Every month I usually change my focus based on what income I made the previous month. I usually keep an excel spreadsheet to keep track of the various affiliate programs and products that I promote to see where the most of my money is made.

Then I usually decide to work on the income stream that came in third place. I figure that first and second place must be doing well enough so I don’t need to focus on them and anything after the 4th place isn’t worth my time right now.

So third place is usually what I focus on for the following month.

In May third place went to Adsense again. (Which is pretty normal, I usually make the bulk of my money with Amazon, then Clickbank comes in 2nd and Adsense is usually third).

I don’t actually make a huge amount with Adsense yet, probably around $300 a month spread between a handful of sites.

I did notice that my HubPages adsense income has increased to about $30 a month though, so this month I’ll be writing more hubs which will accomplish two main goals. One I’ll be using them to backlink my best performing hubs and two, choosing keywords with a decent CPC.

My aim with Adsense is to get my sites earning around $50 a month each. I have one site that does quite a lot more than that, and many sites that don’t make nearly this amount. But that’s my goal for each of my Adsense sites including those like HubPages that have revenue share.

I also want to continue reviewing article marketing guides.

I have already reviewed a budget guide for $10 here, so now I want to review a guide at the other end of the price budget – a $67 product from Clickbank called Article Marketing Lifeline.

I’m actually quite excited about reviewing this product because it’s by Tim Gorman whose posts on the Warrior Forum I always like reading and I believe he really knows his stuff when it comes to article marketing so we will see.

I have ordered it, and there is a tonne of information here so I think this review is going to be quite long.

I’ll keep you posted.

Well it’s about time I wrote another post here, even though I still have limited time online these days. (Oh by the way, I had the baby – she is now 2 weeks old and very cute).

But lately many of my online friends have had their sites deindexed due to what Google has called Made For Adsense (MFA) sites or thin affiliate sites. Of course some of these are not thin at all, they just happened to be hosted on Blogger which if you didn’t know already is going through a major cleanup right now.

I still have all of my Blogger sites for now, but then I never really developed any of them substantially and most of them are just sites I played around with, so it would be no huge loss if I did lose them (although I’d rather they stayed as most of them are true blogs about my experiences of certain life experiences). I didn’t develop them to make money – which is probably why they haven’t been touched.

Now let’s get to the mini site issue. If you’ve been in IM for a while you’ve no doubt heard of the x-factor type micro site model where you build a site around a certain keyword, usually a physical product and then use an ugly theme and a big in your face Adsense block right at the top of your article to encourage people to click your ads so you earn money.

Now the problem for these types of sites is that Google has said enough is enough, and is deindexing them left, right and centre.

Why?

Well if you look at it from Google’s point of view, or rather the advertisers that are paying for ads on Google, then you’ll realise that these are probably not real customers but more likely just people trying to run away quickly from your ugly theme. You will earn money, but the advertiser is not likely getting a true customer. If they are unhappy then Google is unhappy. If Google is unhappy then they will kick your ass right out of its index, no questions asked.

You can read more about this at my favorite blogs:

Griz – Making Money Online in 2010
Ben – How not to make money online

So why is Amazon better?

So we have established why having Adsense can be risky, but does that mean all mini sites are useless? Well no. I have quite a few mini sites but they all have one main difference – they use Amazon on them.

Why should that make a difference?

Adsense is a pay per click program. You get paid when someone clicks an ad on your site whether they are a real customer or not.

Amazon however is a pay per sale program. The advertiser (Amazon) can’t lose out because the customer MUST make a purchase before you get paid. Therefore it’s less risky and Google won’t care about your mini site as much. (They still want to provide value to the searcher, but they won’t totally diss your site unless you blatantly do something wrong).

Any pay per sale program is going to be safer for your business and your website

Does that mean you should avoid Adsense altogether?

Of course not, I still have Adsense on many of my sites, but here’s the difference: most of these sites have good amounts of content that I personally wrote (so it’s original and written from my point of view in most cases), the topics are those that I know about, they are updated fairly frequently, all have different themes (I could never do the ugly theme thing as I’m too much of a girl and like things to look pretty) and I try and provide real value.

Now, I do need to go and ‘tone down’ the Adsense on some of these because I do use ‘above the fold’ big square Adsense blocks on them which I’m now quite nervous about, but these are definitely not crap sites.

So what do I recommend for you?

If you have been using the Adsense mini site model (less than 5 pages of real content, ugly theme, big in your face ad block) then I suggest you either add loads more content (and make it GOOD content) or swap Adsense for an affiliate program or pay per sale program like Amazon or eBay. Oh and change your theme too. Make sure it doesn’t look like every other site out there in terms of content, layout and colours.

Start to try new things and don’t follow the herd. The reason Griz and Ben are so successful is because they do their own thing, try things out. If you just follow the advice of the latest ebook then it’s likely not to work long term unless it’s built on a solid business model. If you do like a particular marketer’s strategy then add your own spin to it. Mix it up.

And the biggest lesson that I’ve learnt from Griz & Ben is that if you are in the MMO niche, then for goodness sakes, don’t stick your head out and become too popular (I’m thankful that only about 3 people online know who I am).

Gotta go and feed the baby now, catch ya next time.

t xx

I probably should update this blog since I haven’t touched it since, good grief, October – I have been slack!

I don’t have any other excuse other than I don’t try and rank this blog for anything so it doesn’t mean all that much to me except for keeping in touch with people who seem to be interested in what I have to say.

Well I had a good Christmas with Amazon earnings, but January was awful – I guess people have lost all spending interest although it’s starting to pick up again now.

Lately I’ve been trying to increase my adsense earnings. So I’ve been building backlinks and writing content for some of my information blogs. It’s slowly creeping up, but I do get impatient sometimes I wish I could crack the $20 a day mark with adsense (it’s getting closer hasn’t seemed to budge much).

I like the adsense model but haven’t pursued it much in the past due to concentrating on affiliate sales and Amazon. But you should never concentrate on just one method of making money online in case something happens to that source of income. Likewise you should never have just one blog or website either – the more you have out there the better your income will be and the more stable it will be.

What does it take to make money online?

Recently my mother told me she was in a bit of credit card debt so I suggested internet marketing to her to try and help her get some extra income. That was back in November and she still hasn’t shown any interest in finding out how.

That’s pretty typical for most people. They want to earn money online but aren’t willing to put in the effort to do so, or they make one HubPage or one blog and wonder why the money doesn’t roll in immediately.

The truth is that it takes work, just like anything else, to make money from your blog or website. You need to write the content, get backlinks, monitor your rankings and work out the best monetisation methods to use.

It’s actually a lot of writing in the beginning, unless you outsource this – although I don’t recommend you do this unless you are making a decent income first.

So to answer the question how to make money online – it’s WORKING by writing articles, content, getting backlinks etc.

How much money can you make and how soon can you see the money?

Most people like to know what is possible when it comes to earning an income on the internet. And while I don’t have an exact figure for you, I believe that if you put the effort in, you could see a small amount of money within around a month or two. It won’t be much to start with but as you continue to do more work, it will grow and grow.

Let’s say that after two months you were able to see a monthly income of $50. Not much you might say, but let’s imagine that you kept going at your business and after twelve months got to around $300 a month. (and I’m being conservative here – you might earn much more).

You could of course fast track that by writing more articles and building more blogs, (I’ve know some people who have got to 5k a month within a year). It really depends on how much work you are willing to put in.

That’s all well and good, but what do you mean by work?

I think the first step to really making money from the web is to build a blog (either self hosted or free) or lots of hubpages based around products that people are already buying.

Finding good keywords isn’t hard, but it does take a big learning curve to know what you are looking for and how to choose a good one.

I usually prefer product keywords simply because people buy products more than they buy information (generally speaking).

I’m experimenting more with info based keywords now, but I still make far more money with product keywords.

So how do you find keywords?

Stop looking at your computer screen and have a look around the room you are in. What do you see? In my case, I see a TV, mirrors, pictures on the walls, couches, a cat sunning herself on a mat, books, sunglasses etc etc. This is a good start – I could choose any of these.

Let’s say I wanted to focus on sunglasses more. The keyword sunglasses is just too general so you need to drill down a bit. Often times I’ll put the keyword in the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and see what comes up. I like to look at exact match phrases generally (but this isn’t a hard and fast rule). Try and look for keywords that have around 3 or more words in them. A few caught my eye because they have lots of searches (more than 5000 per month exact match):

Cheap designer sunglasses
mens designer sunglasses
sunglasses for women
marc jacobs sunglasses

Next I like to see what sort of competition there is for those keywords. Just look at page 1. You really are only competing against the first 10 websites anyway.

You can also expand on those keywords to find ultra specific phrases like:

cheap designer sunglasses for men
cheap designer sunglasses online
where can i find cheap designer sunglasses
where to buy cheap designer sunglasses

It’s much easier to go after longer phrase keywords when you are starting out anyway as they are easier to rank for (even if they don’t get as many searches).

So start a hubpage about cheap designer sunglasses (or even a whole blog if you prefer) and start targeted the smaller and easier phrases that have virtually no competition and work your way up to the main keyphrase you are going after.

Write one article (or blog post) and make it at least 500 words. More if you are in the mood.

Next get some backlinks from article directories, forum sigs, blog commenting, rss feeds. As many different places as you can think of.

Once you’ve got about 10 to 20 links to your site, move on the next project. Come back to this in a month to see what traffic you are getting and how people are finding your site. Expand on those keywords. Get more backlinks.

That’s what I mean by work. Just keep doing something – adding content and more importantly getting backlinks everyday.

That’s how to make lots of money online.

Personal Stuff

I’ve had lots of people ask about the pregnancy and yes everything is going along great. Less than 2 months to go now.

We are also in the process of selling our tiny two bedroom house to move to somewhere bigger (crazy timing I know!)

Late last year I told you that I was taking Adsense off my blog because it looks messy and it wasn’t making me any money anyway. And that I thought putting Adsense on your blogs was a waste of time.

I was an idiot.

Yes, this particular blog doesn’t make that much money because really it’s more of a social blog so people can keep track of what I’m doing online but the number of niche blogs that I now have that is growing all the time and THEY do earn me some nice Adsense income. It all started about a month ago when I discovered Griz.

What’s a Griz?

Griz is, in my opinion, the best SEO/Adsense teacher that I’ve ever come across online. I found him after doing a search for ‘make money online’ in Google and his How to Make Money Online for Beginners site was about #3 – out of over 180 million results.

Oh and did I mention that it’s a free blogger blog? Interesting isn’t it.

He also recently started another site that I also have been reading: Make Money with Adsense. It’s eye-opening.

Anyway all of the information on his blogs is free and the best SEO & Adsense information that you’ll ever find. He walks the walk, and talks the talk.

Since following his methods my Adsense income has risen from about $2 per day to $10 per day. In just one month! Imagine what I’ll be earning from Adsense in 12 months time.

So my advice to you dear readers is to visit Griz and devour his websites. Read everything twice. Three times if you have to. Delight in every tip for making money online that your little beginner (or even intermediate to advanced) minds can soak up.

It’s just another income stream to add to your belts and best of all its totally free.

Griz – you’re a legend.

And yes I can’t help that this blog is pretty – I’m working on it.