Get paid to put ads on your site - WidgetBucks - The Adsense Alternative

For those who don't know how to make money using website ads (Skip it if you do, it's extremely basic): If you wish to make money with your website or blog, there are organizations that will pay you to display ads on your site. (More specifically they will pay you for each unique person that clicks the ad when visiting your site). To do this, you simply register with them, and after that you can generate some "code" which you simply copy and paste somewhere on your website, and it will generate ad boxes wherever you pasted it. There is no catch, tons of people do this, and it is completely free and benefits both sides. One organization that will pay you to display ads is called WidgetBucks, which is explained below.

Many of you know about Google Adsense. Adsense pays you to display ads on your website, put in simplest terms. But, Adsense can be quite hard to deal with, it is hard to register, it is hard to keep track of, and it is easy to get banned for doing absolutely nothing at all. That is why there is WidgetBucks, the Adsense Alternative.

WidgetBucks is an Adsense Alternative that DOESN'T suck (Example of sucky ad network: Chitika). Then perhaps you would be interested in WidgetBucks. WidgetBucks is way better than Adsense, WidgetBucks ads are nicer, and more interactive. When you position your mouse over an image appearing in the WidgetBucks ad, it gives you details about the product and "best prices" and such, this look is MUCH more appealing than Adsense ads and will draw more interest from visitors. Another thing I like about WidgetBucks that makes it a viable Adsense alternative is that it automatically gathers statistics about how well your ads are performing and rotates to higher performing ads more often, automatically improving eCPM (eCPM is a overcomplicated term for how much money you made relative to traffic on your site).

Now, you are going to be wondering: "Well that is all well and good, but what about the payout?". The payout is just fine and worth it, and pays similar to Adsense. But then you have to consider that WidgetBucks ads are far superior currently to Google's ads and display very high appeal and high quality products. In my opinion, Adsense more often than not displays products that I would consider low quality and I am surprised anyone buys them at all. You can also refer people to WidgetBucks and that works quite well too. Long story short, I make at 200-300$ a month from each of my websites from WidgetBucks alone, it really ads up if you have multiple sites bringing decent traffic.

Conclusion: WidgetBucks is good. I like it. It works. And I don't even need Adsense because of it. It has many advantages over Adsense, and is definitely more than viable as an Adsense Alternative.

If you want to try it out, I have placed a referral banner right below here, so just click that and hopefully both of us will make money. Registration is much simpler than Adsense, they can even pay you by Paypal (Adsense is against Paypal because Paypal is a competitor). Registration is fast, for me I was approved the next day. Here it is, I hope it works well for you as well.

24 Year Old Makes 46'000$ from ONE YouTube Video

You may or may not have heard of him, he goes by the alias of "funtwo". In 2005 he uploaded a video simply titled "guitar", in the description box was an affiliate link for GuitarMasterPro. The video got 47'000'000 views and he has made over 46'000$ from it. I doubt he knows everything about affiliate marketing or earning money online, but this shows that any special talent you have can translate directly into money on youtube, even with basic knowledge. He has been interviewed by CNN and other media groups because of all this. Apparently his friend was the one that uploaded it to youtube and monetized it, lucky for both of them.

Once you watch this video, you will see just why it is on the front page of the most viewed videos ever! This guy is great, I wish I could play like that. This proves skill can translate to money more often than not.

More Article Directories To Bring Traffic, Because Traffic is Money

Here is a site that has a huge list of article directories, and it shows their pagerank right beside them. I recommend submitting each article you write to all of the articles with pagerank 5 and higher. A tactic I use is to focus on submitting a single article to as many worthwhile places as possible. If you submit 10 articles to 10 places (pagerank 5 or higher I'd say), and each submission brings you 10 blog visits a week. Well thats 4000 hits a month. Manage to convert even 1% of that at 10$ a piece (for example) and you just got 400$ from 10 articles. Also for a less conservative example lets do 10 articles, 10 submissions, 40 blog views a week from each. That totals at 16000 a month. Convert 2% of those at 10$ a piece and that is 3200$ a month.
ArticleTrader

Here is another list of article directories that is also good.
Best Article Directories

[Update!] Only a couple days after this post Google released their own article directory called "Google Knols". Odds are very high that this directory will quickly exceed all others because Google will make sure of that. Now is the chance to take advantage of it as soon as possible, because if you didn't already know, the first people who got in on EzineArticles when it came out were hugely successful. You can find it here. Trust me, Google Knols is soon to be the most successful directory in existance, it is growing exponentially as we speak. I have already put 25 of my articles there. The best thing about Google Knols is that since it is FROM Google the articles there will rank higher in Google on average than the other directories, meaning way more search engine traffic to your articles. And as you probably know search engine traffic is where the big money is at.

How to use Google Analytics for detailed site stats

You can register for Google Analytics here. Google Analytics is great for affiliates since a lot of the information can be used to tweak and modify your site to become more profitable.

You can see pageviews, how many of them were unique, how many left as soon as they got there, the average time spent on the site, how many of those visits were completely new people, how much of it was direct traffic (from people typing it in the address bar or from favorites), how much of it was referral traffic from other sites, and how much of it was from Google or other search engines.

So if search engine traffic was the lowest you could decide you wanted to work on that for instance, getting more backlinks or tweak keywords or something.

After registering you will see some HTML code. If your using blogger just go to Layout --> Edit HTML. Use ctrl+F to find the first head tag. And make sure you paste it directly before the head tag. The head tag will say "head" and have a "<" and ">" on the left and right side. So past it directly before the "<"

Great Video About Google and Search Engine Optimization

Man I love this video. It tells you a lot about how Google operates when judging websites. It has a lot of mention of Search Engine Optimization as well. It is about ten minutes long. It appears to be part of a Discovery Channel documentary. This is one of the best videos I have found yet, top quality.


And here is a very short video that explains the "site:" command in Google and how you can use it to view all the pages Google has indexed for your site, if any.


And a third video that tells you how you will do a lot better working with Google than trying to trick them. This may be the best of the three.

How To Choose Profitable Keywords For Your Blog

Alright. These tips are for getting your blog a good place in the search engines. Each blog has "tags" or "keywords" you can enter for each post. You should customize those to the most profitable keywords you can determine. But even tags are not the most important. The title of your blog should contain your most profitable keyword if at all possible. And you should use it as much as you can without it looking wierd, inside the content of your blog. All of this counts for blogs, websites, or anything else in a search engine for that matter.

Now the question is, how do you choose good keywords?

First go to Google Keyword Tool. Think up some words that have to do with your site. For this obviously it would probably be "make money online", "make money with blogs", "earn money online", "get rich online", "affiliate programs", "internet marketing". So forth. Don't be so generalized that it could have too many meanings, like "make money". Because thats not just making money online, but anywhere. You want to get your target audience, you don't want to have to compete against a whole bunch of other websites especially ones that have nothing to do with your subject.

Now just hit the "Go" button or whatever they call it.

Though I have my own complicated methods for searching for keywords, basically I recommend just sorting by the highest monthly volume for this month. Then looking through those and deciding what fits your blog and what doesn't. After you have a list of that, Google each one. On the search results, near the top right, check how many other pages appear for that keyword. That is how much competition you are dealing with. Under 2 million should be good for beginners, as a maximum. There is a formula you can use to figure out just about how easy it might be to get on the front page for that keyword. Just take the monthly traffic rating in the keyword tool, divide it by the number of "competition", and multiply it by 1000 so its easier to read. If that number is greater than 100, most of the time its a reasonable word you could appear on the first page for.

"make money" only has a rating of 31 going by my basic formula
"affiliate marketing program" would have a rating of 250

Another method you can combine, is once you find a good list of keywords, look them up in Google. Look at the best ranking sites for those words, see what keywords they are using, go to them and see why they are so popular. Learn from that and try to implement it yourself, or step it up and do better than them.

Here is a video from a class going over SEO. Its ten minutes long, and most of the useful information is after five minutes. Its long-winded but if you want to watch it odds are you will get something out of it

Link Directories, what they are, how they increase profitability

Link Directories are places where you can submit your link. They are designed to be completely search engine optimized and therefore form strong backlinks to your site.

There are two major free link directories.

DMOZ and Link Directory

DMOZ has the most traffic and is the most popular. Link Directory seems to have a higher Google ranking but less traffic. It is hard to figure out how to submit to DMOZ but Link Directory is much easier. Link Directory however requires you to put a link to them on your site before they will link back to you, which can be kind of annoying. Either way they both help to varying extents, only the people behind them know for sure, but many people say they get good results later on.

Yahoo also has a link directory, but at a cost of 200$, it may not be worth it to those who aren't quite rich yet.

List building - What it is, and how it helps you make more money

List building in Internet Marketing refers to mailing lists. You collect people's emails with a mailing list and are therefore able to send them resources, products, guides, or whatever it is your blog is about.

It may sound like it isn't a big deal, but it is. Because instead of only being able to profit when someone visits your site, you can build a mailing list and also potentially profit every time you send something out to them periodically. With a mailing list you build a devoted and targeted audience that is actually interested in what you have to say, there can't be a more profitable audience than that, just don't take advantage of them.

Now you can't just spam people. Well you can, but people will ignore you and you won't make many sales probably. The goal is to as always give them what they wanted when they signed up for your mailing list anyway. And by that I mean useful information or resources. It doesn't matter if its paid or free, just useful for whatever niche your in. You should make a point to mix free and paid resources together, instead of just taking advantage of their trust to get them to buy stuff. Give them a reason to join your mailing list, such as a free ebook or something. There is nothing like a free and useful product to draw people into a mailing list.

The more useful your site is, the more people will join your mailing list. The more useful your mailing list is, the less people will unsubscribe from it first thing. Now you have a permanent group you can potentially profit from while authentically helping them at the same time. (As long as you take my advice and don't just spam them or take advantage of them)

Getting a mailing list is easy. Like many things it is done through HTML code, which you copy, and paste on your site somewhere. For a blogger blog like this one just create a new HTML "page element" and put it in there.

A great free mailing list can be found at BraveNet. The page that links to has a list of many of the resources they offer, including the free mailing list. Not every resource on there is free of course. BraveNet has a lot of good resources, so I recommend remembering them for later when your more advanced and possibly need what they offer.

I always try to mention the free methods of accomplishing all of this, as long as a free method exists. But in some cases, this being one of them, a paid service called Aweber is much more fully featured and much more popular among internet marketers. Their mailing list is more advanced but it is not free, although it is cheapish.

When your mailing list builds up to about 100+ it will become worth it to occasionally send out resources to them, paid or otherwise. Many people regret not adding a mailing list from the beginning, take that into consideration if you want to skip this step.

Video Marketing, a great way to increase profit

This is so easy and great. If you can get your hands on a decent webcam, and you are good at talking, this is just great.

Youtube. Video mecha of all the internet, pretty much. Over 260'000'000 hits to their site this month alone. An average video collects at least 10'000 hits in a few months. If your making a video about something people care about and you have chosen a great title (titles are extremely important), and done some keyword research and used those keywords for the video. Then you can get hundreds of thousands of views, if the video goes viral, make that millions. Just don't jerk around in your videos, try to get straight to what the watcher wants to hear of 90% of them will leave in 3 seconds. Give the watcher what they wanted, refer them to your site or something, and your good to go. Free nearly guaranteed traffic especially if you did it right.

In addition to keyword research for your video, which almost guarantees it 10'000 hits in 3 months if you do it right, along with choosing an actually good title and topic for your video, there is a way to even further promote it, and increase the chances of possibly going viral. The method I refer to is embedding. On the same page as almost every individual video you will see an embedding link. If you copy that and put it almost anywhere (your website, whatever), then that video will appear there. People will see it, thus increasing its views, thus increasing its prominence in youtube's search results, thus increasing its prominence in Google's search results, all of that results in even more hits and more traffic.

Soon I will begin my own video series, I'll post about that when the time comes.

Submit your URL to many major directories at once

I should have shown this a while ago but oh well. This site lets you submit your URL to Google, Yahoo, MSN Live, and many other search engines and directories for free, and is very simple to use. SubmitExpress

Only submit once. This is not a very important tool but it will get your site indexed fairly quickly if it is not already. If you cannot find your site for any of your keywords in Google, this may help you get there a little bit.

Backlinking is the way to go to get higher pagerank in Google though, so don't think this is a substitute for that. In fact it pales in comparison. The only purpose of this is to get your site indexed in the major search engines if it is not already.

More on Article Directories

As I probably mentioned, EzineArticles, Buzzle, SearchWarp, and GoArticles are the four most popular Article Directories as judged by traffic ratings. But they are all different and each have their own advantages and disadvantages.

EzineArticles, has an extremely long approval process and the strictest posting requirements. Your articles may get denied a few times until you can manage to comply with their relatively strict guidelines. But it undeniably has the most traffic by far and many people swear by it for getting the most traffic to their articles.

AssociatedContent, a very little known directory with little competition in the Internet Marketing niche. This is a good thing for us, because the traffic coming through this directory is second only to EzineArticles.

Buzzle, has less traffic, but their approval is 2 days at most, sometimes next day. Personally I get more traffic to my articles from Buzzle than EzineArticles, probably because the traffic to competition ratio is better on Buzzle than EzineArticles. I highly recommend Buzzle as the primary article directory.

SearchWarp. Its alright, what can I say, the reason its on this list is because it has the 3rd most traffic per month. Worth submitting to.

GoArticles. This is good not only because it has good traffic, but there is little to no approval process. This has the fastest approval of any of the top directories.

Hopefully this helps enlighten you to the advantages and disadvantages of each.

It is important to have good writing and spelling practices when you write your own articles, but if you have some money to spare you can pay someone a little money to write one for you. But be careful, don't pay anyone more than $5, its not worth it, standard price is probably $4. And even that won't be worth it if the article is not properly SEO'd, so you should ask about that as well. And even that won't help you if your page it links to isn't converting at an average or better rate. So be careful if you consider that method. The safest way is to develop your own article marketing tactics and write your own articles, but if money is no object, go for it.

Once you have compelling affiliate programs that you really believe people will want to buy/register for, you may want to consider that method because it will return your investment on average. If you want to try getting somebody else to write your articles, I recommend going to the Warrior Forum, and talking to this guy. Request that the article be no less than 400 words and no more than 600 words. Most experienced people will tell you that 400 to 600 word articles that get straight to the point and tell the reader exactly what they want to know from the start, are the best converting articles with the highest click through rates (CTR).

"Bum Marketing" video

This video shows 5 core steps to making money without spending money. I show you this to clear up any confusion you may still have about how all of this works. It is fairly concise. This particular video shows you how to make money without a website or blog, but I don't recommend that method because more often than not you will be making ten times more money with a base of operations. And without a website or blog you can't combine your efforts with adsense or the many other methods. Just one more step to becoming an Internet Marketing Specialist

The Danger Of Link Theft, How Its Done, And How To Prevent It

I mentioned link cloaking briefly, and said it was complicated for a newbie and not something you need to focus on for some moderate success. Link theft is more common than you think, and one of the best free ways to fully cloak your link is to download The Free Link Cloaker.

There is a video tutorial that goes over most of what you need to know to professionally cloak your links, and here it is:

About Adsense, what it is, why you need it

See those ads at the top and bottom of my blog? That is adsense. Basically for anybody that clicks on one of those I get paid a small amount. Adsense is from Google, all you have to do to register is for to Google's front page and click "Advertising Programs", and register for Adsense. Beside that you will see Adwords, that is different and cost money, but I'll get to it later.

Once registered, basically you get some code that they give you, and put it where you want on your blog. If your using blogger, since blogger is owned by Google, you can link your adsense account with them from somewhere on the blogger page. Then to place the adsense on your blog just create a new adsense page element under layout.

Once logged in to adsense just go to the Adsense Setup tab. Then hit Adsense for Content. You'll go through a couple customization pages but even if you leave it at default settings it is fine, don't worry about channels for now, they are only for tracking purposes. You'll get some code, which you can use anywhere on your website. If your using blogger you don't need the code because they autogenerate it for you once your accounts are linked.

Don't click your own ads, don't get anybody else to click them either. Because they will know. They just won't tell you til payday when they suddenly cancel your account, after you have already wasted all your time.

Here is another video, a guy called Bill McIntosh, he got 3.5 million dollars in 2007 from adsense alone. But his sites are very popular and he has many of them, and he is an expert. Perhaps one day your sites will accumulate that amount of money for you. Its a pretty interesting video, definitely shows you some possibilities. Also his site apparently has some good free info.

Reach 1000 blog impressions

Once you have done enough article marketing, backlink building, and so forth, and your blog reaches 1000 page impressions, you should see some results from there. If you haven't made one commission by then with a high EPC product, then you should start looking at the layout of your page, and start looking at how what your selling is presented, and like my blog you should probably be selling multiple things throughout.

If people don't find what they are looking for right from the start, 70% of them just click right out of the page, that is why it is important to have useful content, as well as actually useful products. Don't give useful content but try to sell a crap product or a product that has nothing really to do with what your content is, because your conversion rate will be extremely bad that way as well.

You should also check if your using the right affiliate link, its rare if you aren't, but make sure you copied it correctly.

If you reach 1000 impressions and still have 0 sales, you need to look at page layout, how you've presented what your selling, and how you've presented your content and if it is useful and gives the reader what they want from the start.

Your blog or website is like the root of your operation, like the foundation of a house, without a good foundation, everything else suffers.

Keywords and Articles

It is important to do some keyword research when choosing keywords for your articles. Google Keyword Tool is just fine for that task.

Simply enter a few keywords about your article, submit it, and Google will return many results. Sort them by average traffic ranking per month, choose only keywords that have a traffic ranking, but yet still have as low of competition as possible. If you do that you should do fairly good, you have to really worry about the competition, because if competition outweighs traffic you still won't get hardly anything.

Keyword research, if you haven't learned already, is important for just about anything that you want to be found on the internet, including articles submitted to article directories. Articles with proper SEO can rake in 100s of views a day. But you should not expect this, as even for a professional there is a highly random aspect with each article, some flop, some go viral.

The Warrior Forum

I've been holding out on this until you learned some basic knowledge of Internet Marketing, because I didn't want to confuse you with everything contained on what I'm about to show you. You shouldn't expect to understand everything there, but this is the Google of Internet Marketers, and when you finally do have the understanding, this forum will be invaluable to you. It contains every secret and method known to man, it has 1000s of members, everyone helps everyone.

I will continue to post more guides and resources here, but there are many more to be found at The Warrior Forum

More Ways To Build Quality Backlinks

This is an article I wrote on Buzzle earlier. I thought it was better than my old article so I'm posting it here. Perhaps it will give further insight. You can never know too much and IM is about putting your knowledge into action.

"The idea behind backlinks is that if your site is providing quality information, then other sites will link to yours, thus increasing your popularity and ranking among the search engines, particularly Google, thus boosting your traffic.

There is more to building backlinks than just spamming your URL across the internet. Google compares titles and keywords and content of sites that contain your URL, if they seem irrelevant then Google will give very little consideration to that backlink. On the other hand the more relevant it deems each site, the stronger the backlink becomes. Another consideration is the popularity of the site containing your URL, if the site is not popular at all, the backlink won’t do much at all. On the other hand the more popular it is, the stronger your backlink is. Relevance and popularity combined form a very strong backlink, and the more backlinks you get the more popular your site becomes and the higher you show up in the search results. Backlinks are said to be the prime factor in how Google determines the placement of your site, so you should not ignore them.

Method 1: The natural way. I’m sure you’ve heard it before, but have useful quality content on your site, that way people will link to it naturally. But of course this helps none if you’re a beginner or your site has no popularity at all yet. It won’t just take off on its own of course, but this is a very powerful method later on once your better established.

Method 2: Site Directories. DMOZ and Yahoo Directory are the most popular and form the strongest backlinks. If you want to get known on the web it is essential that you register with both directories. Just Google DMOZ and Yahoo Directory they’ll be the first results. Getting registered with these directories takes time, months, but it’s free worth it.

Method 3: Forum and Blog comments. Perhaps you know of a forum or blog that has the same general category as yours. Put your blog in your forum signature and respond to a couple posts in those forums. For blogs, just post a comment on the most popular ones and somehow include your URL. Google indexes forums and blog comments, so these backlinks are valuable as long as the forum or blog you posted in is relevant and popular.

Method 4: Articles. There are article directories all over the internet. The 3 most popular are EzineArticles.com, Buzzle.com, and SearchWarp.com. They have 8’000’000, 1’300’00, and 800’000 views respectively this month alone. Basically what you do, is register at each, write an article that has something to do with the same category as your website or blog, this can be a review, or whatever. Just make sure your reader will find it interesting, that’s the most important part. Once done, you will usually see some sort of “resource box” where you can leave a link to your website or blog, you should include some incentive at the end of the article to go there, or at least let the reader know it exists. This is a very powerful method to build traffic and backlinks. Even a very poor article will get a minimum of 30 hits in a week, and each article is another backlink to your site. A well Search Engine Optimized article with a well chosen niche can get hundreds of views a day, with over 40% click through rate.

The power of building backlinks should not be ignored. If you ignore it, you ignore it at your own peril. Backlinks are one of the most important factors in long-term permanent traffic, perhaps the most important. Combined with the other aspects such as SEO (Search Engine Optimization) you can have a very popular, and profitable site."

Best place to register and host domains for affiliates

The best place to get a domain registered for affiliates, as many successful affiliates will tell you, is HostGator.com

It starts at $8 a month with unlimited domain hosting, and is really all you need. As I have mentioned to make even more money you will need an actual domain, and a good place for it to be hosted. The reason Host Gator is a great choice is because its low cost and pretty fully featured, without being overcomplicated. Basically it just outshines the competition.

With a real domain and web hosting in your arsenal, your money making potential is much higher than with a blog. You have full customization over the name of your URL, site organization, keywords and other SEO stuff. All of this, especially having a catchy, relevant URL is extremely important to success and higher search engine rankings.

[Update] In fact it seems Host Gator now has a $5 hosting plan, I don't know how long that will last but if you want to take advantage of it, well, you know where it is. Good luck.

EPC, what it is, what it does, and why you should care

As I mentioned briefly before, EPC stands for Earnings per 100 Clicks. I'll try to explain it as simply as possible but it can be hard to understand. EPC is a stat listed on most individual affiliate programs, if not, it can be figured manually. Basically, it is conversion rate combined with commission in a certain way, to show you what you can expect to earn when a certain amount of people see your link. One thing that confused me, is I thought that they PAID me that amount for every 100 clicks, boy was I wrong. So don't get confused and think that, because thats not what it means.

So lets say a program gives a commission of 20$. Its Earnings per 100 Clicks is also 20$. That means on average, the people selling this product got 1 full sale for every 100 clicks. 1 sale in 100 clicks is 1% conversion rate. If you can remember that a product having the same EPC as its commmission means 1% conversion rate, your already doing good.

Lets say your still confused and you see some freaky product that gives 15$ commission, and the EPC is 1$. That is a 0.067% conversion rate. Terrible.

The math for figuring out conversion rate from just commission and EPC is this:
EPC/Commission = Conversion%. "EPC divided by Commission = Conversion%". So 20/20 = 1%. 20/5 = 0.25%.

To figure out EPC from Commission and Conversion, since some programs don't list EPC, you can find it out like:
Commission*Conversion%. "Commission multiplied by Conversion%". So a program that pays 20$ commission and has a conversion of 5%, has an EPC of 20*5, or 100$. A program like that would be great, if it exists. This formula for figuring out EPC when none is listed is VERY important. EPC is the main criteria for determining how much money that program is making others, and most likely how much it will make you.