In my desperate attempt to keep my posts to no more than 4 times a year (not proud of the posting frequency), I decided to compile my five best money makers over time. I’m certain that the following list would be of help you to prioritize your own money makers after knowing what has worked best for me in the past.

5. CPA Websites

It might be safe to say that I am a complete new comer to the world of CPA. CPA stands for Cost-Per-Action, where offers generally pay you for each desired action that your visitor completes for your advertiser. E-mail submits are perhaps the most popular form of CPA offers. I am still experimenting in this field, however I am starting to see some amusing results that I will share with you in a future post.

4. Adsense

Adsense is, perhaps, the most popular way to make money out there. I doubt there are a lot of people who haven’t seen the “Ads by Google” label plastered on almost every page they visited. Adsense isn’t used as much by bloggers these days, because many have found out newer and better ways of making money, but it still gives marketers something to slap onto their blogs, which can’t be monetized otherwise.

3. Private Ad Sales

Private Ad Sales have always contributed a significant amount to my monthly income. Even though they do not constitute a majority of the ad space on my blogs, they still tend to contribute a greater share of the ad revenue. The simple reason behind this is that private ad sales removes the middle man from the transaction of the advertiser and the publisher, and is often beneficial to both.

2. BuySellAds

BuySellAds is an online platform that creates a bridge between publishers and advertisers. However, unlike Adsense, BuySellAds does not work on a cost-per-click system. That is, you do not get paid by BuySellAds for each click to your advertisers’ website or they do not pull a random ad to fill in the ad space on your website. Instead, BuySellAds only sell ad space on blogs on a monthly basis. This has worked great for me in the past, as it helps sell ad space in a much more organized manner on most of my blogs, including this one.

1. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is definitely my top money maker so far. Introduced a tad bit late into the affiliate marketing industry, I still managed to get a gist of how affiliate marketing works and why it is so much better than other nerve-wrecking services, such as Adsense. Affiliate marketing websites include Clickbank, which is a wonderful platform to use.

Clickbank is a website where you can promote e-books, online courses and other digital products, and get a commission for every sale that you drive. It’s as simple as that. I have written a guide on how you can make money with clickbank and I find it to be one of the most easiest places to get started because of its simple user platform.If you have not yet tried affiliate marketing, then I strongly suggest that you do because affiliate marketing is the most simplest and profitable opportunity available to make money on the internet.

Don’t know where to start?

I strongly recommend that you check out Commission Breakthrough; a revolutionary new product that teaches all the basics of affiliate marketing. Commission Breakthrough is an all-in-one package that teaches you everything, from finding a profitable niche market, to monetizing the traffic on your website through affiliate marketing. Click here now, to get in on this mind-blowing course.

This post lists my top five money makers in the past few years, and I have put a lot of time and effort in order to ensure whether each of these methods makes money or not. Therefore, whether you’re a new comer to internet marketing or an expert, if you’re looking for a new way to make money then I strongly suggest that you try one of these methods.

I never gave this matter much of a second thought before, but now that I’m starting to, I’ve realized that fresh backlinks play more important of a role than I had thought. Of course, I could be wrong with my assumptions, but if I’m right then fresh backlinks play quite a vital role in maintaining a pagerank assigned by Google.

Nobody knows exactly about the Google algorithms, so we can only assume after testing different methods to see what works. It is more of an experimenting game to know what factors play a bigger deal. I have experimented with my smaller blogs before to see what was working, and mostly it was backlinks from other authoritative blogs.

Moreover, as backlinks from authoritative websites became older, rankings further improved. But, as I have recently seen,  those links become less effective overtime and you need fresh backlinks to keep the whole thing in balance.  I’m going to experiment some more with my other blogs and I’ll write an update after I see some substantial results.

Neobux is beyond the shadow of a doubt considered of the best PTC (Paid-to-Click) websites online today. It has been offering its services worldwide in multiple languages since March 2008, and at present has a large user base of over 4 million. Both users and advertisers show immense satisfaction using it, as can be seen from their comments on the site’s forum and at other places on the internet.

However, its recent drop in click rates has sparked some negativity among members, especially standard members, who feel discriminated by this change. Well that is understandable because their earnings have dropped significantly and many of their referrals have stopped clicking. However, it is important to acknowledge that the site needs to satisfy its advertisers and must take sufficient measures to benefit and keep itself stable as well. On the other hand, advertisers have found these changes extremely beneficial as the click packages have become 10-35% cheaper dependent on the package purchased.

Neobux has a lot of positive points about it. It has an active forum where members can post their payment proofs, get support, use it in many different languages and stay updated on the latest developments on the site. It offers instant payments which very few other PTC sites offer and you can get paid instantly regardless of the amount requested. Moreover, you can make purchases and upgrade your membership using your main balance, which once again is a trait you won’t be able to see on most other PTC sites. Neobux also offers a decent direct referral limit which increases proportionally to your time spent on this site. Furthermore, there are no restricted countries, which allow members to join neobux from all parts of the world.

This site has some robust security features as well which includes a strong DDOS protection (an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users) and provides users the facility to have a secondary password and PIN which provides added protection to their account.

A very unique characteristic found on this site is the use of NeoPoints. 1 NeoPoint is added to a member’s account every time an advertisement is viewed by them. Now what is the use of NeoPoints? Well upon reaching a certain number of NeoPoints, you can utilize them to get rental balance. Such as:

• 250 NeoPoints = Add $0.10 to your rental balance
• 500 NeoPoints = Add $0.25 to your rental balance or Increase the direct referral limit by 1
• 1000 NeoPoints = Add $0.60 to your rental balance

Note: Rental balance can only be used to pay for rented referrals and is not available for cash out.

Although neobux does have quite a few useful features, yet it is not a ‘get rich quick’ scheme and can be an extremely slow earner if you do not have referrals. You may end up earning $0.01-$0.015 a day at most without referrals. As a result, it may take you up to 200 days to reach the minimum payout amount of $2, even if you remain active on the site. You can have direct referrals on neobux only after you have been a member for at least 30 days and have made 100 advertisement clicks.

It is true that getting referrals is a pretty daunting task, especially if you are new and inexperienced in the PTC industry, yet it is worth noting that referrals can act as the backbone behind your success on neobux. An alternative option to this is renting referrals, but more often than not you may find yourself getting a deficit on them.

Neobux gives you the option of recycling inactive rented referrals and auto-paying for the ones that are active, but seeing users’ comments at various places on the internet, it seems that even with these features it is pretty difficult to get a return on your investment, which is why I personally do not recommend renting referrals on neobux. However, it may be a great option to rent referrals using neopoints as you have got nothing to lose!

There are six types of advertisements available to view on neobux. These are the Orange Fixed Ads, Purple Fixed Ads, Micro Ads, Mini Ads, Standard Exposure Ads and Extended Exposure Ads. Also, there are different types of membership available and one can earn a lot more as being an upgraded member than as a standard member. However, one should only upgrade once he has enough referrals from whom he is sure to get a return on his investment. Upgrading without having referrals will result in you having to bear a heavy loss.

How often have you googled something important and were eventually led to an article fully loaded with ads? And after finding a way to read through the ads, you discover that the article was not helpful at all. Google has finally brought these websites down for good. I’m not particularly talking about made for adsense websites, but I’m talking more along the lines of Ezine Articles or WiseGeek.

I’ll start by explaining my frustration with wisegeek.com. Wise geek is an informational website that contains over 50,000 articles. Apart from the  traditional “how to” articles, this website targets “What is..” articles. So if you were ever searching for something like “What is a credit card?”, this website would come first.

Since the website was old, had hundreds and thousands of indexed pages, and a lot of editorial backlinks, this website had a lot of authority in the eyes of Google. The authority was so much, that the website would dominate a spot in the google top 3 rankings for almost any keyword it would target in it`s articles.

The typical article is a near 500 word, half helpful article. Along with the articles are huge Adsense blocks carefully embedded to fool the visitor for normal links. I’m a webmaster who plays with ads all the time, and I found that to be irritating. I can only imagine what the rest of the people would’ve thought about it.

Well, long story short, Google punished WiseGeek.com and other websites of the sort who were either loaded with ads or had low quality articles on them. This update was much needed and finally Google SERPs have gotten rid of big websites that added little value and were getting a lot of traffic for no reason. Webpronews published a whole list of the the winners and losers in the panda update.

To my knowledge there isn’t really any small website that has been affected by this update in terms of more search traffic or less search traffic. At least, the search traffic at my websites has remained constant and I’m glad google took this initiative to punish the big ones. To be honest, these website had it coming.

Let me know if you know of any smaller websites that have been affected by this update and why. If you’re not sure whether your website has been affected or not, then just compare your search traffic of march with February. If you see a different trend than the previous month then there is a chance that your website has been affected as well.

What is undoubtedly true of these pioneers is that they certainly know how to build a community. Youtube isn’t even a proper social network, it is just a platform where you can ‘Broadcast yourself’. But these two men have built it into this internet giant that it is today. Youtube, at one time, had the most interactive community on the internet.

Yahoo! made a statement last year about its intention of discontinuation of delicious from its social media ‘arsenal’. With the deal being closed after 5 months, it seems that either they had a tough time finding a buyer or they really were concerned on handing it over to a company that could “make more sense of the service”.

Whichever the case, according to speculations and rumors, the deal was closed around the $5 million mark. Educated guesses were that Yahoo! acquired Delicious in 2005 for somewhere between $15 million and $30 million. Now, it would be unfair to make judgements on the Yahoo! product management based on rumors about the purchasing and selling price, so I would leave that part to a side for now.

Although Yahoo! claimed that Delicious would make more sense with someone else, one might think that why Yahoo! failed to make sense of it. The fact that it bought Delicious for a double digit million dollar figure and sold it, most probably, at a loss is a more-than-clear indicator of its failure to achieve its acquisition goals. Obviously, it wasn’t making much money either.

Delicious might’ve been a much bigger and more useful tool had it grown to the masses properly. It had (and still has) the one feature Google lacks: Direct user input. Delicious maintained a user community where people shared and bookmarked links on the internet that they found interesting. With that edge, many anticipated Delicious to become the next big thing after Yahoo! acquired it. Too bad things didn’t work out the way they were meant too.

As a delicious user and fan, I’m super excited with this acquisition because these two social media pioneers may just add the well-needed push to delicious to take it to the next level. After all, the internet is now evolving into web 3.0. Will these people be able to establish a system to improve delicious and bring it to the top 50 internet giants or will the efforts go down the drain? Only time will tell the real answer to this, but for now you can use the comment section below to explain your thoughts on this acquisition.

Through trials and errors, I too have my own techniques and strategies for succeeding with clickbank. However, with the variations in the inernet marketing industry, I have changed my strategy from time to time.

My own strategy isn’t really unique, but it’s a nice mix of different techniques. Clickbank, for me, has been the best service to make money promoting digital products. But, before I get into detail:

What is Clickbank and how does it work?

If you’re new to this, you might be thinking what Clickbank is. But don’t worry, it’s nothing scary or too complicated. It’s just a simple platform to connect Vendors (People that make the product) and Publishers (People that promote and drive sales to the product).

When the publishers promote the vendor’s product and drive in a sale, the vendor pays a commission to the publisher as a reward. It’s pretty simple: The product is ready, the sales page is also ready and all you have to do is promote the product with your own promotion link.

Commissions usually range from 50-75%, which means that you’re making more money than the vendor makes on that particular sale. Some products have recurring fees for which you’ll be able to make a recurring commission.

You can use Clickbank’s Analytics service to check how many visitors you’re sending to the sales pages of the products and you can analyse other important data over there to find out what’s working and what’s not.

How to start off making money with Clickbank?

It’s really just a 5-step process:

1. Register at Clickbank.com
2. Login and go to the ‘Marketplace’.
3. Browse between categories to find the product that you want to promote.
4. Create your hoplink for that specific product.
5. Promote that hoplink and drive sales.

It’s all easy until Step 5. Promoting the hoplink and getting visitors is a tough task. Getting sales from those visitors is an even tougher task. Although, the vendors do a great job in creating a well converting sales page, it’s still hard to get a sale done if it’s a random visitor.

So, you need to get targeted visitors to your hoplink in order to drive interested people to the sales page that might actually end up purchasing. There are many ways to get targeted visitors.

How should I promote my hoplink?

Below is a list of ways you can promote your hoplink to drive targeted visitors to the sales page:

• Use social media: Facebook, Youtube and Twitter are one of the most effective tools for driving sales through Clickbank. The bigger your friends list at Facebook or the number of your followers at Twitter are, the better chance you have driving sales. It’s a good idea to find out the interests of people (not friends ) and then try to market the product to them. You can make use of facebook pages and the information boxes of youtube videos to promote your hoplink and receive targeted traffic.
• Use a blog: Some time ago, I wrote a guide on how you can setup your blog and make money with it. By using your existing blog (or creating a new one), you can put promotional banners of related clickbank products on your blog with your hoplink. This is also quite an effective method as it requires less work of promotion if you’re already running a blog that receives visitors. Even if it doesn’t, now you can promote your blog instead of promoting the hoplink to build a little trust on the visitor to increase your chances of making the sale.
• Promote to a mailing list: You can build a mailing list by creating a splash page to get your visitor’s email addresses and then later emailing them your promotional links to make the sale.
• Advertise on websites: You can also purchase targeted traffic through Google, Facebook and other similar websites. You’ll have to pay a set price per visitor

The promotional techniques consist of, but are not limited to, the methods listed above. You can use your creativity to drive traffic and sales through other methods. Unleash your inner sales man and promote your link all over the territory.

Now that the Clickbank guide is in front of you, it’s about time you get to work. Sign up with Clickbank now and start promoting products. The sooner you start, the more you’ll learn; and the more you learn, the sooner you’ll start making money. Best of luck!

I’ll be writing follow ups to this post to give more tips on making money with Clickbank. So subscribe to the blog to stay updated. If you’ve got you own tips or experiences with Clickbank, please share them in the comments section.

Please understand that this article is not about getting approved by adsense, but about getting your approved adsense account verified in order to receive payments. Before being approved by adsense, we always think that getting approved is the toughest part. But soon we realise that the whole process is one bumpy road.

Once you reach the minimum payment threshold on Adsense, they send a PIN to you through the postal service to confirm your home address. Once you enter the PIN in your adsense account, your account is verified.

However, in my case, the postal service was consistently misplacing the letter containing the PIN which was quite frustrating for me. Moreover, you can only request the PIN three times, after which your account is locked.

Before requesting it for the third time, I finally contacted their support and told them of the issue. They offered me to verify my account sending them a scanned image of the identity card or utility bill, both with the payee name and address on them.

I responded to them with the scanned copy and they verified my account soon. Had I known earlier, I wouldn’t have waited so much. So, if anyone is trying to verify their account then I would recommend them to consider this option as it is much more quicker than the default method for verification.

Bounce rate represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and “bounce” (leave the site) rather than continue viewing other pages within the same site.

And this is the formula used to calculate the bounce rate:

Bounce rate = total number of visits viewing only one page / total number of visits * 100

Most of the time, having a high bounce rate is considered as a bad sign for a blog. It’s because it means that you are not doing enough to retain your visitors and they are just slipping away by not going further than the first page of your blog.

However, classifying a high bounce rate as good or bad, depends on the purpose of the blog. Many of you might be a little confused by this point, so below I’ll list the two most broad (perhaps a little vague) categories of blogs:

1. MFA (Made for Adsense) Blogs with the sole purpose of making money
2. Blogs with the purpose of maintaining a reader community and loyal visitors

By this point, one can easily draw a line between the two categories above with regard to the variation of bounce rates. So, returning to the main topic: Does a higher bounce rate equal more money?

A blog that is made for the sole purpose of making money, loaded with ads everywhere and highly optimized for making money is better suited with a higher bounce rate. It’s because a person who is going to stick around your blog and becomes a regular reader, will rarely (if ever) click ads.

So, if you can manage a high bounce rate with a blog made for making money, you can make more money. A high bounce rate usually means that the people visiting your blog have less interest in your blog’s content and that is something you can use to your advantage in the case of those MFA blogs.

On the other hand, retaining visitors brings profits in the long term, if you monetize effectively. A high bounce rate in this case is bad because it means you’re just losing visitors or potential readers.

There is, however, a mix of the two cases. That is, a blog that is made for making money (Not exactly MFA) as well as garnering readers for the long term profits as well. In this case, a moderate bounce rate should be considered ok.

So, here is an idea for all you bloggers running any of the these three types of blogs to understand the bounce rate with regard to the purpose of your blog. Over time, I have tried to maintain my bounce rate at ~65%, how have your experiences been with higher or lower bounce rates?

Read here no more, and proceed to the interview and read for yourself. Oh, and do not forget to leave a comment once you’re done reading the interview.

I replied to one, two, a dozen, a few more, and then I stopped. Telling every person again and again to dig up a few links on my blog and providing them with relevant articles was becoming a pain. This is an all-in-one compilation of ‘How to make money on the internet by blogging?’ articles. Dance pal, your prayers have been answered.

You may refer to this obsolete post on making money that I wrote in 2008, it might give you some idea too. Please note that I’m not providing you a fool-proof plan to make money with blogging. This is just to give you an idea on how I make money on the internet, and how you can get started by copying following me.

How To Make Money By Blogging

Without further ado, here is a brief version of the whole ‘Make money blogging’ model:

1. Choose a topic to blog about by finding a niche market.
2. Research on the topic and find your target audience.
3. Choose a blogging platform
4. Get a domain. (optional)
5. Edit the template and customize the theme if it is blogger or get a theme if it is wordpress.
6. Start writing articles about the topic you chose in a systematic manner while maintaining a balance.
7. Promote the blog to bring traffic. You can either go for free (long) methods or just purchase traffic.
8. Monetize the blog.

This is the basic blogging model as it is and this is how you set you foot into the blogging world. All the hyper links in the list are referring to other articles on the blog that will further help you with that step.

The model is quite basic and it is mainly for newbies who want to know how the ‘make money blogging’ thing works. If you’re starting a blog or already started one then go through my post on anonymous blogging, spam comments or a fix on long post titles. Other than these the ‘blogging’ category is full of help for beginner bloggers.

Best of luck with your blogging venture. Oh, and if you start a new blog, don’t forget to link back. That’s how we spread love in the blogosphere!