Making Money With Your Computer & The Internet

Making Money Watching TV Commercials On Your Computer

2011-06-30T00:02:00.000-04:00

Yes, it's true. It's now possible to earn money by watching TV commercials on your computer. It's called varolo.com, and there are actually a few different ways you can make money with Varolo.

To be specific, the money you earn is for the ads watched by people you have referred into your downline (or "village" as they call it on Varolo.) Then you have to watch a number of ads yourself in order to claim your earnings. It's all documented on the website for you when you sign in, so you see your progress as you watch.

The bad news is that there really isn't much money involved so far. As of this writing in June of 2011, Varolo has only been officially online for a few months, so it's just in the building-up stage as far as traffic and earnings that will be available. But as the site grows in popularity (and it certainly is so far after the first few months) the earnings are sure to grow as well.

The great news is that Varolo is totally free to join and use, so it won't cost you a thing, other than the time you spend on it. Because of that, it's not very hard to get people to sign up under you, since it doesn't cost them a cent to do so. Many people join just to be able to enter the Varolo weekly jackpot drawings, which only require you to watch at least one ad to have a chance to win. There's another winner every week!

Plus, if you choose to promote the extremely affordable advertising that Varolo offers, you can also earn commissions on any advertisers that you refer.

The way I look at it, it's an interesting idea that I think is certainly worth a try, and worth watching to see how it grows in popularity. Needless to say, I hope you'll join my Varolo village so we can give this a try together! I look forward to welcoming you onboard!

How To Safely Preview Your Google AdSense Ads

2009-08-26T11:20:00.004-04:00

Have you ever wished you could find out in advance which Google AdSense ads might appear on your own site if you were to add them? Or have you ever been tempted to click on any of your own AdSense ads yourself? (Which you KNOW is a no no!)

Here's an easy way to do both of the above, and without breaking any rules or risking any penalties from Google for terms of service violation.

It's called the AdSense Preview Tool. It's totally free to download and use, and it's right on Google's own website. Used with Internet Explorer version 6 or higher, it can be added as a right-click menu option. Access it while on whatever page you're currently browsing and it will show you a list of ads that could appear as Google AdSense ads on that page. (I just tried it on this very page, and sure enough - some of the same ads that it showed are actually being included in my real live ads.)

Plus, if you click on any of the ads listed on the preview tool, there are no charges applied to the advertisers and no penalties to your own account.

You can read a lot more about this at Google's AdSense Support page. And there's even an easy uninstall tool posted to help you remove it when you want to.

So the AdSense Preview Tool is a very inciteful tool you can use when you're planning your own advertising...or just trying to satisfy your own curiousity as to what's really behind all those forbidden ad clicks afterall!

GoogleAmbush.com - What a Ripoff!

2009-06-10T22:38:00.009-04:00

For many months I had been seeing Google Ambush being plugged by various internet marketing gurus in their email (spam) updates. As incredibly outrageous as their sales page claims for huge (and fast) incomes possible to amass with it were, I was still curious. But being a subscription service that charges $77 per month to continue using it, I was always put off by the price. However, when they finally came out with the $4.95 for a 7 day full access trial, I finally decided it was risk-free enough to give it a good look and find out for myself if it was really worthwhile. So I tried it.

Was it worthwhile? I hate to have to be the one to bust your bubble of hope for incredible overnight internet marketing success...but no, I did not find it to be worthwhile in any way at all.

The first thing I hated about it was that immediately after my order was placed they hit me up for the ever-more popular "up-sell" offer...in this case for a set of instructional videos that would supposedly give you the "edge" over all the poor members who chose to pass on ordering them. I figured that there's a money-back guarantee anyway, so I might as well not chance missing out on the details on how to get the most use out of Google Ambush. I had decided to give it my all, trying it for 7 days anyway...so I sprung for the additional $77.00 for those. Come to find out, those videos should be included in the regular price anyway, because all they are is a set of video instructions on how to use the site. Nothing special at all.

The software itself is basically a 5 step system to design ad campaigns to promote ClickBank products. The five sections are:

Product Finder
Keyword Research
Campaign Loader
Landing Page Generator
Tracker

Product Finder allows you to search for ClickBank products to sell, using changes in ClickBank's "gravity" ratings, showing the amount of change in the last day, week and month. Plus it shows that information in chart form to make it easy to see at a glance. However, this is nothing you can't find for free by using CBEngine.com. (In fact, even CBEngine's "Pro Membership" costs less for a whole year than Google Ambush charges each month.)

Keyword Research is a fairly crude keyword suggestion tool which seems to be less advanced than even free keyword suggestion tool sites like http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com
and Google's own https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal (For $77/month I would really like to see something more elaborate than what can be easily found elsewhere for free.)

Campaign Loader is a tool to help you create and place your Google AdWords ads right there without having to sign out and go into the AdWords site yourself, supposedly making it easier. But once again, this is nothing you can't do pretty easily on your own for free.

Landing Page Generator is the module that I was most excited to see in action, since it's supposed to automatically create landing pages for each of your keywords to promote the products you selected with the "Product Finder" in step one. But I was really disappointed to see that it just created fairly crude little "review" pages, which are designed to list comparisons between similar ClickBank products you choose to promote. The big feature is that you can give each product a so many star rating and supposedly let the reader decide which to order. It's not a bad idea, but it's certainly nothing fancy that you couldn't do easily yourself with any simple web page designing software. But there's hardly anything "automatic" about it - you still have to write all of your own description text, etc. So how is it supposed to enable you to do this whole process in just a few minutes, like the sales page promises? What happened to the claim of "Generate Your Landing Pages Automatically!"?

Tracker is Google Ambush's tracking screen which is supposed to allow you to track your sales all in one easy step. But it doesn't even do this on it's own...you need to download your ClickBank account details first. So it's only using the information provided by your (free) ClickBank reporting. Once again, nothing that isn't available to you for free already anyway.

So there you have it. That's all there is to Google Ambush...it's just a big build up for not much of anything worthwhile. And to make matters worse, their customer service (for me anyway) was absolutely non-existent. There's a "Contact Us" link right on the top of the site, but I left them three different messages over that week and not one was responded to. The first day I tried it the Product Finder list was not working correctly and not showing what the different gravity rating changes were for each of the 3 time frames. Several weeks later it was apparently noticed and corrected, but there was never anything mentioned to me about it.

And yes, I do still have access to the site several weeks later as of this writing, since they don't seem to be willing to cancel my subscription. I was immediatly billed for the first FULL month of service for $77.00 (which was also supposed to be at a special rate of only $67.00 but wasn't) precisely at midnight of my 7th day. This still being after I requested online the day before that they cancel my subscription. So far, I've been refunded for the first $77.00 (for the videos), but not for the second. I figure I'll probably just have to claim a dispute for that charge with my credit card to be able to be refunded. They don't seem to be accessible at all, either by writing to them on the site itself or by email, and no phone number was ever provided.

About the only good thing I can say about Google Ambush is that it at least teaches you the correct steps to follow in order to find and promote good ClickBank products. But this is certainly nothing you need to spend $77.00 per month on when you can follow all of the same steps for free using other sources.

Oh well...so much for "ambushing" Google by "reverse engineering" already successful campaigns, using "laser targeted" precision, with "push button" ease. What an incredible load of hype! Trust me on this one and save your money!

BlinkWeb.com: A New, Free Website Builder by Matt Callen

2008-09-09T14:53:00.011-04:00

I just found out about a new, free website builder site that's really worth recommending called BlinkWeb.com. It's a free website builder that you can use online to create your own website. And it's been designed to be so easy to use that there's really no more excuse for anyone who's been wanting to build a website to continue putting it off.

BlinkWeb was created by Brad and Matt Callen, who are well known in the internet marketing world. Just Google their names and you'll see that. BlinkWeb uses a "drag and drop" kind of interface where you can choose the type of site you want to create, whether it be a blog, a sales page, or just a regular content type of website. Then you can choose from many different layouts, or templates, and start inserting the stuff you want, wherever you want it to appear on the page. And then - "Presto!" - you have a website built within minutes in whatever style you'd like.

They also have an actual mini-course right on the site on internet marketing, and creating niche information products, etc. There's probably more information and good advice there than you'd find find in so many of those get rich schemes that are always being advertised with high price tags...and yet they give all this information away for free, just to help you get started after you sign up.

But the best news is that BlinkWeb is actually totally free to use and play with all you want. And when you're satisfied with the site you've created, you can either have it hosted right there on their own servers very inexpensively, or you can download your new website as a zip file and save it to your own computer, ready to upload to your own web server.

If you're like me, you're probably wondering how they make their money though, since it's totally free to use. The answer is that they also offer very reasonably priced web hosting, and a big percentage of users will probably opt for that, since they make it so easy to do.

But even if you don't use their hosting, they still get you for a subscription fee to be able to download your completed sites, which you don't find out about until you hit the download button.

So the truth about BlinkWeb is that it's not really totally free to use, like they claim. It's free to join and use - but if you want to keep what you create with it, you do have to pay a small fee to do so. But I think that's fair - especially since you don't have to pay anything before you see what you can create with it first.

They have several different "subscription" options to chose from for downloading. As of this writing, they offer unlimited downloads by the day for only $9.95, or one month for $19.95. (That gives you plenty of time if you have a bunch of sites you want to create.) Plus, they even offer a lifetime subcription for totally unlimited site downloads, all for a single one-time fee. Then you're set to create all the sites you want!

So I think it's pretty brilliant the way it all ties together. Even casual users can now create their own professional looking websites with no help from expensive web designers; and BlinkWeb makes some money on the back end from subscriptions and the huge number of sites that are sure to be hosted right there with them.

It just launched earlier this year (2008), and they say over 27,000 sites have already been created with it - so word must be spreading pretty fast. That's what happens when somebody comes up with an idea that lots of people have been waiting to see.

So if you've been looking to do what I've been dabbling with myself, and that's create some websites to build a business around, this BlinkWeb could be a huge help to you. It's totally free to join and try out, so why not give it a whirl and see what you might be able to create?

Good luck with carving out your own little corner of the internet world!

Pay Per Click Advertising - It's Trickier Than I Thought

2008-05-16T10:10:00.012-04:00

Pay Per Click advertising is something I always thought was the easiest, most sure-fire way to get an avalanche of instant traffic to your websites...and always there, whenever you're ready for it. (And willing to pay a little bit for it of course, too.) So until the last couple of weeks I had never even dabbled with it at all. Since I do have a handful or so of websites put together now, I figured it's time to direct some traffic to them and see what happens. Should be a piece of cake, right?

As it turns out, there's a lot more to pay per click advertising than I realized. I had the introductory credits to use toward Google, Yahoo and MSN that you get when you open an account with BlueHost, so I figured that using those would be a good excuse to get started. I'm not used to spending ANY money on these little business experiments of mine, but you've got to start somewhere I guess!

I was pleasantly surprised that MSN only requires you to put $5 of your own money into the account to get the $30 credit added when you open it. Even I didn't mind that, being the cheapskate I am! :) Yahoo calls for more like $30, but they add another $50 to it. I haven't tried Google yet, but it's similar to Yahoo I think. And it's surprisingly quick and easy to actually open the accounts; it's all done entirely online.

Quick is the keyword, though, because before you know it they start prompting you to enter your first text ad to start with. Suddenly you find yourself thrown into the ad writing business - which is like a whole art of its own. Right on the spot I'm sitting there, trying to draw on all the ad writing tips I've ever learned to come up with an ad that makes some sort of sense.

Then, of course, they ask you to enter all of the keywords you want to have your ad matched to, and even offer you the option to write several more ads to test against each other, which I was totally unprepared for as well! :) The good news is that you can always change your ads, add more, delete some or all, or even just scrap them all and start over again anytime you want. So there's really no pressure.

It's pretty cool though. I find it to be a lot like placing regular classified ads. Except these ads go live within minutes - so you can start seeing results almost immediately. It's kind of neat how websites that have been sitting, unknown to everyone in the world other than myself, can almost instantly begin registering visitors. (And even Google AdSense clicks, which is much more exciting!)

The volume of traffic from the pay per click ads, however, hasn't been what I expected so far. (In the little bit I've tried so far, anyway.) I was expecting more, although I'm sure the popularity of your subject matter makes a huge difference, and also how much you're willing to pay per click. Pay more and your ad appears at or around the top of your competition; pay only the minimum bid amount (which is what I did) and your ad may hardly ever appear, depending on how many competing ads are out there. But the minimum is only 10 cents per click for Yahoo, and a mere 5 cents for MSN. Prices like those do give you a fair chance to make a profit, even if you don't get as many visitors.

The real challenge is...AdSense ads sometimes don't even pay that much per click. You never really know what they'll pay until they're clicked. Some ads might pay a dollar or more on the same site as other ads that only pay a few pennies, so it's hard to predict. Naturally, the idea is that hopefully in the end you receive more than you pay for all those paid visitors. But when your sites rely mostly on AdSense for revenue like the ones I've made so far, it looks like it might be tough to turn a decent profit. Add in a few affiliate sales to the mix here and there, or maybe sales of your own products, etc., and it should get easier.

So you need to bid at or near the minimum per click to give it a chance to be profitable, yet at that rate the amount of traffic you receive just isn't very impressive. I guess the answer to that still goes back to my original idea of just creating LOTS of different sites until it all starts adding up to something worthwhile.

So while pay per click advertising is a super fast way to direct some traffic to your websites...unless you're willing to pay a higher amount per visitor, there are probably better ways to create traffic. I haven't tried paid banner or text ads on other websites yet, but those might be a better choice in some cases. For now though, I'm going to continue experimenting with these pay per clicks and see what else I can learn. (And hopefully earn!)

Earth Day and Global Warming

2008-04-22T16:19:00.003-04:00

Happy Earth Day! I wish I could have spent my whole day outdoors, as nice as it is outside around here today. I, however, had to settle for lunch hour outside at the park, but that was better than nothing! :)

My own most substantial contribution to the Earth Day cause came at the computer keyboard. I've just finished putting together a website that offers lots of information on global warming. It features dozens of links to videos and other articles that represent both sides of the big debate so that visitors can make their own choice as to who to believe on this important issue of our time. I figured that this subject SHOULD be of interest to anyone who lives on Earth, so I'm bound to get some visitors, aren't I? ;)

Actually, whether you live on Earth or not, you're more than welcomed to check it out at:

www.globalwarming-videos.com

Have a great Earth Day!

Free Online Press Releases

2008-04-22T11:15:00.004-04:00

I just found a great website that allows you to post press releases online, totally free of charge. It's a great way to promote new websites as you create them, which I plan to do, or whatever new products you might be marketing, etc.

You can find it here at: Free-Press-Release.com

There are many other similar websites that charge varying amounts for allowing you to post press releases, but this one really does offer totally free listings. Of course, they also give you the option to pay for a premier version which includes greater promotion, etc., but that's only an option that they make available if you choose to use it. Check it out!

I've Been Busy Lately!

2008-03-28T16:10:00.022-04:00

I haven't posted here in about a month - wow how time flies when you're having fun. (And when you've been busy!)

I've been quite busy lately, working on what I've settled on as my decision on what to apply myself to, as far as money making endeavors.

Looking through my (mostly junk) emails I came across something about a case study on someone's success at creating profitable websites. It's like, yeah, what else is new? But in this case it was impressive enough sounding that I ended up reading it and even studying it, trying to get the main idea of what has worked for the person who wrote the article.

Without actually promoting it for the guy, I'll just describe it as a software program that "creates" websites in a mostly automated way. Not fully, but mostly anyway. And the main idea I took from this article was that the key to the author's success was not so much that he did everything right, but that he did lots of what he did find to work.

More specifically, he created not just a few, but several hundred websites that consistently made at least small amounts of money each day. The result, in his case, was supposedly a consistent $15,000+ monthly income after only about six months of work. (Yes, I'd say that's something worth looking into, wouldn't you?!)

Needless to say, about the only way you could pull this off is to use something that does, in fact, automate the whole web site creation process so that it enables you to create lots of websites fairly quickly. And true to my usual form, I didn't just take this guy's word on what is the best program to use to accomplish this, but instead started searching a bit on my own for something I could use myself to get similar results.

And guess what? I found something else that I think is even much better than what that person was promoting. The one I found actually creates streaming video sites on whatever subject you choose, rather than just collections of free articles from around the web. And I think most people find streaming videos about the subjects they're interested in more exciting that just rehashed articles that can be found all over the place already.

So just finding this motivated me to finally open a web hosting account with BlueHost, which is the one that is highly recommended by Holly Mann, who uses the service for her own sites. After doing a lot of research on different web hosting companies, I decided that this was a good one to choose because not only are they one of the least expensive services for what they offer, (as low as $6.95 per month), but they also allow an unlimited number of subdomains for any domain names you host through them. And since I plan on creating a lot of websites here very shortly, this is important. Plus, an added bonus is that your first domain name is on them - it's free of annual fees for as long as you keep your account, which is nice.

Shortly after setting that up, I've now already created 3 web sites so far, all decked out with Google AdSense ads, ClickBank ads and even Amazon ads - all placed automatically by the program! It's really great, since it's so easy to go from start to finish all in one sitting. So I can really see the possibility of setting up dozens or even hundreds of similar sites before long. In fact, I now PLAN on doing so!

So maybe now you can see why I've been so busy lately that I haven't even posted here for a whole month! In fact, to be honest, I actually don't see myself continuing to post here all that often from here on, since there's really not much of any need to. I think I've found what I've been looking for since I started this blog. So I'll be busy doing what I should be doing, and that's creating more and more new and unique websites to make money with. Once they're set up and online, they don't go anywhere - they just keep making more money without doing much of anything to them. Truly "Auto-Pilot" as one of the latest internet marketing cliches goes!

OK...I guess I won't keep it a secret. I wasn't really planning on revealing this here when I started writing this post, but if you'd like to check this thing out for yourself you'll see that I'm not exaggerating. The program I've been using is called Instant Video Site Creator, and on their website they even include a few sample video sites that they've created as examples of what you can do with the program.

Needless to say, I'm pretty excited about the possibilities! So if I'm not posting on here very often anymore, you'll know what I'm up to! I plan to take this opportunity to get lots of sites up and online and start building my own personal "virtual real estate" empire on the web. I figure whether I really end up having the kind of success that other guy had or not, I'm going to give it an honest effort and find out for myself what's really possible.

Wish me luck! And of course, good luck to you as well, if you decide to try the same thing. Take care!

Scam, Ripoff Alert: www.35grand.com

2008-02-27T19:06:00.006-05:00

I was recently suckered by a website called www.35grand.com into ordering what turned out to be a total scam. Plus, I'm disturbed that this ripoff is still being advertised on 35grand.com last I checked, so I feel like I owe it to my readers to let this be known. Hopefully this might help some other people to avoid getting cheated by the same offer.

Back on 11/6/07 I even posted a list of several different ideas I had at the time for making money, and following this guy's plan was one of them. The "deal" was that I was supposed to be a dealer of his supposedly deeply discounted laptop computers, and easily be able to earn an extra "35 grand" per year. I had really high hopes for this, and I was excited to have found something like this in time to make some extra money before Christmas, etc.

Problem is, about 3 weeks after ordering the dealership (for $195.00) all I received was a nearly empty 3-ring binder that only included some general information about different types of laptops that would supposedly be available sell, a couple of CD ROMS about how to use free advertising and market on the internet, and a contract to sign and return that said I would have my local area reserved for me only. The explanation for the lack of further details was that he was just getting started and would be sending more pages for the manual as they are created.

That was the last contact I had with this person. My emails and phone messages were never answered, and neither was the snail mail letter I sent to ask what was going on and to request a refund if the program was not going to take shape.

Luckily I did end up getting my money back, but only by calling my credit card and disputing the charge. It was probably a pretty easy decision for them once they verified that the phone number that appeared on the credit card charge had been disconnected by then. So thank goodness I eventually got my money refunded because it doesn't always work out that way!

It's so easy to fall into the trap of believing everything people say when it comes to money making plans. The sales pitch on this 35grand.com even builds rapport with the reader by acknowledging how most money making plans for sale are just a waste of time and money, and then ends up being just another one of those situations.

I guess it should have been a clue that I wasn't dealing with the most honest of people when I first learned of this site by way of an ad on CraigsList, which was supposed to be advertising a "local" business opportunity. (He's on the opposite side of the country from me.) The truth is hidden well in the ad, since it only reveals the phone number which instructs you to go to the website for further details.

It's interesting to note that at the time of this writing he's even lowered his price to $99.00 for the "dealership" now. I guess even ripoff artists have to do a little price testing once in a while, huh?

I've reported this scam to GoDaddy, which is who the domain was registered with, so hopefully www.35grand.com will be brought down before it can rip too many more people off.

Seasonal eBay Toy Sales (My Own Results)

2008-01-17T10:00:00.000-05:00

A couple of months ago I posted about the toy selling guide I had ordered and my plans to follow it, buying toys just to resell closer to Christmas. So in case anyone happens to be curious about how it turned out, here are the final results after eventually returning quite a few items that I didn't sell. (The numbers are all rounded off to keep it simple.)

Total profit after all eBay, PayPal and shipping expenses was about $70. This was after purchasing about $400 worth of toys. Only $138 worth of them were actually sold, but the remaining $262 or so were returned to the stores I purchased them from for the same price.

So the $70 profit sounds a lot better on an investment of $138 than it does on $400, but that's really the amount I had at risk. (If you want to call it that.) But that was a lot of work I did just for that $70 profit - lots of picture taking, eBay item description writing, packing and shipping...not to mention the time I spent in the stores, both buying and returning the items that didn't get sold.

Plus, when you figure in that I also paid $30 for the ebook that inspired me to do all this, it's more like only a $40 profit. So was it all worth it?

Well...that's $40 that I wouldn't have had if I didn't do it. But considering the amount of work that was involved...I think I'd rather be the one selling the ebooks for $30 each than just doing what the ebook recommends! (Which, time and time again, is usually the case with money making plans that are being sold.) When will I ever learn?!

Avoiding Get Rich Scams

2008-01-03T23:55:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year!

How are your new year's resolutions going so far?

I'm not really very big on actual new year's resolutions myself, but I do always feel like the start of the new year is a great time to re-evaluate your goals and plans. So if you realize you've been drifting away from focusing on what's important, it's a good time to get back on track.

One of my usual goals is to continue to research new ways to make money, and this year is no different in that way. But I also have to be careful not to be TOO open-minded about money making schemes that are being advertised. As negative as it sounds, most of them are either just not worth the money they cost, or worse - even downright ripoffs.

For example...

Just yesterday I spent my whole lunch hour reading one of those little booklets that's really just a big sales pitch for a money making program. In this case, it was titled "The Overnight Millionaire", by Russ Dalbey. I get these from him every so often, and I had seen some derogatory comments about his products before, so I usually just throw them out. But here it is, Happy New Year time, so I thought I'd read this one anyway.

Before long, it sounded so good that I had halfway decided to order the thing. (For about $150.) But when I got back to work I took a quick look on Google to see what I might find about it.

Here are just two websites I found:

http://www.infomercialscams.com/scams/russ_dalbey_winning_in_the_cashflow_business

http://www.ripoffreport.com/searchresults.asp?q5=Russ+Dalbey&searchtype=0&q1=ALL&q3=&q2=&q7=&q4=&q6=&start=0

Needless to say, instantly the temptation to order it was gone! Although, replacing it was the rather depressing realization that the existence of easy, get rich quick plans that you can buy and put into action immediately is probably just a total hoax.

It's almost like, is there no truth being sold out there? Is there really no way to make a lot of money easily, with very little work involved? If there is, whoever is doing it isn't writing any books about how to do it and selling them for $150 - they're too busy quietly doing it themselves and enjoying their success.

Time after time it seems to be the case that if someone is trying very hard to talk me into spending money to find out how to make money their way...it's a waste of my time AND money.

Naturally, I have found a few exceptions, like Holly Mann's "Honest Riches" book, and Charles Heflin's "The Master Plan". They're reasonably priced and they really do give you lots of good step-by-step guidance and advice. So I can't fairly say that they're ALL ripoff artists, but probably 90% are.

In fairness, I haven't ordered the program by Russ Dalbey myself, so maybe it's not totally fair to say it's a ripoff. But let's face it...there are way more than just a few people out there saying that's the case in so many words. Common sense kind of tells you that it might be best to avoid that one!

Like I've said before...it's always best to see what you can find on the internet about whatever you're thinking of buying - before you buy it. If it's well-known that something's not a good deal - you'll find out before doing so the hard way.

Sorry to be so negative, or to bust your own bubble about the whole get rich quick subject, but that's what I've found to be true so far. So because of this, even though I'm convinced there is plenty of money to be made on the internet, I think I'd like to steer as far away from the field of "money making advice" as humanly possible when choosing a niche to settle on promoting. I'm starting to feel like I don't even want to be part of it - part of the problem, posing as part of the solution. There are so many products and services out there to be promoted...so why not go into a totally different direction?

That's just my own feeling...there's really nothing wrong with selling money making plans - as long as they really work the way they're advertised. But that's the hard part.

Holiday Greetings!

2007-12-28T14:59:00.000-05:00

It only seems right at this time of year to stop and wish all of you and yours a Merry Christmas/Happy Holiday Season and a Happy and Prosperous New Year ahead!

Myspace Comments

The Truth About "Pay Per Play" Audio Ads

2007-12-19T00:13:00.000-05:00

Have you seen all the hype already about "Pay Per Play" advertising? In case you're not familiar with it yet, it's a new twist on Pay Per Click advertising, except this is referring to audio ads that you pay to have played on relevant websites.

And much more exciting is the idea of being PAID per play, for each time your own website is loaded and plays the ads!

This is a lot like Google AdSense ads, in that only Pay Per Play ads that are relevent to the content on your site will be played. And the ads themselves will only be 5 seconds in length as your page is being displayed - only once though, so as to not frustrate your readers. In fact, they say that early tests show there are hardly ever any complaints about the audio ads, since they're so short in length.

But my favorite difference between Pay Per Play ads and Google AdSense ads is this...

You get paid for every page view, regardless whether anything is ever clicked on! That's right...click-through rates are obsolete in this game. Every page view can now create earnings, without any other action being taken by the reader! So all you'll need to do is drive traffic to your site, and then you can start earning something for every visitor!

For a limited time too, they are even offering "core" memberships, (still for free), which also entitle you to a share of the earnings of others that you've referred.

Of course, there's nothing to say that you can't include both AdSense ads AND Pay Per Play audio ads on your site, for the best of both worlds! So far, there's nothing in Google's AdSense rules that keeps you from using both of these types of income producers on the same pages, so why not?!

If you'd like to hear some samples of what the ads might sound like, as well as learn more about Pay Per Play advertising, here's a link to the company's website: 5 Second Pay Per Play

They have a list of FAQ's included there which answer most any question you're likely to have. Plus, you can always email the company itself with anything else you might want to know.

The truth is: A lot of people are saying how annoying they think it might become if almost every web page you ever load eventually has these little audio ads playing on them. And I'll admit, I was one of them.

But let's face it...the ads are only going to be 5 seconds long and played only once. How annoying could they really be? Plus, it's free to join, and for a limited time they are even giving you commissions on the people you've referred into the program. I don't see why almost anyone with any kind of a website, blog or social network page would not want to join this!

Just think...you'll get paid for every visitor to your site(s), so it's like getting a 100% click-thru rate on all of your traffic!

If you do have a website or blog of any kind, I think you owe it to yourself to check this out. It's free to join, and certainly free to learn more about too!

Don't get left out on this one. In a few short months, nearly every website operator will already be signed up. You're only going to be hearing more about this all the time. Why not register with them now while you also have a chance to get lots of those other webmasters in your own downline, where you can start earning from their efforts as well?

Check it out right now before you forget about it! It'll be fun to see how big this might become within the next few months...so let's make some money together on this one!

Here's a link to the website: http://hotshorturl.com/mz68

See you there!

P.S. - The whole Pay Per Play program is being promoted by none other than Charles Heflin, so you know this is something to take seriously. If you're not familiar with him yet, simply Google his name. I've been a fan of his no-nonsense advice for over a year now. He's someone I feel confident I can look to for details on separating the truth from the hype about internet marketing. So when I found out that he was chosen to manage their promotion I couldn't sign up fast enough!

Got My First Ever Check From ClickBank!

2007-12-14T11:39:00.000-05:00

I got an early Christmas present from ClickBank - my first ever check from them! I say it's a gift because I didn't figure I'd receive it until I got a few more orders from different credit cards, as their terms of service states. Unless I've missed something, I thought I wouldn't receive a check until that happens, regardless of the size of my balance, but I guess there's must something about this gift giving time of year.

Hey, it seems only fair anyway...I've had my account for over a year, and I certainly haven't caused them any trouble as far as disputes with customers or anything like that, so I think I deserve to be paid what they've owed me for quite a few months anyway. Especially since those inactivity fees were going to start eating away at what little I had coming to me before long.

My last sale was about seven months ago, so I'm not sure what caused them to write the check, but I'm certainly not complaining! I do wonder though if this means from here on I can be paid immediately on reaching my payment threshhold. That would be nice to know, but I guess I'll find that out when I get a few more sales. For now though, I'll certainly accept this little unexpected surprise!

Legitimate Paying Free Programs, Hard To Find

2007-12-03T11:32:00.000-05:00

Are there no legitimate free programs that actually pay their members what they promised?

One of my Yuwie friends had mentioned on her blog that she was trying one of those get-paid-to-surf programs, and it seemed to be working pretty well. It starts you at 45 cents/hour for fairly effortless web surfing of their advertisers' pages, with the chance to earn up to 75 cents/hour.

I guess it was a weak moment for me or something, but I went ahead and logged on to sign up for it too, using her affiliate link. I got almost all the way through the registration process, but then it stalled on the last step and said it couldn't establish my account at this time and to try again later. Odd.

So then I Googled to see what I might be able to find about it, and sure enough, it turned out to be pretty much a known scam. The one I'm talking about is called Surfjunky, and anyone that takes a minute to Google it can find plenty of reports of how well known they are for closing peoples' accounts just in time to avoid paying out what they owe them.

This just reminded me that I broke my own rule and didn't research the program first before deciding to sign up for it - and in turn probably waste quite a bit of time before I found out the bad news firsthand.

All it takes is a minute to Google things that you come across, BEFORE you agree to spend your time - or worse, your money - to promote things that you think may be worthwhile. Just because things are free, it doesn't mean they can't waste your TIME...and that might be even worse than wasting your money sometimes.

So don't let your guard down like I did. Remember to do your research before getting involved in any kind of investment of time or money. There are no secrets on the internet, so you can usually find out pretty quickly if others have had bad experiences with whatever program you're considering. You just need to remember to take a look.

Just Glad To Be Alive & Unhurt

2007-11-20T09:38:00.000-05:00

I got in a pretty serious car accident last week, and even lost my car in the process. Fortunately, I somehow wasn't even injured, although my car wasn't as lucky....

http://www.yuwie.com/profile/pictures/album.asp?id=97792&aid=88846

Not much you can do to avoid a collision like that when someone goes through a red light and pulls into the intersection at the very last second as you're just entering it yourself at about 45 mph. I don't think the people in the other car were too seriously injured, but they were taken to the hospital after the firemen had to cut the roof off to get them out.

So here's a free public service message: Please don't drink and drive over the coming holidays. (Or ANYTIME, for that matter!) And always wear your seatbelt, because I'm sure I would have been injured if it wasn't for that and the airbag.

You forget that airbag is even in there all those years, but I'm sure glad that it was the only thing I hit my face on, rather than the steering wheel...or worse, the windshield. Could have been a lot worse, so I actually feel lucky to get through that without any injuries.

So now, while everyone else is doing Christmas and holiday shopping next weekend, I guess I'll be car hunting. It would be a lot more fun if I actually had some spare money to do so with, but I'll have to see what I can do, so wish me luck with that. (Just what I needed - ANOTHER thing to add to my important things to do list!?)

Needless to say I've been pretty sidetracked from my money making ideas lately. Now I'll have to try to get back to business and see where I left off in my next post. Thanks for reading, and I'll talk to you again soon!

Money Making Ideas: Time To Re-Focus

2007-11-06T23:20:00.000-05:00

I think it's a good time for me to step back and take a look at all of the different money-making ideas I have right now and decide what I should be spending my available time on. I've been carrying too many ideas around in my head lately, so I'm going to list them all here and try to decide what I should concentrate the most on. (Or even try at all before I forget!)

In no particular order so far...

Yuwie - Recruiting more referrals

eBay - Have several items that are ready to sell

Laptops - Buying and selling, using the supplier I recently found

Creating the eBook I've got an idea for

The Plan - Following it by creating niche info websites

Sports Arbitrage Betting - Following the plan I downloaded recently

Affiliate Marketing/Following Holly Mann's ebook completely, step by step

AdSense - Whatever it takes to get up to that $100 payment minimum

ClickBank - Whatever it takes to get 4 more credit card sales, so I can get paid for what I've already sold. (And avoid further inactivity charges.)

Toys - Buying "hot" ones now to resell on eBay closer to Christmas

Wow, what a rambling list...doesn't look like anything that's going to drive my blog to the top of many "Great Reading" lists. (Don't want to bore you!) At least there are 10 items, so I can call it a Top 10 list! But that's an example of the kind of baggage I carry around in my head at any given time. Crazy, aren't I? Let me try to make some sense of it now though, and see what order I can come up with as far as what I should tackle first. I'll re-list it now in order of importance or urgency:

Toys - Buying now to resell on eBay closer to Christmas
Laptops - If I'm going to start selling them, this is a great time of year to do so.
AdSense - I have some seasonal ideas I should take action on now in time for the holidays.
The Plan - Ties in with AdSense plans
ClickBank - Need some more sales ASAP to avoid further inactivity charges, plus to get paid.
eBay - Selling to do (Will also tie in soon with both toys and laptops above.)
eBook - Creating the product I have an idea for
Affiliate Marketing/Holly Mann's eBook - Ties in with both ClickBank and eBook plans
Yuwie - Get more referrals to increase earnings. (Ongoing)
Sports Arbitrage - A cool idea to try when I get the chance to learn more about it

That looks a little better. Makes it much more clear what I should be doing more of with my time. Since the holiday season is on the verge of being here, anything to do with that has to be around the top of the list. That means, in this case, the top 4 items on my list.

I've already taken some action on numbers 1 and 2. Buying toys to re-sell is, I think anyway, a great idea that could make a nice profit with not very much risk if it's done right. I figure if I choose the right toys, (which is probably the hardest part) I'll do fine, because eBay has a way of finding buyers for you if you have something that's in demand. Getting them sold closer to Christmas should be no problem, but I have to try to get them as cheaply as possible while the early sales are going on now. ToysRUs has some good sales on right now.

Which toys to buy though? I've started buying quite a few different ones, rather than a bunch of any one, just to be on the safer side. But I'll probably wish I had more of certain ones before long! (Anyone have a crystal ball out there?) LOL

There's a lady named Jenni Hunt who's actually compiled a list of what are expected to be the hottest toys of this season and likely to be in demand the most, so that's mostly what I'm going by. Evidently, she updates the list each year, too.

I did a little research of my own just for fun, and her list actually agreed with mine in quite a few cases, so I guess I was on the right track. But I still feel like her little eBook and list is more than worthwhile, since she also includes lots of eBay selling tips, etc. that I never would have even thought of. Here's a link to her website if you'd like to check it out too: www.holidaytoyguide.com

The laptop idea, on the other hand, is quite a bit more expensive to get involved in. Good ones are always hot sellers...but it does involve a bit more of an investment. I have at least started researching for places to buy them cheap enough to resell for a profit, so I'm still thinking about this one for now.

But the toys idea is something I'm definitely going to try. Wow, what a switch - there's just something really appealing about the possibility of actually MAKING money on toys at Christmas for a change! Hopefully I can make enough to pay for all the toys my own kids want for themselves! (Wish me luck!) I'll keep you posted on how I do with this.

In the meantime, I'll talk some more about the next items on my list in my next post. Thanks for reading!

Blog Improvements Underway

2007-11-01T14:20:00.000-04:00

I was lucky enough to stumble on a great blog recently when the author was offering to do a review of your blog if you were one of the first 3 to respond to his post. I was the third. Shortly after that he kept his word and posted a very candid review of this very blog, offering several major ideas for improvement.

I had almost forgotten about the whole thing until I got the email saying he responded, so I had never even stopped to wonder what he might have to say. He got right down to business though, immediately pointing out several common "beginner" mistakes I've made, and outlining the improvements he would advise to be made.

Maybe I was expecting just another, "Yeah, that's nice" kind of response, but he really took this seriously and offered some blunt, no-nonsense, almost step-by-step instructions on how to make this site more appealing to you, the reader.

I really appreciated that. It was nice to finally get some honest, impartial advice from someone who's an experienced and successful blogger. So as shocking as it was to hear that I had made so many obviously newbie mistakes, (no coincidence there, either!) it was nice to get pointed in the right direction.

I mean, I never really set out to create a "successful" blog here with this...it was more like just a place to record my own thoughts as I go about experimenting with my little internet business ideas. But if you're going to do something, whatever it may be, you might as well strive to do it well...so I don't see any reasons NOT to use the ideas he offered to make this a better blog. I've already added a profile description, as he recommended. (And moved those irresistable little AdSense ads a bit further down the page!) And I plan to make the other changes as I'm able, as well.

So if this blog begins to look a little different, maybe you'll be noticing along with quite a few more readers if it works out well! Or it might not even be noticeable, who knows? Feel free to let me know what YOU think of this blog too...I kind of enjoy getting the feedback, and I'd be glad to do the same for your own blog, too.

Thanks for reading!
John

By the way, if you'd like to read Hock's review on this blog, you can find it here:
http://www.marketing-tools-review.com/blog/2007/10/aspiring-to-be-a-serious-blogger-get-your-own-domain-name/#comments

Banned From Blog Rush?

2007-10-23T16:58:00.000-04:00

About a month ago I recommended a new, free traffic generating tool called Blog Rush. Designed and promoted by Internet Marketing guru John Reese, it looked like a great idea. Then, people started using it to do their spamming and things got ugly. Reese put out a stern warning message for everyone to stop, saying that all blogs registered to use it would be individually judged for content and eliminated if found to be non-conforming to their requirements. Problem is, these requirements were never totally defined from the beginning, and now they've apparently become more than just anti-spam requirements.

This very blog of mine, for example, was inactivated by Blug Rush. Does this look like a spamming blog to you? I don't think so. In fact, it's probably one of the most honest blogs you're likely to find on the internet about making money with internet marketing.

Needless to say, I believe they have gone way too far in their discrimination efforts to avoid spam. True, my post only gets updated a few times per month so far, which may also be true of many of the spam-type websites they're trying to weed out. And true, I also have some Google AdSense ads included, like almost every site you ever bring up these days. So why should this barr me from participating in their little traffic circulating program?

I guess what I made the mistake of doing was also adding the Blog Rush tool to my admittedly very small http://www.ps3-now.blogspot.com/ blog. It was mainly created to help people looking to buy a PlayStation 3 video game system, and to get a few AdSense clicks here and there in the process. So I'm not entirely in disagreement with them for banning THAT blog. But because ONE of my blogs wasn't up to par for them, that also means ALL of my blogs get banned?

My advice is to just save your time and effort and pass on Blog Rush...at least until they get their act more together. (They are still very new.) If it improves and catches on in a big way, it will be easy to find and maybe worth trying again later. Until then, there are plenty of better ways to bring traffic to your blog without having to meet someone else's ever-changing requirements.

Bottom line is that for the month or so I was using it, Blog Rush brought me a whopping 7 (seven) visitors to this blog. I think I can function without it.

Getting ClickBank Affiliates

2007-10-17T08:35:00.000-04:00

A recent reader found my blog by searching Google for "getting ClickBank affiliates", so I'd like to address that here today. I like to follow the readers' lead when possible, and write about what people hope to find here.

ClickBank has somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000+ registered affiliates waiting to promote their products, so that is definitely the #1 place to go to find affiliates to sell for you. It seems counter-productive to try competing with the mighty ClickBank website itself, so I would suggest to just let it do the work for you. Afterall, that's what it was designed for.

So I think the key is to make sure your ClickBank Marketplace listing is order, being well written and correctly describing your product. If that is already the case, and your product is, in fact, something fairly well in demand, the affiliate recruiting should pretty much take care of itself.

And it shouldn't take long to get started either, since many ClickBank affiliates often choose to promote the very newest products available. The idea is to get a head start against their competition. If a product is fairly popular, there is usually lots of competition among the affiliates before long.

Outside of this, most sites include an affiliate link to offer the opportunity to promote the product using ClickBank. If your site already gets a substantial amount of traffic, this is probably something you want to include to attract the most affiliates you can.

If you've already done all this and still aren't seeing many affiliates getting involved...you may want to try raising your commission percentage offered. ClickBank now allows you to offer as high as 75% commissions. That might sound like a lot to give back, but remember that each sale from an affiliate's efforts is a sale you wouldn't have had otherwise - and you got it with no effort on your part.

I'm not really an expert on this subject, since I've only been on the affiliate side of the fence since I've been involved with ClickBank. But their website gives you all the details you need to get started as a seller. That's what's great about ClickBank - they make the whole process easy.

If you haven't already registered as a seller with ClickBank, you can find step by step instructions on how to do so, including frequently asked questions and answers right here: www.ClickBank.com/Sell_Products

Hope this helps when you're ready to unleash the next big ClickBank best-seller onto the internet!

Totally (Really) Free Online Classified Ads

2007-10-12T09:04:00.000-04:00

If you're looking for some totally cost free online classified ads websites to advertise on, here's a good list to start with. I got these from one of my many new friends on Yuwie. (I have nearly 300 already!)

I can't say I've actually tried these yet myself, but I just clicked on every one to make sure they're still up and running. After removing a few that were either invalid, parked pages or just something other than totally free, these were the sites that remained. So as of this writing, all of these appear to be good, but let me know if you find any that eventually aren't.

Whether you've also joined Yuwie and are trying to build up your referral list, or just promoting something else, these sites appear to be good for getting some totally free classified ads out there on the web. Give them a try, and good luck with your promotions!

http://www.classifiedsforfree.com/
http://www.craigslist.net/
http://www.hyt.com/
http://www.usfreeads.com/
http://www.recycler.com/
http://www.inetgiant.com/
www.1second.com/1america.htm
http://www.citynews.com/
www.azfamily.com/class
http://www.holton.com/
www.holton.com/keystone
http://www.theadnet.com/
http://www.dollarads.com/
http://www.epage.com/
http://www.backpage.com/
http://www.freeclassifiedads.com/
http://www.bestads.com/

Bestmall Classified
http://www.bestmall.com/class/

Classified Today
http://www.classifiedtoday.com/

Commerce Conrer
http://www.comcorner.com/

Excite's Classifed 2000
http://www.classifieds2000.com/

Plus, it's not a classified ads site, but you can also post at my MSN group forum for no charge:
http://groups.msn.com/internetincome

Profiting From Social Networking

2007-10-08T14:22:00.000-04:00

This new social networking site, Yuwie, looks like it's taking the internet by storm. The membership is growing by leaps and bounds! That's the way it usually is with anything that's free to join and use. And in this case, throw in the fact that it even pays you just for using it - however little it may be - and you've got a real feeding frenzy!

I've got to admit though...it's actually lots of fun to use - more than I expected! In fact, I find myself checking in all the time just to see how many more friends I have and who left me a new message or comment. It's downright addictive!

But as fun as all this "showing some love" to each other on Yuwie is...the real money-making opportunity lies in how many people you can directly refer to the site. So once you run out of online friends and relatives to flash your referral link to, then you have to start getting creative. Adding friends to your list can be fun...but the real money is made by adding REFERRALS to your list.

So I think I've come up with a great no-cost way to do this. I created another free blog site to promote Yuwie with, in the form of a review site. I set it up with a few separate articles linked to each other so it looks more like a regular website. And I tried my best to stay on the subject and use the keywords I decided on. Then I made sure there was a banner ad placed at the bottom of each page to take readers to my referral link. And for good measure I even tossed on a few Google AdSense ads, so there's even a chance for a little more income from those.

The result: Hopefully an automatic referral generating machine! But in reality, I realize there will soon (if not already) be tons of competition using a similar approach. But at least I've got my own virtual net thrown out to test the waters with!

If you'd like to check out my little Yuwie review, you can find it here:
http://www.yuwie-reviews.blogspot.com/

I'd like to think I'm getting better at this, using all the tips I've picked up along the way so far, and I would welcome your comments or suggestions after you look at the site.

And of course, if you'd REALLY like to have some fun, you're also certainly welcomed to join me on Yuwie as well! If you do happen to join, please be sure to mention to me that you're a reader of computer-income. Who knows, I might even send you a free gift! (I wonder if Yuwie has any rules against bribery?) :D

Get Paid Just For Social Networking

2007-09-25T23:00:00.000-04:00

I've just come across a brand-new social networking site that actually pays their members just to participate. It's called Yuwie, and it just launched in May 2007 - but it's grown by over 50,000 members in just the last month alone.

And no wonder...it's very similar to the wildly popular MySpace, Facebook, etc. type social networking sites, and it's also totally free to join. But the big difference is that they actually pay you a percentage of their advertising revenues, based on your profile's page views each month.

That in itself is no cause to quit your day job, but what makes this interesting is that they also pay you for up to ten levels deep of your referals' page views. In other words, the people you directly refer, plus their referals, plus those peoples' referals, etc., etc., etc.

It's not big money we're talking here yet, but you've got to remember that it's just getting started, and the ad revenue is sure to dramatically increase as the member and advertiser base grows.

And believe me, the membership base is just exploding! I looked at the total members number this afternoon, and tonight it's already about 1000 more than it was earlier in the day. And it's going to continue because it's very easy to sign people up for something that costs nothing to join, yet pays them for doing something that's fun, and chances are, something they're already doing a lot of on the other sites anyway. If nothing else, this is certainly something you can do alongside anything else you're promoting. In fact, it can even complement your other ventures and get them more exposure.

I just joined, and I hope you'll join me in this exciting new venture as well. There's already quite a few "clubs" set up on the site for internet marketing and business opportunities in general, so you can interact with others who have similar goals and interests. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Except, in this case, you can be building up an income for yourself instead of just helping the website get rich.

Like anything else, it's always better to get in on this type of thing earlier rather than later, and this is a rare chance to get in on the proverbial ground floor - only a few months after it launched. Like I mentioned earlier, it's totally free to join, so there's nothing to lose.

Just click here if you'd like to check it out and hopefully join me in this. I'll look forward to welcoming you aboard!

Blog Rush: New Way To Drive Traffic To Your Blog

2007-09-21T11:57:00.000-04:00

Do you have your own blog? Since you're reading mine right now, there's about a 20% chance that you do. And if so, there's also about a 100% chance that you'd love to find a no cost way to drive traffic - lots of good, targeted traffic - to your own blog.

Am I psychic to know all this about you? Yes. (Just kidding!) No, it's just that we're really all in the same boat as far as that goes...we'd all love to find an easy way to get traffic in the form of interested readers to our blogs. So I wanted to let you know about something I just came across. (Thanks to Davin, over on Holly Mann's forum, http://www.honestworkfromhomesuccess.com/, that is!)

It's called "Blog Rush" and it's a new way to get exposure for your blog from others that have readers with similar interests.

If it works out as they plan, there's the potential to eventually get tons of exposure just by joining and using this tool. And of course, one of my favorite features of all is that it's absolutely free to join and use! (Fits in perfectly with my other favorites, doesn't it?!) Seems to be a great idea, plus it adds something new and fresh to your blog. I'm certainly going to give it a try, and I hope you'll join the "rush" too!

[UPDATE, 10/23/07: If you want to see it in action, you'll now need to look elsewhere, since they have just inactivated my account. Apparently my blogs are not big-time enough for them. So I personally no longer recommend this service...at least not until they get their act more together and stop banning people like me who are creating honest blogs. I'll be posting more about this subject on my October 23rd, 2007 post.]

Free Keyword Research Tools

2007-09-10T23:33:00.002-04:00

Have you been searching for some free keyword research tools to use - ones that actually work well too? I've posted a few on this blog as I've come across them, but I'm still finding more. So I think this calls for a page to list them all on so they'll be handy to find all in one place.

I'll update this post as I find more to include every so often. And I'll put a link to this page over on the sidebar so this will always be easy to find...for myself as well as you, the readers! (There are at least a few of you out there I hope!)

Please comment or email me if you find that any of these are no longer valid, or if you know of any others that work well that we could add. Thanks in advance!

Here's the list...

Overture (The old stand-by...sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but I HAD to include this one!)
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion

WordTracker: (The FREE version)
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

Keyword Discovery, from Trellian (The free keyword search tool - seems to work pretty well)
http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html

Google Keyword Tool:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Google Keyword Traffic Estimator: (For AdWords, but helps in choosing more valuable keywords.)
https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox

Wordpot - Super fast!
http://www.wordpot.com/

SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool:
http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/

Digital Point Keyword Suggestion Tool:
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

Webmaster Toolkit Keyword Research Tool:
http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/keyword-research-tool.shtml

goRank SEO Tools: (Cool keyword density analyzers for a given keyword on one or more pages)
http://www.gorank.com/seotools/

Google Trends (Most popular recent searches on Google)
http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends

Yahoo "Buzz Index" (Most popular recent searches on Yahoo)
http://buzz.yahoo.com/overall/

eBay Pulse (Most popular recent searches on eBay)
http://pulse.ebay.com/

Try them all and see which ones you like best. You've got nothing to lose - but lots of good, targeted traffic to gain if you choose the right keywords for your sites! And come on back here if you need to find the best free keyword research tools to use again. Good luck with your searching!

Free Lightening Fast Keyword Suggestion Tool

2007-08-23T09:07:00.000-04:00

I just stumbled on what looks like a great new free keyword suggestion tool to use. Well, it has apparently been around since 2005, but I've just come across it for the first time. And what you'll immediately notice about it is how FAST it works! If you're like me and still use the Overture tool because, well, it's free...but you get frustrated over how SLOW it is (when it works at all!) you'll love playing with this new one!

Plus it's easy to remember! It's called: www.wordpot.com

Go ahead and give it a try right now and you won't believe how fast it is. Just try it with a simple search of any word for testing purposes...then try the same search on Overture at: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion

You won't believe the difference in speed! Now EXACTLY how it arrives at the numbers it returns is not entirely clear. They do explain it a little on their FAQ page, but it's a little vague about where the numbers really come from. But for what it's worth I think it's great for doing some quick initial searches as you get new ideas for keywords.

Finally a new, free, alternative to Overture that's so much faster and more reliable! It's just what I've been looking for! I mean, most everyone knows www.wordtracker.com is practically the industry standard for serious keyword research...but at (currently) $30/week, it's certainly not cheap. So until you're sure exactly what keywords you're willing to pay to research thoroughly, this wordpot.com is a handy tool to experiment with.

Hope this helps you on your own hunt for keywords to build your promotions around!

eBay: A Powerseller's Strategies For Bigtime Success

2007-08-15T11:39:00.000-04:00

I noticed there's a great article over on affiliatekb.com on one of my favorite subjects: eBay! It's an interview with a powerseller that has over 20,000 feedbacks to his credit, and he shares his strategies for using eBay on a bigtime scale...certainly worth the time to read it over.

I know I, myself, am guilty of what he mentions, that people tend to stop at being satisfied to just use eBay to sell a few things occasionally for some extra money. But with a few adjustments to your strategies you can learn to think and plan big like the most successful powersellers do, and create a much more substantial income.

Here's the link if you'd like to check it out:
http://www.affiliatekb.com/article/513/ebay-powerseller.html

Ideas For Getting ClickBank Sales

2007-08-07T10:59:00.000-04:00

I was away on vacation last week, but now I'm back again for more adventures in the wonderful world of internet marketing!

Checking my recent traffic records on StatCounter.com, I noticed a very recent reader found this site on Google by searching for "getting clickbank sales", so I thought that might be a great subject to talk about today. It was kind of cool to see that one of my posts from January 2007 was listed at the #6 spot on Google's results for that search phrase. So who knows...maybe someday THIS post will beat that one out! I'm not sure if that person found what they were hoping to there, so just in case I'll try to address this subject more directly here today.

First of all, among the other Google results for the search of "getting clickbank sales" was a pretty neat article. It's on a website that doesn't appear to be being added to any longer, but there are tons of pretty good articles and marketing tips of interest to people like us. Just be aware that, like most everyone, the author is (even admittedly so, to his credit) almost always writing with the ulterior motive of steering you to a sale of some kind. Nothing overly agressive at all, but just be warned that he does try to sell you stuff in almost every article. But this being said, he has dozens of very useful tips included all on that one site, this ClickBank related one being just one of them.

In this article: http://www.webpromotion-weekly.com/clickbank_strategy.cgi, he explains a pretty creative way to get lots of ClickBank Sales by offering to refund buyers your commission. That might sound crazy at first thought, but he's really thinking in terms of building your customer list, not necessarily making profits up front. It's an interesting idea, although the main flaw seems to be the fact people could just as well join ClickBank as an affiliate themselves (for free) and get the commission refunded directly to themselves anyway. It's an article worth reading, though, because it gets you thinking more out of the box, so to speak.

I've already been thinking myself that it would be great if there was a site or forum or something where people could agree to purchase ClickBank products FROM EACH OTHER, in order to establish their accounts. ClickBank has that minimum order total of I think 5 sales required in order to receive your first commission check. And if you're like me, it seems like it takes forever to get those first 5 sales to 5 different credit cards. (I've had a couple of PayPal sales too, which don't count toward those sales.) I might post something to that effect in some forums or something and see what becomes of the idea.

As far as more conventional ideas to get more ClickBank sales...there are lots of ways, but most people seem to agree that writing review articles and posting them to online article directories is one of the best. And the quickest, easiest way is posting directly to forums about the same subject as what you're promoting...I can honestly say I've done that successfully myself, so I KNOW that can work!

Whatever ways you can find to advertise for free should be used as well. I've even been thinking it might be a good idea to print out some impressive looking flyers and put them on actual bulletin boards, wherever it might be appropriate. (And allowed!) I haven't tried that yet myself, but it seems like it might be a good low risk idea to try out. It would be important, though, to buy a good domain to forward to your ClickBank hoplink in that case. You wouldn't want to have to print the whole actual affiliate link on paper for people to have to type in themselves...would need to be something catchy and memorable to have a chance.

Hope these ideas help to get you started...both thinking AND earning!

Free (For Now) Link Cloaking Software From Holly Mann

2007-07-27T14:32:00.000-04:00

A few posts ago I wrote about the free "tinyurl" link shortening service, but now I've just found out that Holly Mann is giving her own link cloaking software away for free. It's going on for now anyway, but she doesn't reveal how long it will really continue. If you go to her site: Honest Riches and look at the upper right hand corner, there's a special "secret" offer you can unfold onto the screen. It's pretty cool, and you can have the free download whether or not you buy her book or even sign up as a free affiliate to promote it with. Of course, if you do sign up you can also tell people about this (for however long it lasts) and get some traffic there like that. But needless to say, I would highly recommend you go ahead and purchase her book before trying to promote it. It's not really a good idea to promote things that you haven't already tried yourself. And besides, from all the ones I've seen, it's about the best one to get started with anyway, so you can't lose on it really. Just about anyone is bound to learn something they can use from it. But anyway, the download is a free gift while it lasts, so feel free to check it out! Here's another link to Holly Mann's site: How2-MakeMoneyOnline

Further Google Ranking Encouragement

2007-07-25T14:12:00.000-04:00

I just realized that this site itself: http://www.computer.income.blogspot.com/ is currently included in Google's listings once again, after falling out for a short while. I guess I don't really post often enough on here to be considered impressive by the search engines, so I should probably try to post a little more often. And even though I don't purposely target any keywords or phrases, it can be found easily by searching for the title in quotes: "Making Money With Your Computer & The Internet". In fact, the last time I tried it this was the 3rd listing overall (of just 3), and the other two were blog directories' links to this. Pretty cool, huh? :)

The problem is, I doubt many people actually search for that exact long phrase very often! I guess I need to refine things, in terms of SEO or Search Engine Optimization! It may have helped that I submitted the site manually, directly to Google a week or so ago, because I noticed it wasn't being included at all. So just a week or so later...I'm back! (For the time being, anyway!)

But for what it's worth, it is encouraging that this little blog of mine is listed by Google, since I really haven't directly submitted it to many directory sites or other blogs. But the ones I did do that with must carry enough weight to get me in. I do post fairly regularly in Holly Mann's forum using a signature link to this site, and I do always "ping" to the blog directories after each post. I've been using http://www.pingoat.com/ since it seems to include quite a few more directories than Pingomatic and some of the others. And OF COURSE...it's free to use as well, which if you've been reading here much, you know I love!

So there you have it...maybe I should rename this "The Lazy Man's Method of Google Ranking". Not HIGH ranking, just ranking. :) No - make that: "The Lazy (and Stingy) Man's Method of Google Ranking"! LOL

A Google Indexing Surprise

2007-07-13T22:40:00.000-04:00

Here's something I find pretty amazing. There are lots of articles all over the internet on how to obtain a high ranking in Google, and it usually involves building lots and lots of backlinks that point to your own site. So people endlessly write articles and place them on the articles websites, and post blog comments and forum posts which include a link to their own site...all done in the hope that someday their site will be ranked in Google because of this. Well, something just happened to me that makes it appear that it doesn't matter so much how MANY backlinks you have as much as the quality of the websites that you have the backlinks from.

I have a very small and simple blog I've set up to help me sell items in the local newspaper. A few posts ago I mentioned this, and the only attention it ever got was from the newspaper readers who saw it in the ad. Then of course the newspaper stopped allowing websites to be listed in the free classified ads, so I got a little discouraged because that ended what I thought was a great idea. I didn't get nearly the number of hits when I only included a phone number in the ad and mentioned the domain name on my phone's voice mail.

Then I tried selling a couple of items on http://www.craigslist.com/, where you can apparently include a link to your own website in your ads. I was a little disappointed in the results because although my sales blog got it's share of instant traffic after listing the ads, it still wasn't resulting in any Google AdSense ad clicks, which I had hoped for. However, something unexpected came out of this, just a week or so after I posted those Craiglist ads.

I checked my blog's stats on http://www.statcounter.com/ and was very surprised to see that one of the hits was referred by none other than Google itself! I knew that meant that the page had somehow been indexed by Google! And it has, as of today anyway when I checked. So with no backlinks at all other than the ones (I think a total of just 2) from Craiglist, my little blog site has been included in the mighty Google's listings! Someone had apparently entered "220 volt air conditioner for sale Delaware"as their search request, and it gave them a list of sites, with mine being #2 on the list! (Second only to a listing on the University of Delaware website.)

This is pretty amazing! I was under the impression that Google wouldn't find and include your site unless you had a certain (fairly large) number of sites which link back to it...but this is obviously not true.

So fear not, aspiring web masters...it's not nearly as difficult to crack into those elusive Google listings as most of us thought! I don't know in how many cases it would be appropriate to place a link to your own website in a classified ad on Craigslist, but the point is that this is a high traffic website, and evidently just one high traffic website linking to your own is enough to get Google's attention. And that was news to me!

TinyURL, The Free URL Shortening Service

2007-07-06T09:44:00.000-04:00

When you're promoting ClickBank products or other affiliate deals, sometimes those affiliate links can be rather lengthy. Too lengthy to even be readable in some emails, forum posts, etc. So there are lots of free services you can use that actually forward to your link from a different address to allow you to have a shorter url to use.

One of the most popular free link shortening services is http://www.tinyurl.com/. I had seen it before many times but never actually tried it until now, and I was suprised how easy it is to use. Like I said, you'll find lots of free services like this if you do a search, but this one doesn't force your readers to see any ads before your own page, which I've noticed some do. And since it's so popular it seems to make sense that it should be reliable as well. Plus, it always gives you a url that ends up being, true to their name, pretty darn tiny! Be aware that it doesn't actually HIDE your true url - that's actually considered "link cloaking" and is a little more involved - but it does allow people to access your link by just using the shorter one it sets up for you.

If you'd like to try it out, I've put a toolbar right at the top of this page to make it easy to find and use. And it is totally free to use, which you've just gotta love! Can you imagine how many hits that site must get? They state that it's in the hundreds of thousands of hits per month, so that could add up to quite an interesting little Google AdSense check each month for them I'll bet! Must be nice, huh?!

Impatience Part 2

2007-06-21T02:41:00.000-04:00

One of my main focuses with this blog has always been using free, or almost free, alternatives wherever possible, and I'm still sticking with that philosophy. It's just that it gets frustrating sometimes how slow things seem to happen when you settle for these little free "experiment" type things I've been trying lately. You can't argue with the price when things don't cost you anything at all, but sometimes I think I should just start using some forms of paid advertising to make some things happen faster. I guess there probably is some truth to the "you get what you pay for" saying, and that's probably quite true in the realm of advertising! Maybe not always, but probably quite often I'll admit, even though I continue to test the possibilities!

All of the sudden I seem to have quite a few things on my mind that I'm anxious to get involved in and try. I usually like to stick to the one thing at a time rule, but I've recently stumbled into a few different things that I'm eager to try out, so I guess I'll be writing about them soon...probably one at a time though! Stay tuned!

Impatience

2007-06-18T16:44:00.001-04:00

It's great that it doesn't cost anything to try this little blog promotion experiment I've described in my last couple of posts, but it's just not creating any meaningful results. The site is getting some traffic, but it seems to be falling off from what it got earlier. So this is starting to seem like more of a waste of time than anything else. I mean, it's pretty clear that I won't be acquiring any great wealth by using my time in this way, so I don't know how much longer I'll stick with it just to get one more sale before I call it quits. Maybe it's actually mostly the same circle of people that look at those profiles on that site or something, which would be tough to prove, but that's one possibility I guess.

Whatever it is, the traffic doesn't seem to want to purchase anything...just look at pictures or videos or whatever is posted. I'm sure that, with persistence, some sales would eventually be made...but it's not the best use of my time to keep striving for. And even though the Google ads that appear on the site are relevent and seem to be just what I would want displayed, they're not earning anything either. I guess I just have to chalk it up to beginner's luck that I earned that sale the very first day I started the promotional profile, so at least I do have that to show for my efforts.

Another Sneaky Experiment

2007-06-15T14:58:00.000-04:00

Taking the idea in my last post another step further, I did create a blog to send visitors to the networking site profile to, rather than just linking directly to my ClickBank links. This way I can at least get an idea of how much traffic that profile is really creating. As I described in my last post, it's just a very simple profile I created using a public domain photo of an attractive young lady, and now it includes a link to what is supposed to be her own personal blog site. (When I say sneaky I mean it, don't I?!) Hey, it's just a little experiment to satisfy my curiousity really, and I don't plan on leaving it up for very long...unless of course it suddenly starts making money hand over fist or something! (Hasn't so far!)

It does seem to get quite a bit of quick traffic right after any kind of a post is made on the site it's part of. But in the week or so I've been trying this, I've noticed that the traffic pretty much stops after the post has run it's course. So if you don't post anything for a day, there's no traffic, since that's the only source there is. But it's a good test because of that.

On that site I've included a whole string of ClickBank links promoting various dating success tips that are available, and of course the google ads. There's only a single actual blog post, which just serves as an introduction really, and is written to imply that there will be more to come. Pretty easy to thow together really, and best of all...free! Might be just an amusing little waste of time, but I'll let you know how it goes.

A Creative, Sneaky, ClickBank Sale!

2007-06-11T00:19:00.000-04:00

I earned a very "creative" ClickBank sale recently on a spur-of-the-moment kind of idea that didn't even cost anything to try. But it's such a sneaky tactic that I almost hesitate to even admit to what I've done! That is, afterall, what this blog is about though, documenting my successes and failures along the way to discovery of what really works, so it's only fair that I fill you in on this...but it is pretty sneaky!

I've been experimenting lately with one of the many social networking type sites, similar to MySpace. Like MySpace, it's also free to use, so you know it's going to be tempting to me to try to use somehow, since that's what I'm always after is free or very inexpensive promotion ideas. The problem is, most of these social networking sites are usually meant for personal, rather than business, use. So you have to be a little creative if you're going to try to use them to promote anything.

What I noticed was that whenever an attractive female's picture was posted on this site, their profile usually got a huge number of hits in a short amount of time. And depending on just how good looking the person in the picture was, there were also many comments posted from men about how great the girl in the picture looks.

So I had a hunch that if I were to create a profile for a ficticious female and post a picture of an attractive female on it, I'd get the attention of lots of the male members of the site. So I did just that and included a ClickBank link to an ebook on how to successfully meet girls and ask them out. And just like magic, within 12 hours of doing so I had a nice (although sneaky!) ClickBank sale that earned a $49 commission!

The bad news is, this was about a month ago, and since then I've made no more sales, so I'm about to delete this little experimental profile of mine. But it's tempting to just leave it on there, since it doesn't cost anything, afterall. But sooner or later they might start to catch on that the pictures I posted are free stock photos from one of the free photo trading websites! But before I do delete it, I might still try creating a blog to link to from that profile instead, where I can include several more links that might be of interest to those readers. Then I'd have measurable traffic to get an idea of how many are really hitting this link. Plus I could throw the good old Google AdSense ads on there too and see what they might come up with if I make the page about dating, etc. Once again, this is an experiment that doesn't cost anything to try, yet quite a bit can be learned (and maybe even EARNED) from it!

Hardly Worthwhile

2007-05-18T22:44:00.000-04:00

It just occurred to me today that I practically never get any clicks from the Google AdSense ads I have on a certain site I won't name. It's common knowledge that Google does not permit websites to "ask" readers to click on their ads. In fact, they seem to want you to avoid mentioning them at all and to just let the readers' own interest lead them to click for more information. So I hesitate to talk about this, even though I usually write honestly about pretty much whatever is on my mind on this blog...but the click rate is so bad I'm considering just removing the AdSense ads from this page altogether.

If you think I'm exaggerating, try this on for size: 6 months, 3 total clicks for a total of 57 cents! I have heard that blogs about Adsense itself and blogs about blogging itself are notoriously bad AdSense earners, but I thought I would do better than 3 clicks in 6 months?! True, I'm talking about a page that gets only minimal traffic so far, since I don't even really promote it anywhere, but it definitely gets SOME traffic daily. I recently even changed to a template that now allows the ads to be positioned on the left side of the page, which has supposedly been proven to work best...but still only 1 click in the last month anyway. The ads look nice, they're blended to the overall look of the rest of the layout and they're all about various ways of making money...they just practically never get clicks.

I guess the problem is that most of my readers know exactly what the ads are since they probably also use them on their own sites. So most fellow bloggers and webmasters tend not to be curious or interested in them enough to click. But still, you would think these ads would be tempting enough to entice more than just 3 clicks in 6 months. I expected so, anyway.

I'm not sure what the real reasons are, but I'm starting to wonder if I'm getting proper credit for clicks I might be receiving. I have no way to test this if I'm not allowed to click on them myself under any circumstances. But if the ads continue to keep drawing practically no clicks at all, I'll probably just remove them altogether. Or maybe the Yahoo version of the ads might get better results. You never know until you try...and I guess that goes for just about everything in life anyway.

Discovery Of An Accident (Sequel to last post)

2007-05-11T08:29:00.000-04:00

I figured I'll try to duplicate the success I had selling the lawn mower in the newspaper and sell the child car seat my son just grew out of. So I wrote a description for it and posted it with some pictures on the blog I used last time. Then I placed the free ad in the local newspaper, again including my domain name that points to the blog. Everything was pretty much the same as last time, so now all I had to do was sit back and wait for all the ad clicks again in between the phone responses, right?

Well, this time the newspaper quietly just deleted the web address from my ad. When I questioned them on this they said they don't allow web addresses in their free articles for sale ads, only phone numbers. So I asked if this is a new rule or something because my last ad was printed with the web address a few weeks ago. They said it must have been printed by accident, since only paid ads can have web addresses included. So my "Accidental Discovery" last time was actually CAUSED by an accident.

This is frustrating! You just can't get anything for nothing it seems. What an advantage that was to be able to publish a web address in a large circulation newspaper for no charge, even though it brought extremely targeted traffic literally overnight. But they realize this for what it is and decided not to allow it anymore...likely because I brought it to their attention, in fact.

Oh well. They do offer free photo posting on their own website...so perhaps I could brand all my photos with the web address. I could try that, but I wouldn't be surprised if they rejected any pics that advertised a web page for the same reason. They realize how powerful a web site can be to advertise with, since I could include a hundred more items for sale on it if I wanted to - none of which they would benefit from. But then, if they charged me $5 to place the ad, what good would the $5 or so the AdSense ads might bring in be?

It's easy to feel like you just can't win sometimes! You can though...I guess I just have to think bigger than this. I thought I was though - in addition to the AdSense ads I also included a few links to ClickBank products under my item description, as "recommended links". Problem is, nobody saw them anyway this time.

My other idea was to re-record the voice mail greeting on my cell phone to announce that web address first for people who are calling about the ad in the paper. Then, of course, offering to let them leave a message if they're interested. The newspaper can't stop me from doing that - they have to print my phone number!

This makes me feel like getting a great big bumper sticker printed for my car to advertise with - they can't stop me from doing that either!!! :)

An Accidental Discovery

2007-04-30T10:31:00.000-04:00

I sold that lawn mower from the local newspaper ad very quickly. But I left the pictures of it on the blog that I listed in the ad, with a new post stating that it had been sold. Naturally, all the traffic stopped when the newspaper ad ended, and in turn, so did the Adsense clicks & earnings. This local paper also includes a listing of ads purchased in their seperate weekly paper, which is really just advertisements and is given away for free. So this ad just came out in the little weekly paper around the end of last week, so I started getting calls on the lawn mower again.

But here's the interesting part...I also started getting quite a few hits to the blog site again - and even several Adsense ad clicks! And once again, considering the number of visitors that statcounter.com reported - more than half of the visitors clicked on Adsense ads before they left!

So I seem to have accidentally stumbled on a partially devious way to make some money here. The ad continued to run, and even be run again in a separate publication, even though I really had no more product to sell. Yet, the traffic the ad brought in was so well targeted to the Adsense ads that appeared, the click-through rate was fantastic! So while they didn't find what they really wanted, which was the actual lawn mower I had already sold - many were more than willing to click on the ads for the information they provided.

This isn't to say that I plan on running a whole series of "for sale" ads for items I don't actually have for sale, but it appears if one was willing to do this they could probably earn quite a few dollars just on the ad clicks the want-to-be buyers would generate. Personally, this seems just a little too dishonest for my conscience, so I wouldn't actually run ads for things I don't have to sell. I'm not even very high on the idea of doing that with the plan of using a 3rd party dropshipping company to do the shipping of the items you advertise. That's considered a legitimate way to make money, and the hardest part of that is finding a dropshipping company that's worthwhile to use. But I do certainly see the benefit of using the blog to assist in selling items that I really do have for sale, so I will continue to do that whenever I have something to sell.

I must say, this makes it clear how easy it could be to create a substantial income from those targeted ads if you simply generate well targeted traffic. It doesn't even have to be a great amount of traffic, as long as it's very well targeted. So that's what I need to focus on is ways to do just that. But in the meantime, this was a pretty interesting little accidental discovery!

Another Successful Blog Experiment

2007-04-17T00:46:00.000-04:00

I'm pretty satisfied with myself right now, even if I do say so myself. It's not much, really...(doesn't take much to impress me!)...but I think it's a good sign. That new blog I started really scored some pretty good AdSense ad clicks today.

Here's what I really did. I had a spare lawn mower that I had decided to sell by advertising it in my local newspaper. This paper offers free ads for inexpensive items, and they run for 3 days. Well, I thought I could set up a little blog just for this too, and post a few pictures of the mower on it, etc. And if I used my domain name, it would fit in the short classified ad they give you for free. (Only 4 lines.) I figured, who knows, put some AdSense ads on there too and see what happens - maybe I'll even get a few clicks.

The mower sold on the very first day, but I left the ad in the paper since it was free anyway. Boy am I glad I did! I got more paid clicks today than any single day back in December with my fairly popular baby-alive blog that month. And the clickthrough rate was way way better too - almost a click for every 2 visitors the page had today!

Turns out that this was a pretty good idea! Most of the readers who came online to see pictures of the lawnmower I advertised were finding all the lawnmower related AdSense ads hard to resist clicking on!

I'd like to think this confirms that I'm starting to figure this out, starting to know what I'm doing with this Google AdSense publishing. I can do this whenever I sell things in the newspaper and make a few more dollars on the AdSense clicks, while showing pictures of the items that wouldn't normally get to be seen in the newspaper classifieds. And it's all absolutely COST FREE, which is my favorite price in the world!

This also marks another ever so small milestine, but a milestone for me nontheless. I'm now more than 25% of the way toward that elusive First Ever Check from Google AdSense, which needs to be at least $100. (I'm over $26 now!) I know, it doesn't sound very impressive to most people I'm sure, but that will be a real cause for celebration the day I finally receive that first check from Google. I've already warned my wife to expect some celebration when that finally happens in the (hopefully!) near future! It will be nice to be able to show her an actual check, rather than those tiny little numbers on the earnings screen...and most importantly, it will mean that all this stuff I'm learning to do is actually starting to work.

Mystery Google Adsense Warning

2007-04-13T22:37:00.000-04:00

I got an email from Google stating that it has come to their attention that my account has gotten some invalid clicks recently. It was very vague and said it is against their policy to try to explain how they know or how it actually happened, but that if I continue to get them my account balance could be deducted in the amount of the illegal click's earnings. Or worse, if it continues, it could even result in having my account suspended to "protect" their advertisers.

Now I have the utmost respect for Google and the AdSense program - afterall, I plan to try to build a substantial income by using them. However, they seem to have quite a sense of humor if they are going to threaten me by saying I may have to give the back 17 cents I earned around the time of that email. LOL

Seriously, I certainly don't want to do anything against their rules for the obvious reasons, but it would REALLY help if they could at least offer a clue as to what type of illegal clicks I supposedly received. I really have no idea what could have caused that. The only thing I did different at that time was place a link to my ps3-now blog in a blog entry on the social site called Facebox. Maybe the way they forward traffic to your entered links is seen as too easy to cause clicks inadvertantly for the readers. (I'm just guessing though, since I posted that the same day Google's email was dated.)

Speaking of Facebox, I've been dabbling with it a little bit lately, trying to figure out if it's worthwhile using it to drive traffic to other more important sites. (Like the ones that can earn me some income!) It's a fun site to use and doesn't cost anything, fairly similar to MySpace, but I'm not convinced it's worthwhile for business promotions. Most of the participants just seem to be out to flirt with other members and comment on their posted pictures, etc., so it's hard to imagine having much success promoting something serious on there. There do seem to be a lot of people creating profiles just to promote their links to one of the popular dating websites, but the way it's being done would have to be considered spamming. I've got to admit it's pretty addictive though, just chatting nonsense with other people just for fun. Not exactly the best use of my time, however! But I do recommend it for what it's best for, and that's just for fun.

Domain Forwarding Problem Solved!

2007-04-01T02:16:00.000-04:00

Well, I should have called GoDaddy as soon as I started having that problem. Solving it turned out to be as simple as a 10 minute call to their toll free customer service line! Now I feel pretty FOOLISH (notice today's date?) for not having done so a week ago!

I guess I'm just bull-headed enough to insist on trying to solve "simple" problems like that myself, just by searching around the internet forums, etc. That USUALLY works for getting the information you need, but in this case, for whatever reason I couldn't find much help. In fact, I saw some posts by people saying that GoDaddy's customer service wasn't of any help, so I hesitated to give them a chance because of that. Now I'm sorry I did - it turned out to be a fairly simple matter.

For everyone else's benefit, here's what solved my problem: My domain wasn't forwarding because it (for whatever reason) was missing the proper forwarding IP address. So the GoDaddy rep. had me enter their correct forwarding IP address, which is: 64.202.189.170. I was told that no matter what anything else was set as, there would be no forwarding done without this. Another 10 minutes later that domain was instantly forwarding to my blog!

Needless to say, I have no complaints about GoDaddy's service, although I do think their help screens should explain this fairly simple detail. I was told they do, but as much as I looked for it I didn't see it explained anywhere.

Just goes to show you...sometimes you just have to talk to the right person to steer you back in the right direction.

Domain Forwarding Problems

2007-03-24T02:29:00.000-04:00

I can't believe all the trouble I've been having with getting one of my domain names to point to a new blogger blog I've set up. I really only set it up to use for posting pictures of things I put up for sale in my local paper's classified ads, but I wanted to use a domain name I have with GoDaddy to point to it with so it's shorter to print in classified ads. The more I look around the internet, the more confusion I find about how (or if) this is possible to do. I KNOW it's possible because I've had this very blog being pointed to by my domain name computer-income.com for several months. That's the domain I had purchased through Host4Profit, (part of the PlugInProfit waste of time and money) which I dropped out of since it was too expensive. But the domain itself, actually through enom.com is still working great forwarding to this blog. I haven't tried calling GoDaddy about this yet, but I think I'm going to have to because I'm not having any luck with this so far.

Dealing With Distractions

2007-03-09T14:56:00.000-05:00

Wow, I didn't realize it's been quite awhile since my last post here. Fittingly so, since I haven't been doing much with internet marketing. Seems like it's been one distraction after another lately. So be warned that now I've got a lot of writing to get out of my system - it might be a long one here today! :)

For starters, we got a new cat and then shortly after a new dog too. (Emmy and Pepe, respectively.) So that's certainly been an adventure at times - but a fun one! And I had all kinds of trouble with my laptop after my kids were playing Disney toddler games on it. I actually spent 3 evenings getting it right again. (Sounds like we need to supervise them more closely while they play computer games from now on, doesn't it?!) I've never seen the mouse pointer totally disappear before, with even the Windows setup disk unable to restore it...but I finally got it straightened out.

I also downloaded a couple of new ebooks, so I've been studying those. One was a book on using the wildly popular video hosting site, youtube.com, to promote your own websites with. It's one of those that's being offered with resale rights, and it already seems to be all over the place. Because of this I didn't really care about trying to resell it, so I bought it for only about $3.00 from a guy on eBay without the resale rights included. For $3.00 I think the information itself is much more valuable than just having another ebook that I could try to sell amidst all the others doing the same thing. (I've never been big on that kind of situation.)

Really, in this case, just using the techniques the book teaches seems more worthwhile than trying to sell the book itself. It's called "Tube Traffic", if your curious, and if I was you I'd do a search for it on eBay if you're interested in buying it. You don't need to pay the $37.00 to $47.00 that most people are trying to sell it for.

The other one I downloaded didn't even cost me anything. It's the new 2007 revised edition of Honest Riches by Holly Mann. And I've got to say, this lady means it when she says honest. I bought this from her about 5 or 6 months ago, and she just emailed me a link to download the revised version for no extra charge. I think that was a really nice gesture on her part, and one you don't usually see among the world of marketing gurus! Just another reason I so highly recommend her ebook. Now this isn't to say that she'll always give everyone free upgrades everytime she revises it in the future, but she did this time anyway. It was well worth the trouble too...it looks to be about twice as many pages as the last one, with lots of new step by step details, information and examples included.

As you probably know, I don't plug many things on this blog because I've always meant for this to be about stuff I've learned as I go along, but I really do HIGHLY recommend Honest Riches by Holly Mann. I hope if you do buy it that you'll buy it through my link right there, considering that I never steer you wrong on this blog, and I hope you appreciate that! :) I agree with Holly's honest policy, so everything I write here is what I've found to be true...not just stuff that I've decided to try to sell you.

So all distractions aside, now I'd better get back to work setting up some streams of internet income!

No Ads Permitted On WordPress

2007-02-21T14:18:00.000-05:00

Well, I guess my AdSense experiment with a WordPress blog is over before it even got started. I feel pretty stupid about now, but after spending the last few weeks putting a nice blog together with the main goal being to get AdSense income from it eventually, NOW I find out that it can't be done. WordPress does not allow Google AdSense ads on the free hosted version of it. They make no bones about it as it's stated right there on their FAQ page. (Which I never searched for info about AdSense until now.)

Their exact words on this subject are: "We have a very low tolerance for blogs created purely for search engine optimization or commercial purposes, machine-generated blogs, and will continue to nuke them, so if that’s what you’re interested in WordPress.com is not for you."

It was really thanks to Charles over at honestworkfromhomesuccess.com for responding to my question. I guess I always just assumed you could use AdSense on WordPress because I've read about the plugins available, but they can evidently only be used when you pay for your own hosting of a WordPress blog. And even then WordPress seems to frown on the practice anyway. They're just not a very marketing friendly blog service, so that's good enough to keep me away from it from now on. (I don't know why I even ventured away from Blogger!)

Oh well...Hey, I never promised to always look like I know what I'm doing here. I decided from the start to post about both the good and the bad along the way, so at least this was a major detail that I had to learn. (And now you've learned it too, thanks to seeing this post!)

But as it stands right now, after building a decent little blog and even getting it to the very top of the Google listings, the whole thing is shot. I did create a Blogger site with a similar name too, so I suppose I can put a link to that on each of the WordPress posts so the whole thing wasn't just a total waste.

I guess my job now is to start by copying all the WordPress posts onto the new blog. Then I'll have to go through with building a set of backlinks all over again. I might as well get used to doing this anyway - I guess it's good practice! Now it will be interesting to see how fast I can get in those Google listings again from scratch. But the best thing is, this time I'll finally be able to include the AdSense ads and starting earning some clicks!

Well...back to the drawing board!

An Interesting Improvement

2007-02-15T22:06:00.000-05:00

My new blog experiment is somehow right back in the Google listings, so maybe it did help to directly submit it to Google after all. (But who really knows?) In fact, when I checked today it was at the very top of the heap for the search term I've been concentrating on. That's right - it was numero uno alright! Now, whether I've really selected the best search term to optimize it for I'm not sure, but I decided on one that makes some sense and thought I'd see how high I could get it to appear in the search results. And lo and behold, it's hit NUMBER ONE!?! (Despite the fact that there are a total of 1,200,000 total results listed!) In fact, today it actually appeared in both the #1 and #2 spots, as well as #3 which referred to one of the articles I posted on it.

I think this is pretty impressive. If nothing else, it just shows that it really is possible to leap-frog past many, many other sites if your own is very relevant to a given search term.

In case you're curious, the blog I'm referring to is at: www.ps3now.wordpress.com, and needless to say it's about the Sony PlayStation 3 video game system that's still pretty scarce and hard to find in stores at the time of this writing. I decided to put together a list of links to the best places to buy the PlayStation 3 online that always seem to have them in stock. They really can be had for anyone who's serious about buying one. So I put the links together, wrote an introduction page, a description page where I described some of the features of the new model, and another page where I listed some of the latest news about the system. All the while, keeping in mind the term "where to buy" for people who are looking for just that. I mentioned the site in a few comments I posted on other blogs and listed it on several free web and blog directories, and eventually submitted it directly to Google and Yahoo. And now, only about 3 weeks later, it's right at the top of the listings for the search term I aimed for. (Which is included in the site's header.) What is this, beginners' luck?!

So now I want to get some Google ads posted onto it and see what happens. It's not so easy with that blogging system though, since WordPress doesn't officially include them. There's a plug-in thing I'm going to try for it though which is supposed to allow you to get them inserted, so I'll see how that goes. And keeping in line with my usual style, this plug-in is free, so no harm done as far as the price!

My New Blog Experiment

2007-02-10T01:15:00.000-05:00

The new blog I've been working on is pretty much ready to go now. I've started posting it into some of the free blog directories, and it's already appearing in some Google searches I've tried - and right on the first page! It's funny how quickly you can get around the top of the listings when your content is really relevent to the search phrase, and once you get a few inbound links aimed at your site. What confuses me though is how you can also lose your position just as quickly. This happened with my last blog experiment. It got right into the Google listings pretty quickly, then disappeared for awhile, got back in again eventually - but it didn't last for long. I guess it has to do with whether or not you continue to post to the blog or not, which I haven't on that one.

I noticed that this very blog you're reading does actually have a page ranking of "1" at this time, which I'm not exactly sure how it earned, but it's pretty cool to know anyway. :) At least I do actually post to it once in awhile, so that probably helps.

I just tried submitting the new blog to Google directly, so we'll see if that makes a difference. For whatever reason, it was listed yesterday but it's not today. In fact, I noticed it being among the Google search results just 5 days after I started creating inbound links for it! (That seems fast!) Now I just hope it gets back in or those Google ads I'm just about to add to it aren't going to get much attention either. (Kind of like the ones on this blog...but I'm not aloud to talk about that, so never mind.) ;)

More Wordpress Discoveries

2007-02-05T14:38:00.000-05:00

Trying to use WordPress, (is it Wordpress or WordPress anyway?) I've also noticed that it doesn't offer access to HTML control over the templates like Blogger does. So even though they have more templates to choose from, you don't have much control over their use. Not with the free version, anyway. And keeping in step with my usual strategy of using whatever free or inexpensive alternatives there are for whatever I'm trying to do, that would mean that's what I'm using.

So one of the problems this causes is that I can't install the code for the totally free web statistics program I've been using. (StatCounter.com) Wordpress does offer their own blog stats page, so maybe this isn't all that crucial, but I do miss not being able to use StatCounter. I've seen some techno-geek types who seem to know how to do everything saying there are ways to insert it as a text item on the page somewhere, but even then the referral information still can't be tracked - just total hits.

So even though many people seem to prefer Wordpress over Blogger, I can't say I do myself. My plan is to promote affiliate products and generate Google AdSense income, and WordPress seems to frown on using their blogs to do either. So there just doesn't seem to be any good reason for me to use it. The only possible one being the 3rd party plug-ins you can use with it to allow Google AdSense ads to be displayed. There's at least one I've read about that offers a "sandbox" feature that allows you to see the actual ads that will display in advance. I'd love to be able to do that! So that's probably the only reason I'm giving WordPress a try for at least one blog.

And one more thing I've find out...you can't really totally delete a WordPress blog once it's been created. You can delete your own work on it, but the name you choose can never be re-used again - it's permanently unavailable from then on. (Even to the one who created it.) Seems awfully final, doesn't it? I have enough trouble making decisions like what to name my blogs without knowing that it can NEVER be used again once it's used and deleted. I wonder if Blogger treats blog names the same way?

So maybe it would be worthwhile to go out and try to create every good blog name you can think of just to tie them up and possibly be able to sell/transfer them to others in the future? (I wonder if WordPress "allows" that?!)

John

Experimenting With Wordpress

2007-02-02T00:19:00.000-05:00

I hear so much discussion about which blog site people like to use more, Blogger or Wordpress. I've been using Blogger so far, so I thought I'd try Wordpress for my next project since so many people seem to prefer it. I've got to say though, I don't know if it's because I started out with Blogger first or not, but I find Wordpress pretty hard to figure out. It's got some nice looking templates and maybe a few more features, but I definitely find it harder to figure out how to accomplish what I want to with it. And there's very little help along the way...you just have to grind through and figure out how to do what you need to do by trial and error until you figure it out. Plus, you can't insert Google AdSense ads without downloading some sort of a plug-in first, and I don't believe they even allow you to post affiliate links. So if you're totally new at blogging, in my own humble opinion, I would still recommend Blogger myself. Hopefully they'll get their own bugs worked out before long, too.

I did stick with using Wordpress long enough to create a little blog just to try it out, so I need to start promoting it and get some inbound links set up for it. I'd like to see if I can at least duplicate the modest success I had with the Baby Alive blog this past Christmas season. But I still need to figure out how to deal with that plug-in that's required just to get the AdSense ads posted to it.

A Blogger Bug

2007-01-24T21:57:00.000-05:00

Blogger finally responded to my email about the problem I've had with AdSense since changing over to their new version. They thanked me for bringing this "bug" to their attention. So at least I feel better in a way now, that it's not simply a matter of me not knowing what I'm doing, but actually a problem with the software. Problem is, until it's fixed you can't change your AdSense ad formats. (Is everyone else actually having this problem?) I haven't tried, but I guess it might still be possible to insert the code directly. As it is now though, I can't use the drag and drop editing to change the ads, so hopefully this will be corrected soon.

Scored Another ClickBank Sale!

2007-01-17T23:53:00.000-05:00

I just signed into my ClickBank account and got a nice surprise - another sale! Sold another of the Honest Riches eBook by Holly Mann. The only "advertising" I've got going for that right now is an ad on TrafficSwarm, so I've probably got to give the credit to that. Once again, this was achieved without one dollar invested, so that means a cool 100% profit! (Beat that, huh?!)

I can't help but have some mixed emotions about this though. Because of ClickBank's policy of requiring sales from at least 5 different credit card numbers before issuing a check, it's starting to feel like I'm never going to see one. PayPal sales don't count toward those first 5 sales, and sure enough - this sale was another PayPal sale. I mean, it's hard to complain about making a sale with no effort or cost, but I'll never actually receive these commissions if I don't start getting come credit card sales. Oh well...I guess this will take care of itself once I start getting a greater number of sales. But until then, it is just a little bit frustrating.

Plus, I just noticed that the only sale I had made for the Survey Scout program resulted in a refund 3 days later. And now that I've also noticed some bad purchaser reviews for it popping up around the internet, I think I'm going to stop promoting it altogether. (Not that I was doing very much to do so, anyway!) I'm going to remove my link for it from this blog to make it official. I don't want to waste my time on programs that are drawing quite a high percentage of refunds. The only reason I had decided to try promoting it was because ClickBank had it listed as one of their featured products and I liked the idea that it seemed so popular. (I guess there are better ways to choose which items to sell!) I don't worry about the same problem happening with sales of Holly Mann's Honest Riches because I know what a great quality product it is. Between the book itself, the very reasonable price for it, and the free forum that she runs and converses with her readers on regularly, it's hard to imagine anyone ever requesting a refund for it. In fact, that's actually what I've gained the most inspiration from myself, so I'm certainly going to stick with promoting that one if nothing else.

AdSense or Affiliate Commisions?

2007-01-16T23:50:00.000-05:00

I've been reading some information lately on both affiliate marketing and AdSense publishing. I guess sooner or later I need to decide which one I really want to concentrate my efforts on, since they are really two completely different and separate things.

I suppose you can certainly create websites that promote your affiliate links and also have Google AdSense ads displayed, but it seems like it's probably better to concentrate fully on one of the other. At least in the early going, since they really are two different things.

I love the idea of Google AdSense publishing because so much of what you have to worry about with affiliate marketing doesn't even apply. For instance, you don't have to worry about link cloaking, since you're not using links anyway. All you need to do is create a website, or blog, that has enough information on a given subject to attract people, bring in some well targeted traffic, and then let the Google AdSense ads do their job.

Eventually I plan to incorporate both affiliate links AND AdSense ads on my site(s), but for now I'm going to concentrate more on using AdSense, since I've already had SOME success with it.

AdSense Nonsense on New Blogger

2007-01-08T23:47:00.000-05:00

I don't know why, but I'm having problems since converting this blog to the "new" Blogger format, which I didn't really want to do in the first place but felt sort of forced to. I kind of wish I didn't now. Ever since I agreed to let it be converted I can't make any changes to the AdSense ads. It keeps giving me an error message that seems to indicate that the wrong account is listed. I even emailed Blogger about it and they never even responded.

On a positive note, I did get a new idea for another blog to draw AdSense clicks on, so I'll be getting that in order shortly. It will be interesting to see if a newly created blog will have the same problem with AdSense or not. I guess I might just have to remove AdSense altogether from this one and re-add it from scratch.

I don't know if this very blog is very well suited to using AdSense ads anyway though. To be honest, they're getting practically no results at all on here. I'm not really surprised though; I've seen several others write that blogs that are about blogging itself don't usually get much AdSense clicking action. It's like hey, there are no secrets here - people who read this know I make some money if the ads get clicked on. But write a blog on any number of other unrelated subjects and the readers of those don't even suspect it...so they feel free to click away.

Same thing with affiliate marketing links - people that are already ClickBank affiliates, etc., recognize an affiliate link from a mile away, so you need to get into "link cloaking" techniques, etc., to try to make it less obvious to them. It's like trying to sell books on basic sales techniques to already experienced sales people - they know all about what you're trying to do. So do I really want to try to fool them somehow, and can it even be done? I guess the old saying about being able to fool some of the people some of the time, etc., makes the most SENSE afterall!

John

Starting The New Year Right!

2007-01-03T01:50:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year, everyone!

Now that the holidays are over, (and all the distractions that go along with them) I can get back to concentrating on this new business of mine. For a change, I'm starting this year with a PLAN, not just a wish for a way to make some extra money. It's a nice feeling.

Once again, the "baby-alive" blog I put up as more or less an experiment worked pretty well to get some Google Adsense earnings. And even with very little promotion from a handful of comment posts I placed in a few well targeted areas. So I'm excited just knowing that I could just as well create several similar sites and earn that much more income from them...and that's what I now plan to do.

That seasonal idea was a good test I think, since it drew a surprising amount of traffic pretty quickly. Although, as expected, by Christmas Eve it was pretty much the end of the AdSense clicks. It was exciting while it lasted though. But now I'll need to choose some non-seasonal subjects to create some sites about so that won't be a problem. Of course, seasonal subjects can be successful while they last...but as far as immediate ideas, January sure seems boring after November & December. Oh well, I'll think of something! (I hope!)

John

Made Yahoo's First Page!

2006-12-13T01:08:00.000-05:00

Today I just noticed I got a visit to the baby alive blog that was referred by Yahoo. So I tried searching on Yahoo for "baby alive", "where to buy"...and my blog came up on the very FIRST page - at the #4 position!

On the other hand, I then tried the same thing on Google, and now today it's not even listed at all on there. (?!) What, does this actually change this drastically from day to day everyday? I could see getting different positions in the search results from day to day, but I don't know why it will be in one day and completely out the very next. I guess you just have to take what the search engines give you, since anything you get is more than what you paid for. (In my case anyway!)

John

A "Good" Mystery This Time

2006-12-12T02:27:00.000-05:00

This was a surprise to find out today: My Baby-Alive.blogspot.com blog is back in the Google listings! At the present time, a Google search of "Baby Alive", "where to buy" lists my blog on page 3 of the results, 26th out of 909 results! (Plus, a comment that I posted about it on another more established blog appears on the FIRST page!) I don't know what that was that happened last week, being knocked off and replaced by another similarly named blog...but mine is back in the listings as it stands now. Maybe merely referring to it in THIS blog actually helped.(?)

Oh well, I'm beginning to realize there's a lot to learn in this crazy but exciting little business called Internet Marketing!

John

The Blog Experiment Is Looking Better

2006-12-10T00:41:00.000-05:00

I guess I spoke too soon when I said my blog on Baby Alive dolls was just a waste of time. In the last week or so the traffic has really picked up, getting well over 100 hits a day often. And accordingly, the Google Adsense ads have finally begun earning a bit also. Now I already wish I had set up more blogs like that one so those earnings would have been multiplied! (I'm still a ways off that elusive $100 minimum check amount from Google.) But I can see that with a string of blogs running the Adsense ads, an actual substantial amount could be earned in that way alone. And throw in a few ClickBank or other affiliate sales here and there and things look better yet. I'd have to rate this as "interesting" to say the least! (Especially considering the fact that this can all be done at NO cost!)

The doll I listed on eBay didn't quite sell for what I had purchased it for, so that didn't turn out as well as planned. I didn't realize how plentiful they are on eBay, even though they aren't in stores, and that's what cost me. Maybe those Adsense earnings might save the deal and pick up the difference eventually. Either way, I'll chalk it up as being an educational experience. At least I've learned a thing or two more along the way by getting involved, and that's what counts.

John

My Seasonal Experiment

2006-12-06T01:07:00.000-05:00

Since we're in the thick of the Christmas buying season, I got an idea for a blog experiment to try, good for practice if nothing else.

For weeks now, the Baby Alive doll has been the first thing my daughter mentions when she's asked what she wants for Christmas. Problem was, it was nowhere to be found by the time my wife and I started our toy shopping right after Thanksgiving day. (I ended up buying it from someone on eBay, since there are lots of them available there.) So I thought I'd set up a blog to list the places I found where you really can actually buy Baby Alive online. Since I'm not an affiliate for Amazon.com, or anything else that sells it, I didn't stand to earn anything from promoting these links...but I figured that whatever Google Adsense income this blog generated would be all profit. (It costs nothing to create the blog and see what happens.)

So far, however, it's been nothing but a waste of time. A whopping 20 cents of income to date, although it has only been up for about a week. It is getting some decent traffic though, without even being ranked on any search engines at all. All I've done is post 4 or 5 comments that included a link to my blog site wherever I found blog postings about the Baby Alive doll. And just by doing that I've been getting over 60 hits/day for the last few, which I think is pretty impressive.

What's disappointing though, is almost nobody is clicking on the Google ads. And I think I know why, but I'm not sure how to correct the problem. For one thing, the people that look at this are probably in a hurry and just want to quickly find what they're looking for. But the main problem is, the ads that are appearing often have nothing to do with Baby Alive dolls, even though I've mentioned Baby Alive over and over and over again thoughout the text. I've stumbled on several other sites that barely even mention the thing, but yet they feature Google ads that all have Baby Alive in their titles.(?!) How do they do that?! I understand that you can screen the ads that appear on your site to some extent, so maybe you can somehow specify the titles that you find acceptable? I don't know, but I'm sure I would be getting many, many more clicks if those Google ads were about the highly defined subject that my readers are interested in. I have to look into this more closely to see what I could do to get more appropriate ads to appear.

If you care to check out this little blog experiment of mine, it can be found at: www.baby-alive.blogspot.com (While it lasts, anyway...I've made it a pretty seasonal thing.)

The other mystery I've found with this blog is how it's been treated by Google itself. I submitted it to Google, and after about 3 days it already appeared in Google's listings if you searched for "Baby Alive", "where to buy". In fact, it was appearing on the 3rd page of results, at about 28th overall in the 400 or so results at the time. Pretty impressive...but then things got weird. The next day I checked the same search and found that I had been replaced in the exact place in the results by another blog of the same name, except for having "-xx" added to the end of the name. So I guess it was generated by some sort of spam blog creator of some kind, because it only linked directly to one of those multiple link websites that has no real content, just links to other websites. I even reported it to Blogger.com, and before long it was no longer appearing to be a valid URL. But my biggest question is, how did this other mystery blog not only replace me in the exact same position in the search results, but also have mine REMOVED from Google completely?!? I suppose I could pose the question to Google, but I doubt I would get much of a reply. At least Blogger took my report seriously and acted on it.

I guess the only way I'll make any money at all off of the whole Baby Alive craze is by using good old eBay itself. When I found a pretty good deal on there to buy for my daughter, I also bought an extra one for myself to turn around and sell! I just listed it the other day and then put a link to it on the Baby Alive blog, too. Already have a few bids with several more days to go. (eBay...what would I do without you?!)

John

Got My First SurveyScout Sale!

2006-11-12T22:06:00.000-05:00

I just got my first Survey Scout sale this week, and after only just 30 visitors to my link! 3% response rate seems pretty good. And once again it's a sale made without ANY money being spent to achieve it. I imagine that it was one of the TrafficSwarm members doing their "required" surfing, and he got hooked on that sales page. (It is a pretty tempting one!) That's still the only "advertising" I've done so far, so I guess I have to give TrafficSwarm the credit. (But I'll keep the commission for myself!)

It was only about $23.00 we're talking about here, but my point is...it didn't cost me anything to earn it. Who really cares how much or little it is when it didn't cost anything to get - it's ALL profit!

There are some people who negatively write off the whole affiliate marketing idea as a waste of time and money, but I think I'm finding all the proof I need that it does work and it can be done. I just have to step things up a little so that the numbers get worth talking about...or at least able to be sent me in the first place. ClickBank doesn't send you your earnings until you've made sales to at least 5 different credit card accounts. (PayPal doesn't count though, which I just found out with this particular sale.) Oh well...still one down and four to go.

I have 3 ads running on TrafficSwarm right now: One for Survey Scout, one for FreeViral, (Which I advertise SurveyScout on), and one for this blog. That's my only advertising, other than 3 or 4 blog comments I left a link to this blog on, and now a listing on emarketingblogs.com, which requires only a link back to them on your blog. Other than that, it's free to get listed on, so you might want to check it out. I've listed this blog in their Affiliate Marketing group.

I haven't posted here much lately since I've been a little busy doing the old eBay thing. This time of year it seems like just about everything sells on there, so I've been taking advantage of it to get a few things sold that I've been meaning to. It's a great way to work up some Christmas spending money in time for the season! (Until I become a master internet marketing computer-income guru, that is!)

If you're curious and would like to check out what I'm trying to sell at any given time, my eBay user name is "digitafel". I explain how I came up with that name on my eBay "About Me" page. I've been using eBay for a few years, so I have a pretty good idea of what sells and doesn't sell, and how to write a decent description, etc. Hey, eBay is one of the most visited websites on the entire internet, so it pays to be involved in it. I even put a link to this blog on my "About Me" page for good measure. I just wonder if anyone ever looks at it. Maybe I should use StatCounter on that too, if eBay allows it!

John

"Viral" Advertising Methods

2006-11-06T00:55:00.000-05:00

There are lots of websites that can generate free traffic for your own site, usually called "traffic exchanges". As I've mentioned in previous posts here, I haven't been very impressed with the quality of traffic they bring, though. (I guess the old saying about getting what you paid for still makes sense.)

Another way to generate traffic inexpensively or even free is viral type advertising. (Viral, referring to being able to be multiplied and spread by others, of course...nothing to do with illegal computer viruses.) I guess there are many ways to accomplish this, like writing articles, or even larger e-books that include links to your website, and uploading them to the various online article directories where other people can copy and distribute them for you. Any traffic you get as a result of those becomes totally free advertising, and it can grow and grow over time...although it would take awhile to get established.

Remember the old chain letter/pyramid scheme offers that always had a list of people to send money to, which you were supposed to add your name to after doing so? The idea was that if everyone just got a few people to do the same, eventually you'd be in position to collect a huge amount of money when you're at the top of the list. Well, I've found an advertising site that works just the same way, but the only reward is traffic for your website. And the best thing is, it's free to take part in.

Rather than go into TOO much detail to describe it, you can take a look at it yourself and see how it works. It's called FreeViral.com, and you can put your link on the list for no charge, then advertise the site itself to get more participants, etc. They seem to have the right idea because you need to look at each of the sites listed for at least 15 or 20 seconds before they give you the confirmation numbers you need to register with. So people are more or less forced to look at your website in order register. I don't know if that really means they'll look long enough to actually get interested in what they see, but since it's absolutely free to set up I figure it's worth giving a try. If it works as planned, you could possibly get a huge amount of free traffic out of it.

I'm using it to promote that Survey Scout program that teaches you how to earn up to $150/hour doing surveys online on your own computer. I used that because they have a sales page that gets right to the point as soon as you lay your eyes on it, and that's what you need for viewers who don't plan on staying long in the first place. I'll let you know how it works out. So far, the only catch seems to be that you still have to figure out a way to drive plenty of people to THAT site in order to get the process started. So far my only attempt to do that has been TrafficSwarm, and once again the traffic coming from there just isn't responding. Unlike the FreeViral site, they don't require you to stay on the pages you have to click on, so people usually seem to click on and click right back off without doing much of any reading. Because of that, I really can't honestly recommend it, even though for some unknown reason I still keep giving it another try myself. I guess I need to look into some of the other traffic exchanges and see if there's something else that works better...something that brings better quality visitors.

Until then, unfortunately, I'll probably just keep getting what I've paid for!

John

Starting To Get Ranked On Google

2006-11-02T22:35:00.000-05:00

I just noticed that I seem to be officially listed on Google now with this blog. If I search by "computer income" and add my last name to the search, this blog appears in the top few Google results! Of course, the hard part is getting to the top of the listings without including my name, but once again, it's a start. A couple of weeks ago it didn't come up no matter what I searched by. So I guess it worked when I clicked on the link to be included in Google a couple of weeks ago. I seem to remember seeing services that will list your site with many different search engines automatically, so I should probably look into that.

So far I'm still only advertising on TrafficSwarm, although I'm not sure why. I'm just not getting anything out of it, other than those few glancing visitors it sends each day. I'm starting to conclude that maybe even FREE isn't worthwhile if all you get is visitors who just glance (if that) and disappear. Pretty soon I plan to look into some of the inexpensive ad space on other websites, or maybe even some of the lower priced pay-per-click ads on some smaller search engines. Something to get a few actual INTERESTED people to read this stuff on how to make money with your computer and the internet. Maybe they'll even click some of the AdSense ads. (Yeah, like you...if you haven't done that already, please do give them a few clicks!) :)

John

Success - My First Ever ClickBank Sale!

2006-10-29T00:00:00.000-04:00

I just made my first ever ClickBank affiliate sale this week!

It was only a few days ago that I included a link on this blog to the ebook I was very impressed with, Honest Riches, by Holly Mann...and just like that I earned an affiliate commission from it the same week. That's pretty cool, since I really haven't even started to promote this blog much at all yet. I have a free TrafficSwarm ad running, and it brings just a few glancing visitors each day. But looking at my StatCounter data, I found out that the sale actually came as a result of a comment I posted on another blog. (At that time it was the ONLY blog comment I had posted, too!) Hmmm...seems like I should be doing more comment posting, huh?!

So far, I still have yet to spend even a penny on advertising this blog, but I've actually made a sale. It's not much, but it's a start. If nothing else it assures me that this affiliate marketing really does work. I guess until I actually received word of a sale, I always had that little doubt deep inside that made we wonder if you ever really get credited for sales that you referred, so this proves it.

The funny thing is, I never really intended to make any money directly from this blog anyway. This is more or less just to document my progress as I begin this business, so anything I earn from this is just a bonus. (The AdSense ads earnings are currently up to about $4.00 now too, with practically no promotion.) I just figured I would record my progress here until I get my main website set up, and then only occasionally add to it after that. But I'm getting so many ideas that I'm anxious to get started with now, I'm going to have to choose a few things to start out promoting and see what happens.

At the top of my list right now is an offer I stumbled on the other day called Survey Scout. The sales page is so convincing, I find myself wondering why I'm even going through all this trouble of affiliate marketing. Maybe I'd rather just quit all this and be one of the ones getting paid to fill out online surveys for companies. (At home in my pajamas, as their ad says!) This company gives their members all the details on how to get started doing just that, and they claim up to $150 per hour is realistically possible to earn. Not quit-your-job-and-buy-a-new-mansion kind of money, but definitely something worth looking into for most people.

Since this ties in well with my "Making Money With Your Computer & The Internet" theme, it seems like a great offer to feature in my upcoming website. Until that happens, I figure I'll throw an ad or two on TrafficSwarm and some other free ad sites, and maybe even buy a few inexpensive banner ads, etc., and see how it works out. They're claiming to have some affiliates seeing 15% to 30% sales conversions, so it must be a pretty hot deal right now. It's still new, too...I think it's only been around for 3 or 4 months. Hopefully it'll STAY hot for awhile and give ME a chance to get in on the fun! I certainly wouldn't mind getting in on something early for a change!

John

“Free” Services – Not Always Good or Bad

2006-10-24T01:15:00.000-04:00

I’m always on the lookout for free things on the internet – especially ways to save on business expenses. And thanks to the nature of the internet, there’s plenty to be found.

I’ve noticed that most “experts” don’t recommend the use of the various free services available, and they’ll give you many reasons why. But the truth is, the main reason they don’t usually recommend them is that there’s no money to be made by referring you to them. They’d much rather give you their affiliate referral link to whatever they promote so they can earn a commission.

That’s to be expected - it’s just how business works. But I’m interested finding ways to save money wherever I can, and I’m sure you are too. So just be aware of this fact and realize that, because of this, you won’t see nearly as many glowing reviews of free services, even though they can often be excellent. Or they can just be a waste of time, so you need to try them to find out for yourself which ones are which.

Here’s one example of each…

StatCounter.com is a free web tracking service I’ve been trying out. This thing has so many impressive features it’s amazing, yet as of this writing it’s totally free to use. The only limit being once you start getting hundreds of thousands of hits per day, you’re then asked to upgrade to the pay version. Beginners don’t need to worry about this anyway. (I certainly don’t, for one!) So I followed the instructions and set it up on this very site to see what I might find out.

Meanwhile, another thing I’ve been trying is called TrafficSwarm.com. It’s a free advertising site that displays your ad in exchange for viewing the other ads they have listed...unless you want to pay a fee to bypass having to view ads. I suspected that most people just click on the ads to earn their credits, without paying any real attention to the web sites they’re shown...and I was right.

Thanks to StatCounter, I was able to know that after about a week on TrafficSwarm, they sent me only about 20 visitors...all of whom stayed for only 5 seconds or less! Meaning not only did VERY little traffic result from that ad, but the people who did click through to this site didn’t even take more than a glance. (If that!)

So I’m starting to think TrafficSwarm is really more like “WastedTimeSwarm”. Maybe with just the right product offer and just the right ad you could accomplish something with it, but otherwise it doesn’t look worthwhile to me. But it IS free. Even if it sent more traffic though, visitors who don’t stay for more than five seconds are worthless anyway. Oh well, at least now I know spending any money for more exposure on it wouldn’t exactly be a good idea.

“Free” products and services are usually advertisement supported in some form or another, but not always. Ads are usually what makes the whole thing possible, since most companies don’t keep websites up and running, etc., just out of the goodness of their hearts – they need to make money somewhere along the line just like everyone else. I use a free email reader called Eudora, and it’s only ads are in a small square in the lower left corner of the screen – they don’t bother me a bit. If there’s no advertising, there’s usually some other ulterior motive somewhere, if only the hope of upgrading you or selling something to you in the future.

One exception is free web hosting services. You probably do want to avoid using them for business web sites, since the ads could possibly distract your readers from your own message. (Or worse, even conflict with your message.) For personal websites though, they could work out fine if the advertising doesn’t bother you. Plus, blog sites like this one (Blogger.com) are also free to use. So in my own case, by the way...yes, I CAN afford to offer the information in this blog out of the goodness of my heart! I hope this helps you out in your own efforts to start your own computer internet marketing business!

John

Deciding What To Sell (Or Promote)

2006-10-17T23:42:00.000-04:00

The possibilities are endless. Sometimes I feel like just closing my eyes and pointing at something to decide on exactly what I should sell to make money on the internet. It's turning out to be a lot more challenging than I expected just to decide what to promote. Plus, there's the decision of selling physical products, downloadable products, or affiliate marketing referrals. I've never been a very fast decision maker in the first place, so as you can see, I'm still working on this one!

I just read a comment I received as a result of this blog in my email. It was from Ally in Scotland. (Which I thought was pretty neat, since I'm in Delaware in the U.S.!) She just checked in to say hi and that she's just started a new internet business too. She sells health improvement products on 4u-net.com, and it made me think it's nice to see someone actually selling PRODUCTS rather than just advice or money making schemes. Good luck with that, Ally! :)

There are SO MANY people on the internet shouting (virtually) that they are incredibly wealthy and can teach you to become that way by following their instructions. I've seen many lately, needless to say, while researching this whole idea of computer income from the internet. What I find myself trying to do is figure out who are really the ones that have been around for awhile, and who are just students (or copycats!) of the true experts. It can be hard to tell because most all of them are pretty convincing in their own ways.

The money making information/business opportunity category of products is obviously one of the most profitable to promote. Maybe even THE MOST profitable. (Although, porn and gambling are right up there I'm sure...but not the kinds of things I want to build my business around.) So it's no coincidence there are so many sellers jumping on the bandwagon to become the latest "guru" and offer their own version of the rags to riches story.

But I'm wondering, do I really want to take part in this whole game too, parading as an expert and selling the same old information to people who hope to find an honest way to make some money? I've already purchased the domain name, "computer-income.com", so it seems like I'm starting down that path whether I meant to or not. Problem is, I'm not rich, (yet?!) so I can't say to learn from me because I've already made a fortune. So I'm thinking that my selling point needs to be my honesty and willingness to help others succeed in their own business...but would that be enough?

I've bought several different gurus' ebooks in the last few months, and you do start seeing the same ideas repeated. Plus, most of them encourage you to turn around and begin selling more copies of their ebook, as their affiliate. About the only one I'd be willing to do that with is called Honest Riches, by Holly Mann. She's taken the type of approach I would like to take, although she's also got the enormous income to fall back on...so I doubt I could compete against her. But hers is a great little ebook that gets right to the point on how you really can make money in affiliate marketing with your computer and the internet. And the author seems very accessible, with her own discussion forum, etc., which is a big difference from most of the others. I'm not going to make a habit of recommending other peoples' money making courses here, but I do highly recommend that one. I'll put a link to her website on this blog shortly.

So there you go, there's my first ever (good) product review! :) But after getting slightly off my intended subject...I still don't know what to sell yet! (Oh well, I'll settle on something pretty soon!)

John

Be Careful Who You Trust

2006-10-14T02:17:00.000-04:00

It's hard to know who to believe on the internet, especially when it comes to money making advice. Everyone seems to have their own ulterior motives. (Usually being their plans to make money off of you!) I like to say there are no secrets on the internet, but sometimes it's hard to find the truth. I'm convinced it's even purposely hidden in many cases.

Example:
The WarriorForum.com forum site appears to be a good place to exchange ideas about internet marketing. It's the official forum community for the Plug-In-Profit site run by internet marketing guru, Stone Evans. That's the program I quit shortly after joining, as I mentioned in a previous post on this blog, when I realized it's just a recruiting tool to build Mr. Evans' downlines in his favorite MLM programs. It's not really just affiliate marketing help he offers by setting up free websites for anyone who wants one, which is what the sales page leads you to believe. There's a major ulterior motive.

Anyway, pretty much proving my point, he just recently changed the program to require yet another expensive program to be joined to qualify for the free website, and even asked his members' opinions of it. I noticed only a few negative responses about it, so I entered my own response to one of those and simply stated that I agreed, and listed some of the many free or cheaper options there are to choose from.

My post was deleted within minutes! (And so was the one I responded to.)

As an experiment, I immediately entered another post that simply said I think everything sounds great and that I'm excited to get started in affiliate marketing. Wouldn't you know it? It was still there last I checked! Of course, I also invited the readers to come and see this blog to follow my progress. (Sneaky, aren't I?!) I'm sure if anyone from the site comes here and reads this they'll delete that post too, but I can't do anything about that.

My point is, that forum appears to be an impartial community to discuss ideas on how to run your internet marketing business...but it's not. It's edited to make sure nobody reveals what a rip-off the Plug-In-Profit deal actually is. For totally new beginners who haven't researched much of anything else yet, it sounds like a great deal because of the "free" website they set up for you, but there's much more to it than that. (Hey, I fell for it myself!) :)

So you have to be careful who you trust, and what forums you place your trust in. The main tip-off that you should beware of someone's advice is when they start trying to SELL you anything - especially stuff that's grossly overpriced. There is SO MUCH marketing you can do that's either free or very cheap. No one needs to be joining expensive multi-level marketing deals that make you pay monthly fees or make monthly purchases in order to be a member, sales rep, affiliate - whatever you want to call it. In future posts I plan to list helpful forums as I find them that seem to be honest and impartial with their advice, but I certainly won't be recommending the Warrior Forum.

John

Starting To Make Sense

2006-10-13T01:38:00.000-04:00

I'm finally back online after some major computer troubles. It SEEMED like a great idea to finally upgrade to Windows XP...but let's just say it didn't go very smoothly. I bought it for about half price (after a mail-in rebate) so it was a great chance to upgrade at last to the new version. (I felt like I was the last person still using Windows 98.) The last couple of computers I bought were "bare bones" generic units from computer shows, with no operating system installed. (You can really get a great new computer really cheap this way though!) But it resulted in my old version of Windows 98 being the hand-me-down to the new computer each time for the last several years.

For some reason this Windows XP upgrade just wouldn't install completely over my old version, and eventually even ruined my system to the point that it couldn't even start up anymore. I had to reinstall Windows 98 and back up ALL of my own data. (Not a small project - I probably have a few hundred eBooks I've bought in several lots that I've never even read yet!) Then I had to reformat the hard drive, install Windows 98 (again!?)...and finally install the XP upgrade. (I'm exhausted!) I've just started restoring my software and saved data, etc. It's all working smooth and sweet now though, so I GUESS it was all worth it!? Everything really seems to snap right along much quicker with XP, so it is quite an improvement. But I guess my lesson for you on this subject is...

BACK UP YOUR FILES BEFORE UPGRADING!

On a happier note, I just logged in to my Google AdSense account today, and lo and behold...I finally got my first ever click-through earnings! OK...now it was only 86 cents for 2 clicks yesterday, for the little ads at the top of this blog...but it's a start! Kind of cool considering that I haven't even begun to promote this blog site at all yet, so to get anything is pretty neat. You've got to realize...with just a little bit of exposure, that 86 cents could be every day, and after 365 days that becomes over $300 a year...for doing absolutely nothing!

I thought of the AdSense ads as a nice way to supplement your website profits, but I guess they could actually turn out to be a real income producer themselves. Imagine having about 40 websites all earning that modest 86 cents a day. Suddenly you're making over $1000 a month just from those ads! (Whether you ever actually sell anything or not!) I think that's a pretty exciting possibility, myself!

I think I'll print out those mighty .86 in earnings and maybe frame it to display as my first ever AdSense earnings. Hey, why not? People often save their first dollar earned, or their first check received, etc.

You might even say...I've finally made some SENSE here for the first time ever!

John

P.S.- Thanks to whoever it was who clicked on those Google ads of mine yesterday! :)

Using Google AdSense

2006-09-28T22:39:00.000-04:00

Don't look now, but I'm already moving up in the world. As you can see, I've just added some Google AdSense ads to this very blogsite. (On second thought, please do look at them - and click on them too, for that matter!) This is yet another cool way to generate some income that doesn't even cost a penny to try. No wonder you see those little "Goooooogle" ads literally all over the internet!

The ads are very easily added to any website. It took mine less than 24 hours to appear after registering and getting approved. The ads themselves are automatically selected to be good matches for whatever your site's content may be. And the best part is...whenever anyone clicks on the ads on your website, you get paid! (That's just for the clicks alone - nothing even has to be sold!)

Exactly how much you get paid for them is sort of a mystery. A lot goes into the calculation, including what the advertisers paid, etc., so I'll just have to wait and see what kind of results mine get. (I'm actually not allowed to click on them myself - you have to promise not to as part of the registration process.) Anyway, I'll let you know what kind of results they bring right here in a future post.

But in the meantime...do me a small favor, would you please? Click on one of those little Google ads up there before you leave. Thanks! :)

Keeping Costs Way Down

2006-09-27T23:58:00.000-04:00

One of the greatest things about the internet is how easy it allows you to shop around and find ways to save money. To find the best deal on whatever you're looking for. (Or find out if you're already overpaying for something.) So the costs of starting your own internet marketing business are no exception.

Especially in the early going, I plan to keep my operating costs as low as possible. The way I look at it, you don't have to sell much to be into profit if your operating costs are next to nothing. (And I know this can be done.) If nothing else, this can allow plenty of time to do some good "on-the-job training" while I figure out the ins and outs of this business.

I'll admit I got impatient a few weeks ago and fell for one of those "It's all done for you" deals, where you get a beautiful website all set up for you within 24 hours. I got tired of thinking about all the decisions I have to make just to get this business started at all. (And I'm not the type that makes decisions very quickly!) So I figured that would be a good way to get started, if nothing else.

It wasn't what I thought it would be...

Turns out that this deal required you to host the "free" website with a company that charges $24.95 per month. (Nowadays, anything over $10/month is way out of line!) Plus you had to join what amounted to two different multi-level marketing type programs, one of which cost $24.95 to join and $19.95 per month thereafter. That already brings the monthly cost up to $45 before you've even made a sale. Then the first day of instructions given with the program strongly recommended upgrading the email autoresponder service (which was supposed to be included) so that outside party ads won't be included in all your automated emails. That's good for another $17.95 per month. Now we're up to $63/month. Then there's the ad tracking service that's free for the first 90 days, only to go up to $19.95 monthly once you're locked into using it. ($83 per month?!) Then the participants are wondering in the program's own forum why they're having such trouble making any money with it. It's obvious that the famous internet guru who started it has all the odds stacked in his favor. Everyone that joins that program puts additional monthly paying members in his downline and creates residual income for him - at absolutely NO COST to him. He can't lose. It wouldn't matter if no one stayed in the program very long - there's probably a constant supply of new participants that keep it all going. It's actually a work of genius (for HIM!)...but I'd rather be on the guru's end of the deal!

There are no secrets on the internet...

With just a little bit of surfing the net, it's clear that NONE of those costs are absolutely necessary. I found cheaper or even FREE substitutes for all of those expensive services that could be used at least in the early going. That's money that stays in your pocket that could be used for advertising, etc. In fact, I've already spotted at least a couple of people who copied that marketing idea and attempted to become the guru themselves with their own "plug-in-profit" type offer, featuring less expensive services required to join. I think they've got the right idea.

I started this blog just for something to build from for my own business ideas, and the cost for this has been zero. Now THAT'S a price I can live with!

Defining The Goal

2006-09-25T23:10:00.000-04:00

It's important to first define exactly what your goal to be achieved is before going any further and starting anything.

For my purposes here, I'd like to establish a home based business that generates income just by the use of my computer and the internet. Maybe some people would be okay with something that includes some face to face interaction with customers, or maybe by phone. But that means scheduling plenty of time to devote. I, myself, would like a business that doesn't demand much time to operate it, and doesn't dictate my own schedule for me. Naturally, I'm willing to spend SOME time operating the business, but I want to be free to work when and how much I want to at any given time. So to accomplish this, it's going to need to be automated as much as possible.

You see, I've sold items on eBay here and there for the last few years. In fact, I still sell things on eBay. I enjoy it. But with just a little success on there you begin to realize how time consuming it can be when you start listing more and more items. The description writing, picture taking, packaging and shipping, emailing customers...it all takes lots of time. So I want to improve on that and set up something that's much more automatic.

Think about it...once you set up a website, it doesn't go anywhere...it stays there 24/7. (Even while you sleep!) And there's no 7 or 10 day limit like on eBay. So once you set it up and get traffic flowing to it, your website continues to do it's selling job automatically.

But the next detail is, WHAT to sell.

To set up an automatic money making system like I have in mind, you need to either sell products that are downloadable files (like ebooks or software) or you need to promote other companies' products or services on a commission basis. Otherwise, packaging and shipping products takes time and effort. And if you reach your goal of being successful and making lots of sales - it can really tie you down. It's like the old "Be careful what you wish for" saying...you just might get it! Not necessarily that bad of a thing, but if I'm talking about the IDEAL business, I don't want to be tied down to either packaging and shipping products, or having to pay and train someone else to do it.

So to sum it all up...

I want to start an internet marketing business that sells downloadable products and/or affiliate offers so there's no shipping involved. Just income with (dare I say) very little "work". And the only work I have to do will be when and how much I choose from day to day.

That being said, seems like the best way to end today's post is by saying: Wish me luck!

My Decision To Begin

2006-09-25T00:12:00.000-04:00

Okay, this is it. This is my first ever blog post of any kind, so bear with me...

My name is John, and I've decided to start a home business of some kind to supplement my income. I've tried some things in the past that didn't work out, so I've decided to make a fresh start and figure out what really works - and what doesn't. This blog is going to be my way of charting my progress and documenting what I learn as I go along.

I think it's obvious that starting a business of your own is a better way of going about creating additional income than just taking on a 2nd job somewhere. And a home based business seems to be the only way to go if you don't have a lot of money to invest. But of all the various types of home businesses you could get involved in, the idea of using just your computer and the internet to make money is what appeals to me the most.

We've all seen the get-rich-quick ads..."Be your own boss!", "Make money while you sleep!", "Stay home and make money in your pajamas!", etc. I know most of it's all just sales hype, but the benefits of doing business on the internet really are impressive compared to other "regular" businesses. So I'm determined to try to blast through all the sales hype and figure out what really works - and what doesn't - and start making some money on the internet doing what works. Hopefully, somebody out there will appreciate my efforts here to give you an over-my-shoulder view of what I attempt to do.

So you can relax here, knowing that this is one of the rare places on the internet that you can read information on how to make money without simply being fed a sales pitch for whatever the author is trying to sell. (So far anyway, since I don't even have anything to sell you yet! Watch out for me later though, if I go on to become the next big internet guru!)

Thanks for reading so far!