes it really easy to find and helps to set the hook that will bring readers back again and again.
• Ability to get multiple links from sites. With a traditional site you will be consistently fighting to get links. With a blog, returning readers may link to 50+ blog posts that you write over the lifetime of your blog. Each time they do you will get some additional traffic and a search engine benefit. To get your readers to link to multiple posts that you write, they will need to be able to easily find your new material. This is why having your most recent work on your homepage is hugely important.

It’s easier to get search engine traffic from a blog than it is from other types of sites. Blogs have some very tricky ways to generate search engine traffic that are much harder to accomplish with regular websites. Here are some characteristics of blogs that help them to rank better in Google and other search engines:

• Blogs let search engines know each time new material is published. When you add something new, your blog sends a message called a ‘ping’ to blog search engines immediately. This lets the blog search engines know that your blog has new content, and gets it into Google and other engines more quickly. It also creates direct links to your blog website, which gives you a ranking benefit in Google.
• Blogs get linked to more often than traditional sites. Almost every search engine out there (including Google) uses links to determine which sites are the best. They will include sites that have the most links above sites that don’t have as many. This will give you an advantage over many of your competitors.
• People leave comments on blogs. Google and other search engines like to see constant updates from websites. Since people will be leaving comments on your blog, they will be doing a lot of the updating for you. Every time someone leaves a comment on one of your pages, Google will see that page as having been updated.
• Blogs structure content for you. One of the hardest things about creating a website from scratch is figuring out how to structure your content. Blogs do this work for you and create a search engine friendly structure.

Blogs become communities more easily than other types of sites. The process of bringing people back to a website again and again is hugely important if you want to make a large amount of money from one site. Blogs allow for 2-way communication and this makes them more interesting to visitors. They can leave their comments and ask you questions. Since a person that is interacting is much more likely to come back for another visit, this gives a blog a lot more upside. When people keep coming back it gives you more and more hits which will turn into more and more ad dollars and/or sales.

What Exactly Is A Blog?

The word blog is short for weblog. You can think of a blog as a type of website that is very much like a journal that shows the most recent addition on the blog homepage, which is often the homepage of the site.

If you take a look at the homepage of this site, you will see the most recent additions to the site there. Each time I publish something new, it’s placed on the homepage so that people can easily find it. This helps people to come back often to check for more material.

You may be getting nervous about the technical aspects of starting a blog. Don’t worry because there are some free software applications that can help you with this process. I will be covering the setup later in the article, so there’s no need to worry about this now.

Is Blogging For You?

No matter how effective a blog can be for establishing an online presence, you will have to decide whether blogging is the right business model for you. Every business out there requires unique abilities and characteristics and starting a blog isn’t any different.

Many people are attracted to blogging because it’s cheap and still provides a large upside. The extremely low entrance requirements for the business make it very cost effective, but also attract individuals that lack the persistence, motivation, and ambition to start a blog that can reach a high level of income.

I can tell you that almost every person is capable of starting a blog that makes money, but the amount that a person can make with a blog is determined by many factors including intelligence, passion, like-ability, and more importantly determination and self-belief.

You definitely don’t have to be abnormally intelligent or talented to create a blog that makes money. You do need to have a lot of persistence and determination. I’ve personally seen many friends that have the talent to make a full-time living fail at blogging simply because they quit before the fruits of their labors manifested themselves. I’ve seen other friends that have a lot less talent who have made very nice incomes through blogging simply because of stubborn determination.

Crucial Traits Of Successful Bloggers:

• Self-Motivation
• Determination
• Self-Belief
• Persistence

Some of you may look at those four character traits and wonder if you have enough of them to ever create a successful blog or business for that matter. I can tell you that there was a time in my life that I struggled in all four of those areas. I consider myself blessed to be able to say that I escaped from that negative cycle and turned myself into a person of confidence, ambition, and motivation.

You are the only one that can ultimately determine if you have what it takes to develop a successful blog. The best gauge of whether you can do it or not is whether you are willing to develop yourself as a person during the process. If you’re starting from ground zero, you have a lot to learn. However, there are plenty of resources that can help you during that process.

If you are thinking about starting a blog just to ‘try it out’, save yourself some time right now and don’t do it. In order to start a blog that won’t be a waste of time, you will need to make up your mind beforehand that you will do whatever it takes to find success, no matter the cost or amount of time required to reach your desired level.

Why Starting A Blog Is The Way To Start Online

There are literally hundreds of different methods that can be used to make money on the internet. There is e-commerce (selling products), blogging, traditional site operation, email marketing, pay-per-click marketing, affiliate marketing, social network marketing – the list goes on and on.

When people start learning about the internet and how to profit from it, they often have no idea what to start with. I can tell you that starting a blog will provide you with a much needed education that will help you in the future no matter what endeavors you take on. Free, easy to use software will help to simplify this process so that you don’t have to spend months learning all of the technical aspects of e-commerce and other methods for generating online income.

The Enormous Upside Of Blogging

I have to admit that I never would have started a blog myself if I hadn’t recognized the huge amount of upside that blogging provides. The ability to generate traffic with a blog website is much higher than it is with other types of websites, and this will of course allow the owner to create a substantial income as traffic equals money.

A huge positive to blogging is that some of your marketing is done for you by your blog. When you add a new article to your blog (called a blog post), your blog will notify blog search engines of the new material (called content). The blog search engines will then create links to your new material so that people who search them will be able to find you. This action provides for quite a few benefits including an increase in direct traffic from blog search engines, and also a search engine benefit for search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.

The Monetization Potential Of Blogging

‘Monetization’ means making money. I’ve seen lists that have literally hundreds of different methods that people use to make money with blogs. Instead of providing one of those lists that’s full of mostly useless information, here is a short list of methods that actually work to make great money with blogs that have good traffic:

• Direct Advertising – No matter what industry or topic your blog covers, there will certainly be people and companies that can benefit from advertising on your site – as long as you have traffic. The amount that you can charge will depend entirely on your traffic levels but I can tell you that this can be a very significant method for creating an income. There are bloggers out there that are making over $15,000 per month from this revenue stream alone, and team blogs that do over $100,000 per month in direct ad sales.
• Affiliate Marketing – In order to be truly successful as a blogger that makes money with affiliate marketing, you should recommend products that you really use yourself. After you have people that have subscribed to your site you will be able to develop a reputation as a trusted source for information. If you want to do well with affiliate marketing, never betray that trust. Don’t recommend products that aren’t useful to you and your trustworthiness will benefit both you and the people that read your site. Affiliate marketing is one of the biggest revenue streams I have on my blog, and that is because I would never recommend a product that people can’t benefit from.
• Product Reviews – No matter what your topic is, there will almost always be companies in your industry that will be willing to pay to create buzz for their new products and services. In order to maintain your integrity as a blogger, you will always need to be 100% honest in your reviews. For me, that has meant letting companies know beforehand that there will be both positive and negative points that will be discussed in the review. The positive points will help people the see the benefits of the product, and the negatives will help companies to know what to change.
• Contextual Advertising – Programs like Google Adsense can provide bloggers with a simple way to make money. You can read more about how this program works here: Make Money With Adsense. The basic idea is that Google will allow you to place paid ads on your blog and will pay you when people click on those ads.
• Selling Personal Products And Services – The #1 revenue stream of Court’s Internet Marketing School is the sale of our services. We are able to provide people with the help they need to make their businesses grow, and that help is very valuable. If your blog is built around information that can help people to learn something, keep in mind that some people will want and need more help than you can provide on your blog. Some people, (myself included) would rather spend money than time to learn something new.

You can definitely build a blog into a full time income, however this will take time. The most self-destructive thing you can do is demand immediate, monetary results from your blog. This will only cause you to implode when they don’t come. The key is to be patient with your blog, while sticking to the success principles that I will outline for you in this post.

The easiest way to turn your blog into a time-sucking money pit is by quitting before you get the results you’re looking for. Don’t waste months of your life by quitting before you get results. If you decide that starting a blog is for you, make sure you are 100% committed to seeing it through before you take your first step.

I sincerely hope that by now you believe that by starting a blog, you can create income for yourself. If you don’t, I would recommend working on your self-belief and personal determination.

Choosing A Profitable Blog Topic

When the time comes to prepare to start a blog, the first and probably most important step is choosing a topic that can be profitable. In theory, there are thousands of topics that you could cover with your blog, but some will be much more profitable than others.

Although there are many different profitable topics, most people don’t realize that skills and interests they already have could translate into profitable blogs. When people talk to me in person about starting a blog, I ask them this series of questions before making any recommendations:

• Where do you work and what do you do?
• What topics are you interested in?
• What magazines and/or books do you like to read?
• What do you do with your free time?

I talk to people all the time that spend hours every day reading about something they’re very interested in without realizing that they already have their topic. If you are in this boat, I think you probably should blog about that topic, since the interest is already there.

Before making your decision final, I would recommend taking a look at whether you can actually make money with the topic you are considering. The easiest way to find this out is by looking for a similar, successful blog. If another person or group can make money with a given topic, you can too – as long as you have as much determination as they do.

To make this process a little easier, here are some random ideas that could be turn into profitable blogs:

• Make Money Online
• Investment Strategies
• Real Estate Investing Ideas
• Basic Computer Lessons
• Computer News
• Cell Phone News
• Computer Programming
• Teach People How To Diet
• Parenting
• Pets
• Celebrity Gossip
• Politics
• Sports
• Movies
• Exercise
• Humor
• Home Decor
• Books
• Travel
• Motivation
• Business
• Cars

Now I couldn’t possibly cover all of the possibilities for profitable blog ideas. If you have an idea for a blog, please feel free to use the comments in this post or my contact page. I would be happy to give you feedback about any idea you are able to come up with.

Another interesting metric that can be used to determine whether a blog topic can be profitable is whether or not there are off-line businesses that are profitable in that industry. Are there off-line businesses that do well in the pet industry? Absolutely. Are there off-line businesses that do well in the finance industry? Of course. Are there off-line businesses that do well in the industry you’re considering? If there are, there will probably be online money as well.

Once you have chosen your topic, you will move on to the next stage in the lesson.

Choosing A Domain Name

I’ve written countless times on this site about the enormously important selection of your domain name, which is the .com name of your blog website. In the spirit of being thorough, I would like to discuss this topic further. I would highly recommend taking at least a week to determine the domain name of your site. This will give you ample time to brainstorm and make an educated decision. Do not extend this process for more than one week. Procrastination will inhibit your progress and you need to get started as soon as possible.

When choosing a domain name there are a lot of factors to consider. To help you to make that decision, I would like to address a few of crucial ones here:

• Domain Brandability – In order to create a blog that is highly profitable, you will need to get people to associate your domain name with good knowledge and information in your industry. This process is called branding and is vital for any good blog. Using a name that doesn’t relate to your industry makes the process a lot harder. I have chosen to use my own name for the domain name of my site. It took a lot of extra work to get people to associate my site with internet marketing and if you go this route you will need to plan on putting in the time. Good examples of brandable names that fit well in their industries are ProBlogger.net and Techcrunch.com.
• Domain Extension – There are plenty of domain name extensions to choose from, including .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, and many more. I would highly recommend going with a .com extension if you’re starting a blog. This will make your blog website easier to find and will also help you to get a better price if you were to ever sell your site.
• Domain Length – I wouldn’t choose a domain name that had more than three words in it. Using domain names that have 4+ words will make it harder for people to find and remember your site. Keep the name as simple as possible.
• Hyphens and Underscores – When choosing your domain name, stay away from hyphens (dashes) and underscores. These symbols will make your name much harder to remember and you will always be sending traffic to the non-hyphened or underscored version of your domain name. I have seen plenty of sites that were able to make it with these symbols in the domain, but why would you want to make it harder for yourself?

As long as a domain is available and doesn’t break any of the above rules, you should add it to your list of possibilities. After a week you should have plenty of possibilities on your list, and you will then choose the name that you like the best. Since each of them fits the criteria of a good name, it will come down to personal preference when you make the final decision.

Checking Availability Of Domain Name

Any site that sells domain names will allow you to check a name for its availability. Any name that is currently registered by another person will come back unavailable. The site that I use to check for the availability of domain names is called ProudDomains.com, but really any domain registrar will do.

Once you have chosen an available name that you want to use for your blog, you will of course register it. I use ProudDomains.com for this as well, it costs under $10 per year to register a domain name there.

Setting Up Your Blog

Once you have a domain name, you will then proceed to the setting up of your blog. This will involve setting up hosting, installing your blog software, and starting to add material to your site.

Web Hosting And Blog Setup

A web host is a server (computer) on the internet that your blog will be stored on. I use ProudDomains for most of my hosting because it’s pretty simple and straightforward to use. They also have a support number that you can use if something gets messed up. In another article that I wrote about starting a blog, I have included a walk-through that you can use to get your hosting set up properly. You can find that here: Starting A Blog. The article also covers the installation of WordPress, which is the blog software that I would highly recommend using.

Developing Your Blog

If you followed the instructions properly in the other article I linked to in the last paragraph, you should now have a blog set up. You still have a long way to go but are off to a great start. Congratulations, you have just started a new business with a few days work and less than $20 out of pocket.

Giving People What They Want

The biggest piece of advice that I could give anyone that is starting a blog is simple. Forget about what you want, and start thinking about what other people want. One of the biggest mistakes that you can make when starting a blog is believing that people are interested in you personally. Unless you have off-line celebrity, this will not be the case. If you want your blog to be a business, treat it like a business. People will read your blog if it takes care of one of their needs.

Please take the time now to think about this concept well. If you owned a Radio Shack, would you talk to every person that came to the store about how you are frustrated with your husband and kids? Would you talk to your prospects about how you ate a really crappy burrito last night? If you would, I would never recommend buying a Radio Shack. People go into Radio Shack because they want help figuring out how to take care of their problems, not to deal with yours.

People that visit your blog will be there for one reason – because you provide or claim to provide something that they need or want. You need to keep this concept fixed in your mind every time you work on your blog. Forget about yourself and focus on providing people with information they need, or with information they enjoy. Stay on topic, stay on topic, stay on topic.

How Often Should You Post

This is a highly debatable topic to say the least. Some people believe that you need to post as much as possible, and other people think that you need to choose quality over quantity. I believe that quality is the most important factor to consider, but I also believe that people will lose interest in you if they have to wait too long for your next post.

If you desire growth for your blog, you will need to post quality articles as much as possible. If you can’t post a quality article at least three times per week it could take years for your blog to grow to the needed level. Start by posting 3-7 times per week and focus on providing value. If you have the time and knowledge to post more, by all means do it.

How To Make Your Blog Look Unsuccessful

More often than not, bloggers scream ‘lack of success’ from the mountain tops. They will plaster all over their blogs that the blog is ‘their journey to online success’. If you are in this boat, I don’t mean to offend you. What I do mean to do is tell you that you are basically telling people that your are not successful right now. You might as well say, “I don’t know what I’m doing,” because that’s exactly what you’re implying.

People are looking for blogs and websites that know what they’re doing so that they can learn. If you don’t know what you’re doing you will need to learn as quickly as possible. Think of it like a new job – do you know 100% of the ropes on your first day at work? Let’s say you start working at a Radio Shack and on your first day you don’t have the answers the people are looking for. Does that mean that you’re going to give up? You might be uncomfortable for a few weeks, but after that you’ll have a better understanding. In the meantime, you’re going to do the best you can with the knowledge you have.

If a person comes in to your Radio Shack and wants to buy a cell phone, are you going to tell them that you don’t know anything about cell phones and send them on their way? No, you’re going to do your best to sound professional and knowledgeable right?

No matter what industry you have decided to blog about, people will be evaluating nearly every word you write. Be a professional and people will treat you like one. Be an amateur and people will treat you like one.

Make Your Best Information Easy To Find

I could never stress enough the importance of creating an easy-to-see section that contains your best work. When a stranger visits your site, they will often click around a little to see if there’s anything that interests them. If they can easily access your best information, they will come around more often and may even subscribe to your site on the spot. I have such a section called ‘Court’s Best Work’, and I owe a large amount of my subscriber base to that section.

Other Tips And Tricks For Developing Your Blog

In this article, I couldn’t possibly include everything that you can do to develop your blog. Since I have written extensively on the topic of blog development, here are some links that I would recommend taking a look at:

• 10 Easy Ways To Make Yourself Look Like A Blogging Newbie
• Related Posts Plugin and SEO
• Not Using Permalinks – Search Engine Suicide
• Using The All-In-One SEO Pack To Target Keywords
• The Three Personalities Of Exceptional Copywriters
• How To Trash Your Blog’s Brand In 5 Easy Steps
• 3 Reasons You Desperately Need RSS Subscribers
• This Worst Post In The Universe
• Looking At Keyword Stats Like An A-Lister
• The Obvious Secret To Never Running Out Of Post Ideas
• A Not-So-Often-Used Trick To Increase RSS Subscriptions
• Creating Landing Pages Worthy Of Getting Ranked #1
• How To Create Rippin’ HTML Title Tags
• 12 Ways To Get People Hooked On Your Site
• The Secret Of Building A High-Traffic Site

Promoting Your Blog

Once you have created and started to develop your site, you can start promoting it. Promoting a blog is not an overnight process but it shouldn’t take years either. If you are promoting correctly, you should be able to see increases in your traffic during each calendar month.

Since every blog is different, it is impossible for me to lay down exact time-lines for blog promotion. That said, there are certain methods that you should use in the beginning stages of blogging that you probably won’t use in the latter stages, and vice versa. In order to illustrate these differences, I would like to lay down a simple, estimated time-line that will approximate the process of promoting a blog. Please understand that this line isn’t meant in any way to be exact. Some of you will implement ideas more quickly than others. Additionally, some ideas can be integrated more easily in certain industries.
0-2 Months

During the first two months you have your blog online, you will have very little leverage. This means that other bloggers probably won’t really respect you and this means that they will probably not help you much with your promotion. During this time period, you will also get very little love from search engines like Google, who favor heavily sites with more age and more online presence.

Although these factors are working against you, there are still methods that you can use to promote your blog. Keep in mind in the beginning that each new visitor is a victory. Each time a site links to you during this time period is a huge success and should be treated as such. Here are some of the best promotion methods you can use during this low-leverage promotional period:

• Blog Carnivals – Blog carnivals are basically articles that people create on their sites that showcase other articles related to a certain topic. Usually all you have to do to be showcased on a blog carnival is create an article that’s on topic that you can submit. People that create blog carnivals will rarely exclude a decent article, so it’s a great method to use to build some links in the beginning stages of your blog. Each carnival will usually also deliver a small amount of traffic to your site. Here’s a post where I explained how to ‘carnival’: How To Get Links Using Blog Carnivals.
• Commenting On Other Blogs – This promotional method doesn’t provide you with a ton of leverage, but should still be used in the beginning stages of blogging. Some of the most important links I was able to get from other blogs in the beginning of Court’s Internet Marketing School came from people who found me because of a comment I left on their blog. There is a great post that I read on this subject a while back here: Do You Have A Blog Commenting Strategy?
• List Building – In order to turn your blog into a credible site sometime in the future, you will need to get to know some of the more prominent and mid-level bloggers in your industry. While this won’t help you during this time period, it’s a great time to work on building the list of people you know in your industry. I would start by sending a simple letter of introduction while letting the bloggers know that you would be happy to link to their valuable articles. Asking them for help or links at this point is almost ridiculous – that will come into play much later down the road.

If you have some regular traffic after your first two months (this amount doesn’t have to be huge), you know that you’re on the right track. By that time, you should have a few readers that visit regularly and you should also have at least a few people that read your site through RSS or email RSS. Since you started from ground zero and haven’t spent any money on promotion, don’t worry if the numbers are small. Later on you will be able to use higher leverage to create bigger promotional opportunities.

If you don’t have any regular readers at this point, it would be wise to figure out why. Either your blog’s content isn’t good enough or you haven’t been promoting enough. Continuing on without figuring out the problem would be a waste of time. Take an honest look at your site and promotional methods and try to identify areas where you can improve.

3-6 Months

By this time you should have some regular readers and hopefully some contacts that will be able to really help you to promote your site. While this time period will provide you with some additional leverage that you didn’t have during the first two months with your blog, you will still have relatively low leverage compared to what you will have in later time periods.

During this time, Google and other search engines will continue to show you very little love. This is normal and doesn’t mean that you are doing something wrong. As I stated earlier in this lesson, Google favors heavily websites that have more time online and a larger presence. Even though search engines aren’t going to show you a ton of love during this time period, you should be able to get some search traffic. You will also start laying the foundation that will lead to the big search traffic that’s down the road.

Additionally, this is a great time period to network with bloggers that are close to your level of success. Since it really doesn’t do any good to network with sites that aren’t related to yours, take some time to search Google and Technorati for blogs that cover similar topics.

Here are the promotional methods that I would be using during this time period:

• Aggressive Link Building – While your search traffic probably won’t be spectacular during this time period, you will want to use this time to build links, because that will help you in the future. There are a lot of different methods that you can use for this, but I would focus primarily on blogroll link exchanges (don’t do too many during this time period because later on you will be able to do exchanges with stronger sites – do 5 or so), blog carnivals, and emailing other bloggers when you create great content. You can supplement this with some good article marketing.
• Socializing With Other Bloggers – This includes commenting on other blogs, emailing authors of blogs, and just plain being cool to people. I wrote an article a long time ago for eMoms at Home and published some surprising side effects of being social. Here’s the article: My 8 Hours As A Blogging Socialite.
• Social Media – With the help of some of your friends and contacts, you can start to use social media for traffic during this time. You will need to take some time to research what kinds of content do well on each of the social sites that you decide to use. I would focus primarily on Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, and BloggingZoom. They are all open to bloggers and of course I have a preference for BloggingZoom because I own part of it. Your success with social bookmarking and voting will depend heavily on your ability to write interesting content. Don’t get discouraged when you aren’t a smash hit at first. You can and will learn to do well with social media if you keep working at it.

By the end of the first six months your blog is online, you should be able to get a significant amount of repeat traffic. Again, if the repeat traffic isn’t there you will need to re-evaluate your site. There’s no reason to keep working the same way if you aren’t getting the results you’re looking for. Make some changes and take a hard look at where you might be going wrong.

7+ Months

After the first six months are over, you will be able to make a lot more progress with your blog. Time will start working in your favor because of a few important factors:

• Google will stop hating you. If your site was placed in Google’s sandbox, it will likely come out at about this time which will mean that you will start getting the Google traffic that you deserve.
• You should have at least some name/brand recognition at this point. If not, you failed during the first two sections of promotion so you will need to start over with the list building and networking.

The use of these two advantages will give you increased leverage as you start this period of promotion. This will give you more and more ability to create traffic with your promotional efforts. During this time period, these are the methods I would focus on:

• Marketing Your Best Articles – By this point you should have friends and contacts in your industry. You should create mutually beneficial relationships where you help each other to market good articles. You will help your contacts by linking to their good work and they will link to yours.
• Guest Posting – Once you have established somewhat of a name for yourself or for your brand you will be able to approach bigger blogs about becoming a guest poster. As long as you have earned some respect in your industry these bigger blogs will probably be happy to have you. There are plenty of sites that accept guest posting, and many of them have tens of thousands of RSS readers. I’m sure that you can see the value in getting your name in front of that many people.
• Social Media – As long as you continue to provide value to the online communities you are targeting, you will find continued success with social media. You can increase that success by expanding your area of influence and networking.
• Link Building – During this time period you will continue your link building efforts. This will help you to increase your search engine traffic and direct traffic from other sites. You will use basically the same methods I talked about in the previous section.

Additional Promotional Information

Let’s be honest, I couldn’t possibly include everything about blog promotion in a single article. In order to help you guys to understand more about the successful promotion of blogs, here are some other articles that I’ve written on this topic:

• Increase Search Traffic With Effective Link Structure 2.0
• 10 Secrets Of Advanced SEO Copywriters
• The #1 Word Of Successful Bloggers And Copywriters
• Creating Landing Pages Worthy Of Getting Ranked #1
• How To Create Rippin’ HTML Title Tags
• Search Engine Optimization For Yahoo
• How To Make Your Posts 500% More Powerful With Only 25% More Work
• Escaping The Search Engine Pipe Dream
• 10 Simple Ways To Get Banned By Google
• The Beginner’s Guide To Top Google Rankings
• The Effective Way To Market With Articles
• Offsite Optimization – SEO That Works For A Change
• Write Using Keywords

No matter where you’re starting out, no matter what you currently know, I believe that you can start a profitable blog. I sincerely hope that this article can help you to get started, while showing you how to avoid the pitfalls that could waste your valuable time.

Top 10 Mistakes You Can Make When Starting A Blog

Some of the best information I’ve read on blogging hasn’t focused on what I should be doing, but instead focuses on what I shouldn’t be doing as a blogger. Here’s a short-list of pitfalls that will waste your time and stunt the growth of your blog:

1. Choosing topics that aren’t interesting to you.
2. Failure in providing enough value to your target audience.
3. Quitting before your traffic comes.
4. Failure in learning about search engine optimization techniques.
5. Failure to make friends and/or make contact with prominent bloggers in your industry.
6. Failure to write with social media success in mind.
7. Relying 100% on Adsense.
8. Blogging too much about yourself, thinking that people are interested in you.
9. Failure in approaching your blog as a business.
10. Failure to believe that your blog will be a success.

Source: Courtneytuttle.com

Have you ever wondered how you could earn more per click with Google Adsense?  I am sure you have if you’ve ever tried using Google Adsense on your website to make some money.  There are many different techniques you can use to earn more money with Adsense.  You can optimize the ad positioning on your website.  You can change the format and color of the ads.  You can also exclude certain websites from advertising on your site.  However there is another technique that most people overlook that can definitely help you make more per click with Adsense.

I thought to myself how I could attract that kind of high paying income with Adsense and I started to do a bit of research. What I found is that since I’ve intergrated my Google Adsense account with Google Analytics I can tell where the traffic came from and what keywords got me that high payout with Adsense. So I started there and starting improving my website.

If you haven’t setup your Analytics account with Adsense yet you definitely need to do it. There should be a link at the top of your analytics account to do this. Follow the easy to follow steps and you will be glad you did! Now go into your analytics account and click on traffic and select the traffic type. Once you’ve selected the traffic type click on Adsense Revenue tab. In here you can see the keywords that paid you the most. This is key because this is something you were never able to do in the past. Google Adsense never gave you this type of information. So with this information you can write new articles are are more focused on these keywords and therefore attract more of that kind of traffic and then your payout from Adsense will be larger!  One thing to keep in mind though is that the payout on keywords can change due to geographical location, time of year, and the economy.  So you need to keep those things in mind when optimizing your blog posts, articles, etc.  This isn’t a exact science and it takes practice.  This technique is more of a general guideline to get you moving in the right direction to earning more with Google Adsense.

The last key thing that everyone knows is the placement of the Google Ads. Especially if you are writing on a blog or website that people who visit are technical in nature. These type of people notice ads more quickly and are unlikely to click them unless they are very interesting. However if they are more mixed in with the content they are harder to see and therefore more people will click on them and your CTR will go up! Try it out for yourself and you will see! I’ve changed mine multiple times and am starting to find it has help me a lot!

Anyways – hopefully this strategy helps you earn much more with Google Adsense. Good luck.

As the end of the school year approaches, many high school and college students find themselves scrambling for summer jobs so that they can save up some spending money.

Unfortunately, there aren’t many decent paying jobs available for teens, especially in a rough economic climate. However, there are a number of websites that offer very easy money for teens online. For a teenager who is disciplined and responsible, online jobs are the easiest way to earn a significant wad of cash this summer.

Websites That Offer Easy Money for Teens

Teenagers today typically have an assortment of skills that are useful and valuable on the Internet. For teens who are skilled writers, earning money will be that much simpler. Additionally, there are also well paying jobs available for teenagers who know how to write web pages, write high-volume blogs or forum posts, or program in different Internet or desktop programming languages. However, finding those opportunities often involves wading through a mountain of garbage and scams. This article will provide teens with a guideline for the best opportunities on the web that offer easy money for teens.

1. Easy Income for Teens Who Can Write Articles

For any teen that has excellent writing skills, the Internet offers an abundance of cash just sitting there for the taking. Yes, it may take a full eight hours a day of good solid writing work – but what could be better than rolling out of bed at ten in the morning and going to work at home, in your pajamas? Sound too good to be true? Well put on your pajamas and check out these opportunities.

Associated Content

Associated Content is one of the most popular “user-generated content” sites that offers articles on just about every topic under the sun.

At Associated Content, you can either “claim” topics from the assignment desk, or you can submit topics of your choosing. You can earn both upfront payments, as well as monthly payments based on traffic to your articles. Starting out, you might only earn $3 to $4 per article you write, plus $1 to $2 for traffic – but if you wrote 5 articles a day, that’s $400 a month, plus additional monthly royalty payments.

Not only does writing for a site like AC establish you as a writer, but if your writing is exceptional, AC will even consider you as a preferred content producer, and their clients may ofter you writing gigs that pay $20 and up for an article.

Helium

Helium is another user-generated content forum that pays you both upfront fees as well as traffic royalties.

Helium is unfortunately a bit cheaper with their payments, and they’ve established a bunch of loopholes you need to jump through. You can earn about $1 per article plus traffic payments. However, to earn those payments you have to spend time “rating” articles – a painful and tedious process of comparing two articles and picking the one that’s better. But with Helium, the real money is in the “marketplace” section, where you can compete on client writing gigs worth anywhere from $5 to $100 or more.

Triond

Triond is another content site that accepts your articles and pays you royalties for traffic.

Triond is one of the few sites known for actually sending authors the payouts they’ve earned, so it deserves mention here. However, if you want to use Triond to add an income stream to your summer writing, you’ll need to submit a very large quantity of articles that are well written with SEO in mind, and can attract a very large stream of readers from the search engines. If you can accomplish that, then yes – you can earn money from Triond.

2. Make Money Writing Reviews or Writing Letters

One of the most popular reasons many people use the Internet is to research products before buying them. This has turned “reviews” into one of the most popular types of content online. If you like writing up product reviews, then there are countless opportunities to earn income from your written opinions.

’ve written for Shared Reviews (the image above) before, because they do legitimately pay their authors. However, I’ve also heard that Epinions is another great review site to earn money from.

Have your friends ever told you that you’re amazing at writing letters? Then consider spending your summer creating custom letters at Letter Rep. Yes, the website isn’t exactly the prettiest site in the world – but by submitting letters to custom letter requests that visitors submit to the site, you stand to earn $10 per letter. Not only that, future visitors to the site can also purchase your letters, making your pile of work a wonderful source of residual income, not only throughout the summer, but even throughout the school year.

3. Quick Money for Teen Programmers

If you are an ace programmer with any programming language, you could spend your summer doing programming freelance jobs for some real cash. However, when it comes to finding freelance work, you have to be very careful what websites you visit – as most of them are useless or flat out scams.

Scriptlance is about as far from a scam as you can get. At the beginning of my online writing career, I spent months sifting through the latest project postings there (there are dozens per hour), and bidding on the ones that matched my skill set. There’s writing work, but the bulk of Scriptlance is programming work. If you post a professionally written proposal to the person who posted the project, your chance of landing the gig will be excellent. Just working on scriptlance projects alone, you could easily earn several thousand dollars by the end of the summer.

Other legitimate freelancing sites (although none quite as big as Scriptlance), include Rent A Ghost Writer, Elance, and iFreelance. Be sure to watch for new updates often, and be the first to post a bid.

Work Hard, Be Persistent, and Rake in the Dough!

The key for teens to successfully earn a small fortune during summer break through online work is by staying persistent, even when it looks like you’ll never land that first gig. Keep posting your daily articles to the royalty paying websites, and bid on freelance projects constantly. Soon, you’ll find that you have more work than you know what to do with. If you can discipline yourself to work for at least eight hours straight for every weekday during the summer – you’ll save far more money than any of your friends could earn waiting tables or mowing lawns!

Have you ever earned money from any of the sites listed in this article? Are there any good opportunities missing? Share your opinion in the comments section below.

Source: MakeUseOf.com

To which you react with horror and suspicion….

How could it be possible to increase my sales without driving more people to my site?

And the answer to that is simple:

convert more of the visitors that are already visiting your site!

Yes. Mr Cow, you say, that would be great. But do you have any actual helpful tips to, maybe, you know, help me do that?

At this point I realize that my imaginary reader is quite sarcastic today, and I might want to lighten up, because it obviously says something about my own issues.

Anyways, fear not, imaginary reader, because I certainly do have advice for you on how to improve your conversion rate without spending money on additional traffic.

The secret is: make simple changes to your website to improve its overall performance. The best part about this is, unlike buying traffic, which is a short-lived benefit (i.e. only for as long as you’re paying for it) the changes you make to optimize your conversion rate is the gift that keeps on giving.

The first thing that you need to do is figure out your list of priorities, and I can’t tell you what these should be. Look at your metrics, and find out if there’s an obvious place to start – i.e. a page where the drop-off rate is drastically higher than anywhere else on the site. If there is, then start with that page. If there isn’t an obvious place to start, then I would start with your checkout process and work out from there.

You need to identify where people abandoned the buying process, and try to figure out why. Go over those pages. Is there something that would turn a buyer off, or lose trust in you as a seller. Are you asking for too much information, or is the buying process not transparent? Look at things from a buyer’s point of view – what do you look for when you’re buying something?

Here’s a list of simple things that are easy to do that could help improve your conversion rate, without much effort on your part:

Make sure your ‘buy now’ button looks like a button
You’d be surprised how many people miss this. Your purchase button should be the most prominent thing on the page, and make sure that it’s obvious that it’s a button.

Give security assurance at the point of purchase
People want to know that they’re buying in a secure place, and that your site is a safe place for them to buy. Don’t assume they’ll see the https://, tell them about it on the page.

Make sure you’re providing what your ad promised
Even if you’re offering the same thing, if you word it differently, people may think that you’re not proving what the ad promised. (Eg. – Ad says buy one, get one half off! Website says buy 2, get 25% off both! It’s the same thing, but it sounds like a different offer.

Be clear about the whole buying process if it includes multiple steps
People don’t like thinking that they’re almost done, only to have to keep filling out page after page. By letting your customer know how long the process will take, and what information they will give and get at every stage, they’ll be less likely to drop out in the middle of the process.

Be clear about shipping charges as soon as possible, if you have any
If you’re shipping out physical product, let people know what the shipping charges are before the final checkout screen. Surprise shipping charges are the cause of a lot of mid-checkout abandonment’s.

If you’ve already done all these things, then great. Start testing other elements to see what else you can do to improve you conversion rate. If you haven’t then start now! The true benefit of these improvements is seen over a longer period of time, so the longer you wait, the less money you’ll be making.

Source: JohnCow.com