Affiliate Marketing

Interesting Ways to Make Money Online

4th November 2016 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

Quick NavigationBlogging / Website Monetisation Social Trading 2016 Review Matched Betting 2016 Review eBay Droppshipping What Did I Achieve in 2016?How Will I Make Money Online in 2017?

I can’t believe it, but it’s been almost a year since I started this blog so I thought it would be a good time to look back and see what I have achieved, what I haven’t achieved and whether it was possible to make money online in 2016.

I’m also going to be fully transparent about my earnings from this year, just as a benchmark for the future.

My intention last year as described in my first article was to dedicate my time across 3 ways to make money online:

In this post we’ll look at each of these in turn as well as my latest business venture with eBay Dropshipping

Blogging / Website Monetisation

Well I came into this as a complete newbie and a year later, I’ve got 2 websites up and running and have learnt an incredible deal about internet marketing, SEO and how you can make money through websites online.

I always knew that you could make money through advertising if you had a successful site, but wasn’t sure about the details of:

How you make a site successful
What a successful site looks like
How you make money through a successful site

I’m no expert but I think I’ve got a much clearer picture of all 3 of these things now, and after a year of learning, I need to start applying this knowledge to my sites.

In my mind the answers to these 3 questions are:

Through keyword research, great content creation and link building

High quality interesting content, generating over £1k of income per month with growth potential

Pay per Click (Adsense), Affiliate Revenue (Amazon), Building e mail lists

Content Creation

From the information that I have digested I’ve learned that making money in this way is a lot more complicated than it was a few years ago, where you could just throw up a website that focused on long tail keywords, create some product reviews, generate some links from a Private Blog Network and you’d be in the money.

Now, the focus is much more on providing great content that is actually useful and solves people’s problems rather than just promoting products.

There’s been a shift in thinking from creating niche websites to building broader authority sites that you grow with time, and as they grow in size they have the potential to bring in much bigger revenue streams.

This shift largely came after a couple of Google updates, that basically wiped out the traffic of a lot of the niche sites.

Your typical site such as ‘bestpaintbrushes.com’ that was made up of review articles and was stuffed with affiliate links would have got one of Google’s ‘Thin Content Penalties’, which effectively removed it from the search listings as part of Googles purge on poor content.

The key now seems to be really finding a niche that you can develop and grow over time, and put systems in place so that others can do a lot of the more labour intensive work for you.

This includes outsourcing things like content creation, link building and formatting of blog posts to free up your precious time.

Website Monetisation 2016 Summary

It’s been great learning so much, but I really need to put this in practice. The main issue here has been time.

I’ve had so much going on that trying to write, publish and promote articles is something that I’ve had to neglect and hence I’ve made no money at all from this idea this year.

I think I’ve got a solid base to move forward, next year and with a bit of luck I’ll have more time to dedicate to this next year as it’s definitely something I want to pursue.

Money Made this Year:

£0

Earning Potential:

Passive Rating:

Social Trading 2016 Review

I’d never heard of Social Trading before I stumbled across an article on it and thought that it looked like an interesting idea.

I’ve got a bit of experience with investing in the stock market, but Social Trading seems like a novel way of investing your money.

I’ve done a full review of my year here but if you haven’t heard of it before, social trading or copy trading as it’s also known, is where you invest in traders and make the exact same trades that they do, in proportion to the amount you invest.

This means that you don’t necessarily need to know too much about markets, commodities and forex trading as you can leave that to the experts, but rather you invest in traders based on their performance and other indicators such as their attitude to risk and the maximum amounts they’ve lost in a single day or week.

There are a number of sites out there but I’ve been using eToro as it’s got a really great user interface and is easy to start to use.

They have a virtual portfolio that you can use to start with where you can invest virtual money in your traders before you throw your hard earned cash at it.

I do quite like the Fantasy Football nature of this idea and it makes trading a lot more accessible to people who wouldn’t otherwise be interested, however, I can see how people could get carried away and lose a lot of money as well.

On an initial glance you can see a lot of the traders reporting really high yields, however, when you drill into their stats you soon find that a lot of these investors have lost big at some point as well.I invested $2500 at the start of the year and am probably going to make a maximum of $100 at the end of the year, which isn’t a great deal, however, at least I haven’t lost anything.

Social Trading 2016 Summary

Realistically, I don’t think this is a great money making scheme and out of everything I’ve tried this year it feels a bit like you are investing more out of hope than judgement, so probably isn’t something that I’ll pursue in the future.

By the same token I didn’t spend much time on this after my initial research into the shortlist of traders.

Money Made this Year:

< £500

Earning Potential:

Passive Rating:

….Find out more about Social Trading in my Beginner’s Guide

Matched Betting 2016 Review

This time last year, I’d barely heard of matched betting and thought that this was either some kind of scam or was a gateway into gambling.

I’d read lots about people reportedly making thousands each month from this, so thought I’d give it a go, and a year later I can say that it really does work, and IT’S NOT GAMBLING!

The process is quite simple and is built on the principle that bookmakers are giving away lots of free offers, and by placing bets on both results happening you can extract a certain percentage of that bet as your profit.

For example, Betfair have a sign up offer where if you bet £10 they will give you £30 in free bets, so if you select your bets well at the bookmaker and the betting exchange you’ll be able to extract about £25 out of that total bet. I explain this in more detail in my Matched Betting Beginners Guide.

There are heaps of accounts that you can sign up to and make up to £1500 just by working through these accounts, but then you get to the next level…. reloads.

For every given day there are 10 – 20 different offers available across the different bookmakers, that you can keep earning money from. For example today, there is an offer with Ladbrokes where if you bet £20 pre-match they will give you a free £10 in-play bet. The trick is to keep repeating these offers and you’ll be suprised how much it adds up at the end of the month.

On top of this, you can then extract money from accumulator bets using either Accumulator Generator or Oddsmonkey’s Acca Matcher Tool.

If this wasn’t enough for you, then you can go a step further and make money from the horse racing offers and things such as the Oddsmonkey Eachway Matcher which will guarantee you returns from races, regardless of the results.

Matched Betting 2016 Summary

Not only have I made money through matched betting this year, but I’ve actually enjoyed doing it. There is nothing more rewarding than getting money for free and as long as you are careful and gradual learn what you are doing this is a great way to earn a little extra money.

The only downside is that it can start to become a bit time consuming, but overall if you’re looking for a bit of extra pocket money, then matched betting is a great choice for you.

Money Made this Year:

£3500

Earning Potential:

Passive Rating:

eBay Dropshipping

When surfing the web and looking into ways to make money online, you come across a lot of rubbish and a lot of people claiming their idea will make you a fortune. In most cases, if it sounds too good to be true, then it usually is.

However, every now and then you come across something that might just have potential and in my mind, as long as you’re not investing a lot of time or money into that stream to test if it works or not, then some times its worth a shot.

… so that’s how I got into eBay dropshipping.

I’ve been listening to a podcast called Travel Like a Boss (which is awesome by the way) and on one of his episodes he talks to an entrepreneur called David Vu who offers the following course on UdemyeBay Drop Shipping with No Inventory Guide

His course teaches you the basic principles of dropshipping and how you can list a product on eBay, and when someone buys the product from you, you buy it from someone else (at a cheaper price) and they send it to the person who bought it from you.

Sounds complicated? Well it isn’t and the best thing about it is that you get to keep a healthy mark-up on each product and you never have to worry about stocking products yourself.

eBay Dropshipping Summary

I’ve been doing this for a couple of months now, and yes, this really works and after you have done the hard work to set up all of your products in eBay, it becomes fairly passive.

The only work you need to do on an ongoing basis is processing your orders, responding to any queries, and making sure you can always purchase a product somewhere if someone purchases it from you.

The model is simple… the more products you list, the more sales you make, the more money you earn, and you don’t need to invest a penny up front.

Money Made this Year:

£500

Earning Potential:

Passive Rating:

….Read my detailed eBay Dropshipping Review

What Did I Achieve in 2016?

Overall 2016, has been an amazing year and I’ve learned soooo much, and discovered so many things that are both interesting and are potential ways that you can make money online without necessarily being tied to a specific location, or needing to slave away for 8 hours a day.

I feel that I’ve put the groundwork in this year, for some of the ideas that I want to focus on in this next year and the more that I have learned, the more options and business models that I have discovered that have been proven to work, and are attainable if you just put in the hours to start with.

If anything, the hardest thing that I’ve struggled with this year is having the time to dedicate to the different streams of interest, especially as I have a demanding full time job to attend to as well.

I guess the main thing that people care about is how much money I made this passed year. It’s not a huge sum at all, but it’s given me money to invest and build on next year and is a great starting point….. drumroll please……

How Will I Make Money Online in 2017?

I had planned to take 3 months out in February so I could focus on these business ideas, but my work has declined this request, so instead I’ve requested to go down to 4 days a week. This is probably the safest option in the short term, until I can get these ideas fully off of the ground.

I’m swamped with ideas at the moment and there are soooo many things that I want to get working on, that it is driving me crazy, however, my shortlist is:

eBay Dropshipping – Build my store up to 1500 products and employ a Virtual Assistant to work on the product listings to build the store even further and automate the processes. Once this is set up this should give me a steady stream of income, which will allow me to work on other things.

Focus on Niche Sites – I have 1 Adsense site that I have already built and written 10 articles for and since neglected, that I really want to dedicate time to and see if I can start to get this to rank. I also have 1 site that I have bought from Human Proof Designs which they are currently building and will need some of my time to market.If all goes well with this, then I’ve got another great niche that I want to get into

Amazon FBA – This has been pretty much the buzz and excitement of the year, with many people making a great source of income by whitelabelling their own products from China and selling them via Amazon, who also hold your stock and manage all of your distribution. Could have huge potential, but requires a bit of up front investment and research.

Drop Shipping Store – I’ve heard a lot about setting up a dropshipping store with Shopify and would really like to take the Drop Ship Lifestyle course at some point. Again, this one will consume a lot of time, however, I really like the idea and am interested in learning more about this business model, especially as more and more business is going online!

A Year Learning Website Monetisation

31st October 2016 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

I remember that I read somewhere that it would be easy to set up a travel blog and make money from it, which kind of got me started on this whole adventure in the first place.

So over this last year, I’ve been furiously looking into what it takes to monetise a website or a blog and the different strategies you can employ to create an ongoing stream of revenue.

3 Things I learned about Website Monetisation in 2016

I was really keen to find out how that’s possible and whether I could do the same thing, so here are the key things I’ve learned this year

Keyword Research Is Key

If you’re going to start a blog or a website then you have to remember that this is a huge investment of your time, so you really need to get an idea of whether this is going to make you any money at all before you head off writing content.

The first thing that you’re going to need to do is to research a niche.

I’ve written about this in detail before, but they key is finding a niche that:

• You’re interested in

• Has low competition and high volume keywords

• Is a broad enough niche that you can potentially expand this into an authority site in the long term

Get any of these things wrong and you’re going to end up with a blog that is going to be nothing but hard work giving you very little in return.

For any website venture that you’re about to start on I would recommend that you invest up to a month in planning the growth of your website.

• Create a keyword matrix and identify long tail keywords that you will target initially and higher volume keywords that you might want to target in the future

• Consider how your site is going to generate revenue. Are you going to be using Adsense, Amazon Affiliates or other affiliate programmes to earn your bucks?

• Check out the competition in your niche and look at how you could potentially improve what they have created

• Think about how much time your website will take to manage in the future and whether this could be outsourced. The worse thing is that if your site becomes really popular and you have set up systems where you need to be involved in all parts of the business, then the more popular it gets, the more of your time it will use

You can’t Take Shortcuts

Unfortunately, there are no real shortcuts that you can take to building up a successful website.

I’ve read a lot about Grey and Black Hat SEO tricks such as using Private Blog Networks, however, whilst these might get you success in the short term, in the longer term you’re likely to get banned from Google, and ruin your business.

If something looks too good to be true like a gig on Fiverr promising 50 top quality links for $5, then you know it’s going to be dodgy so steer clear.

Yes, there is nothing for it, but hard work and putting in the hours initially.

You’re going to need to write a lot of your content to develop your own voice, manage your own website and then most importantly learn how to market your website and generate traffic, all of which can be hugely time-consuming.

On top of this, you can’t expect instant results as your new website will go into Google’s sandbox and won’t start ranking for 3 – 6 months anyway.

Content is King and Links Are the Queen

The days where you could just throw up an article of a few hundred words for niche keywords and expect to rank easily are long gone.

Now you’ll need to put a lot more work and thought into this.

The content that you generate will need to be:

• Unique (Either a fresh idea or a vast improvement on existing content)

• Interesting (Needs to be made shareable)

• In-depth (Minimum of 1000 words per article)

• Answer a question / Solve a problem

The digital landscape is now so crammed full of content for every conceivable subject, you’ll even find in depth 2000+ word reviews of toilet seats, so you have to make sure your content sticks out somehow.

Once you’ve written this killer content, the hardest part is generating links to this content, which seems to be the biggest single factor in 2016 for ranking your content.

There are plenty of strategies all over the internet on how to do this, but once again, this will just consume a lot of your time.

What Did I Achieve?

On a positive note I have to say that I achieved a great deal in this sphere over the last year:

• I set up 2 websites, www.mylifestyledream.com and a niche website

• I have learned a good understanding of SEO and different tactics

• I’ve learned a lot about internet marketing

• I’ve learned about affiliate marketing and the different tactics that people use to monetize websites

Overall I’ve got a great foundation now in both my knowledge and my websites to build on over the next year.

I haven’t been able to focus as much of my time as I wanted to on the niche website, but plan to switch focus back on to this next year.

Low Light of the Year

I think I’ve found a great niche with low competition keywords, however, it’s not the most exciting niche and is quite hard to write articles for.

I’ve written about 8 so far, however, have kind of lost heart a little bit, because even though some of the keywords that I am targeting are sub 20 Keyword Competitiveness, I still don’t rank in the top 100 for these keywords, which I find really bizarre.

I think the answer to this problem, is that I just need to put in more work, build out more articles and start my link building activities then the site should start to grow in traffic.

Highlight of the Year

The best thing for me with building out these sites has to be the amount that I have learned about SEO.

I find this dark art really interesting and is definitely something that I want to learn more about and spend more time perfecting in the future.

How much Time did I spend?

With a full time job in front of a computer screen, I’ve also needed to research and practice these 3 ways to make money online as well as write about them, all of which takes a huge amount of time.

In reality I’ve needed to just focus on one thing at a time, or free up more time, which I intend to do next year.

How much Money Did I make?

A big fat £0

In fact, by the time I take hosting and themes and domain names into account I’ve probably invested about £150 so far.

However, I feel that I’ve put in a lot of the groundwork with which to monetize these sites in the future.

Was It Worth the Effort?

Yes, absolutely. I feel that I’ve started a new path that I’m interested in and could potentially reap rewards in the future.

Out of all the things I’ve looked at this is most likely to be the idea that comes closest to giving me real passive income in the future.

How do you Make Money from a Website?

24th November 2015 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

Internet millionaires have sprung up everywhere, but have you ever wondered how do you make money from a website or blog?

You may have read about people who have set up successful blogs and are living off of the proceeds of these digital goldmines. Well I expect you’ve also wondered, ‘How do websites or blogs actually make money?’

The truth is there are a variety of strategies and methods of doing this, but in this article we are only going to look at 2 key areas, that will help the money flow into your piggybank once you have set up a successful website:

Pay Per Click Advertising
Affiliate Marketing

Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC)

Do a few searches in Google and you will inevitably come across a site, which has a Pay Per Click banner, usually prominently positioned towards to the top of the page.

For example if I do a quick search for ‘Asian Cuisine’ then pretty much every site on the first page of Google has a PPC ad banner included. Examples of these are shown below:

People are making money from websites using different advertising programmes such as Google’s Adsense programme.

The idea behind this is all about ‘contextual advertising’ and providing advertisements targeted towards the content that the user is searching for.

For example there may be a company that has just released a new brand of wok, so they’re going to want to advertise on a website related to the content, in this case ‘Asian Cuisine’.

The advertiser will use something called Google Adwords ,where they bid in an auction style to have their ads shown on sites and pages, which rank well for a particular keyword. So for each keyword like ‘Asian Cuisine’ they put in a price that they are willing to pay Google every time that someone clicks on the banner. This is often referred to as the ‘Cost per Click’ or ‘CPC’.

The website will need to sign up to the Google Adsense programme, and then dedicate a section of it’s site to display the Google Adwords advertisements. Depending on which keyword the page ranks well for, depends on which advertisements are displayed here.

The advertiser pays a fee to Google for placing its add and every click through received
Google receives a commission for every click (32%)
The website receives a commission for every click (Currently 68%)

So you can see already, that if you have a popular website receiving a lot of traffic for a keyword that advertisers want to display their ads on then you can receive a steady stream of income.

Example Earnings

In the case above, the keyword ‘wok’ has a cost per click of ‘£0.86’ and has 8100 monthly searches in the UK.

Lets assume you got number 1 position in Google for this. This would mean that approximately 32% of visitors who search for the keyword ‘wok’ would click through to your site from the search results page = 2592 visitors per month coming to your site.

Lets then assume for this example that you get a click through rate (CTR) of 5% – so out of your 2592 visitors, only 5% will click on one of the Google Ads on your sit = Approx 130 visitors per month will click on the ad.

This brings in a total revenue of £111.80 per month (130 x £0.86 )

However, after Google has taken its cut this leaves you with a grand total of £76 per month

Now, this may not sound like an insane amount of revenue, however, if you multiple this across a number of keywords and potentially a number of sites, then the numbers start to add up.

I’ve written another article specifically around keyword research, that goes a lot deeper into this topic, but there are 3 key factors that you need to look at:

How many visits per month does the keyword receive?
What is the value (CPC) for each keyword?
How easy is it for you to rank in the Top 10 in Google for this keyword?

This is definitely something worth looking at an there is a whole industry in creating ‘niche websites’, which focus solely on making money through advertising, but we’ll come back to them in another article.

Things to remember

AdWords is the programme that advertisers use to promote their products and
AdSense is the publishing network, which pushes the AdWord advertisements to the relevant websites
AdChoices is just a link on the advertising unit to find out more information about the advertising network and how to set your advertising preferences.

Affiliate Marketing

What is affiliate Marketing?

According to our friends at Wikipedia, affiliate marketing is “a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts.”

In laymans terms this means that you get paid for promoting someone else’s product on your blog or website.

Usually this works by placing an ad or affiliate link on your site, which links to the affiliates site where the visitor will either enter the purchase funnel for a product or register for a service.

The affiliate links on your site will have your own id so you track the user through the purchase funnel and will usually receive a percentage of whatever they spend on the site.

There are usually 3 types of affiliate marketing programmes available:

Cost Per Sale (CPA)
This is where the visitor who is referred to the affiliate then goes ahead and purchase a product or service from the affiliate, and receive a percentage of the sale in commission

Cost Per Lead (CPL)
This is when the user of your site is then taken to the affiliates site where they complete some kind of form. This could be as simple as leaving your email address or as complex as filling out a longer survey, but each time this is fulfilled on the affiliates site, you will receive a commission

Cost Per Click (CPC)
We discussed this earlier with Google Adsense, but in this case, this is where you get a commission from the affiliate as soon as they click through from your website and land on the affiliates website

How do I become an affiliate?

In most cases there are no barriers to entry to joining an affiliate programme. You simply need to:

1 – Find an affiliate programme that is related to your product.
You can either do this by joining one of the affiliate networks that a lot of the big brands use like Commission Junction or you can try searching for an independent affiliate programme (Just type in ” [your topic] affiliate”)

2 – Join the affiliate programme and create your unique affiliate links.
Am example of a Commission Junction link would be:
http://www.samplesite.comt/click-123456-789789

In this example, the number ‘123456’ will be your affiliate site ID and the number ‘789789’ will be the destination page on the affiliate site

3 – Add your affiliate links to your site
Try to avoid plastering these all over your site and only add them in places, which will be useful to your visitors. Otherwise your visitors will get annoyed and you’ll end up with loads of affiliate links, but no-one to look at them!

Setting up affiliate links on your site really is as simple as that, but of course, they key is getting enough relevant traffic to your site in the first place to click on those links. If you haven’t done it yet have a quick squizz over my Keyword Planner article, which gives some useful tips in getting the right traffic to your website or blog.

So how much can I earn through my affiliate links?

Well, how long is a piece of rope??? This depends on so many factors that it’s hard to put an estimate on this, however, there are some things that will help you get a feel for the type of online earnings you will be taking home

1) How much traffic is coming to your site, to pages where you have the affiliate links?

2) Earnings per click (EPC)
You should be able to get this from most affiliate programmes and is a simple formula (Commissions received divided by referral clicks), which tells you how many of your visitors that you send to the affiliate programme go on to purchase. For example if you send 100 visitors to a site and 1 person purchases something worth £10, then you have an EPC of £0.10

3) Average Order Value (AOV)
This isn’t freely available with all affiliate programmes but if you can get the information it is a useful metric to understand your potential earnings.

4) Commission Levels
The amount that an affiliate is willing to pay your varies wildly between products and affiliate programmes. It can be as much as 50% for some digital products, but generally, it will be a lot less than that.

Your first Top Tips for Affiliate Marketing:

We’ll look into affiliate marketing in more detail in a later article but some of the key rules are:

Only ever promote products that you are genuinely interested in or would buy yourself
Don’t try to sell the products, but recommend them instead
Make sure that any affiliate links are placed in the right context. They should be related to the theme of the article, rather than just strewn around your site
Always be clear that you are getting a commission from these links

Resources

http://websitesetup.org/33-ways-to-monetize-website/