Make Money Online

I got an email today from one.com about their new introductory offer for people living in UK, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and India, whereby we offer 12 months free hosting and a free domain to residents in those countries.

Now when I went to sign up for the new account, I was told there is a small setup fee. In my case it was £9 but I think 12months free hosting and a new .com domain is easily worth £9.

The main reason why I signed up for the offer is because its good to have more than one host, because it adds better SEO benefit when you link your sites together as the links will be on different IP addresses. Also the google adwords coupon is pretty cool, I think that will come in hand when I start the PPC-Coach program !

This is a good offer for anyone new to trying to make money online, because if your going to try and make some money online you are going to need a webhost and domain at some point.

Heres what you get:

Anyways sign up here

Just been reading a post over at DP, someone asked is there such a thing as a bad niche to get into. A lot of people answered the guy and many people said things such as: entertainment, music, gaming, sports, insurance, warez.

Now I haven’t really been in any of those niches expect sports which I started a Euro 2008 blog, but with the fact that England didn’t even qualify for it, my passion has really gone for the subject, so I couldn’t really say if it was a good niche or not.

However some people insist that picking a niche that you like and have a passion for is the best way forward. I think on the other hand that this is not always the best option as you could be really passionate about making your own curtains for your house (lol bad example I know!, but you get the point), your not going to make much money from a site based around the topic.

On the other hand if the topic you love has a good following with a lot of other people who enjoy the same thing and you can see affiliate marketing being able to be used then this could be a good niche to go into, because as you already have the passion for it you are likely to keep interested in the site for a lot longer and therefore more likely to be successful.

So is there such a thing as a bad niche ?

Well in my opinion there is, saturated markets with too many big player websites *could* be a bad niche and also niches with not enough following or niches were no buying or money is exchanged.

Thats my opinion. Whats yours?

These advertising stripes I keep seeing on blogs are kind of annoying. You click the lil x and then u go to another page and it shows again! I don’t give one about what your advertising to get you money I just want to read your article dammit!

This is what I am talking about in case you don’t have a clue about what I am on about. I seriously doubt that the conversion rate achieving from these things is worth the annoyance of your existing readers. This is the reason I wouldn’t even consider putting one of these things on my blog.

I would like to ask any one who is reading this now and is using this on their blog, do you or have you actually made any money out of these things ? If so was it worth it to annoy your readership and if no, why the hell are you still using it because its bloody annoying!

Lets hear some opinions of others on this? Do they annoy you as much as they annoy me?

In my quest to learn more about PPC in affiliate marketing I have started to read up on affiliate marketers blogs. I came across Kirsty’s blog and have been reading it for about a week. I decided to go through her old posts and see if I could find something useful for myself when I came across this post: Adwords PPC For Beginners

Which was a great read for someone like me looking to get into affiliate marketing via PPC. The post is quite lengthy but is packed full of good information. I suggest you give it a read if your looking to get into affiliate marketing or you are into affiliate marketing, maybe your missing out a crucial step that might just help make you some more money!

The famous wordpress theme Revolution is now available to be downloaded for FREE! normally the theme goes for $80 ish so FREE is a big saving! I havent actually used this theme myself but I do think it looks very professional looking and I have heard a lot of other people praising the theme.

It is available here

So we know affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to make money online if not the BEST way to make money online. But some of us may not know were to start or may not want to gamble with their money on AdWords without having the help of a professional to guide them. This is were PPC-Coach comes in.

PPC-Coach are and I quote from their site:

“We are a group of full time affiliate marketers. We have made a living online for just about 2 years now and are very good at what we do. Our specialty is pay per click marketing using Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture) and MSN Adcenter. Our real identities are known only by trusted friends and business associates. If we want you to know who we are, we will tell you, otherwise just know that we are very good at what do and are willing to show you the ropes, exposing more information then you’ve ever seen.”

What sort of help will PPC-Coach give? (from their site again):

• access to the PPC Coach to answer any and all ppc related or affiliate marketing questions you have
• access to the PPC Coach Members Forum, where other members can post questions and post answers for you to see
• access to specific merchants to promote, (yes we will tell you what to promote if you don’t want to use your own stuff).
• access to a growing number of tutorials and guides
• access to how to videos online
• access to like minded individuals who want to succeed just as much as you do.
• ability to win great prizes monthly, (the prize list will vary depending on the contest, (these are great motivators)

Now the best thing about about all of this is that PPC-Coach is only $49.99CAD which works out to be about £25 for the UKers out there! I think this really is good value for money and I will be joining upto this program my self at the end of the month! Rest assured if you are not sure about this program but are interested I will be writting follow up posts about the experience with PPC-Coach and maybe posting earnings too.

As some of the more long term readers of this blog will know that I have not been blogging as much as I used to. A contributing factor to why this is, is because of other projects I have going on. One of my other sites is a discount code website which has steadily been giving me affiliate commissions. However when I buying something off the internet the other day I wanted to find a discount code and I knew it was one that I didn’t have on my site.

I did what most people do and googled it and I found something interesting about the discount code market. Nearly every site I went on to they used a “hide” feature which kept the discount code hidden until clicked and by clicking reveals the discount code and opens the affiliate link in a new window I was impressed by the whole idea of this and decided this is definitely the way forward for my site as currently it shows the codes without having to click the affiliate links.

Now coding is not my strong point at all but I knew this was definitely going to make me more money so I decided to outsource to a programmer. I got him from DP and seems to be taking his time considering he said it would take him 2hours to do! It’s now been a few days! But the price he is charging is very low so I’m not too bothered.

Morale of the story is to check out your competition every now and then and you could well get some good ideas that could help you or potentially help make you more money!

First of all for some of you guys that don’t know what affiliate marketing is..

Affiliate Marketing is advertising a specific product or service in a banner or text link and when a person clicks that link they go through to product or service ‘landing page’ if that person then buys the product or signs up for a service you can get commission. The commission varies depending on what program you are on. You can promote affiliate links on your website or blog or even by using a PPC system. (WARNING: some affiliate programs do not allow PPC on certain keywords). The following are affiliate networks that I use:

Affiliate Future

Web Gains

Buy.at

TradeDoubler

Commission Junction

Each affiliate network is different and each have different advantages and disadvantages.

Once signed up to a network you need to pick a program you want to promote. Now this depends on several things such as are you going to promote on your website or use PPC? If you are using your website to promote a program it would be a good idea to promote something relavant to your site. If using PPC then you want to look at programs that are performing well and perhaps others are making money with, it is easy to see this with Commission Junction.

I personally like the idea of using websites with affiliate marketing because I prefer to use SEO to get traffic rather than PPC. However you need to be patient when doing this as it often takes a long time to rank well for specific keywords in google or any other search engine.

But if you want to make money quickly then PPC is the way to go as you can often see results fast this way. The only downside to this is that it obviously costs money! My advice would be that if you are looking start a PPC campaign is to not jump straight into it do lots of research on the topic and keyword research, try and plan it the best you can.

To put it simple affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to make money online.

Build a site -> Get traffic -> Make money!

For further reading on affiliate marketing you could look at tradedoublers new eBook here