matched betting

Oddsmonkey Review : Matched Betting Made Easy

18th February 2018 By martinos74 4 Comments

Our Oddsmonkey review will look at all of the services, features and tools that are available within the monthly subscription to oddsmonkey.com

Oddsmonkey is another matched betting product that has recently turned into a subscription service, which for a fee of only £15 a month provides a complete toolkit that is useful to both the amateur and advanced matched bettor.

For some of you £15 a month will sound like a lot of money to be giving away each month so we’ve provided an indepth Oddsmonkey review to help you make up you own minds.

To save you reading all of this mammoth article our Oddsmonkey review covers the following topics:

Quick NavigationWhat is Oddsmonkey.com?Oddsmonkey at a Glance Oddsmonkey Basics Training Tools Community Blog Oddsmonkey Oddsmatcher Dutch Search The Oddsmonkey Calculator Bookmakers Offers Listings Daily Offer Calendar New Account Offers The Oddsmonkey Racing Matcher The Oddsmonkey Eachway Matcher The Each Way Calculator Oddsmonkey Eachway Matcher Drawbacks The Oddsmonkey Community The Oddsmonkey Blog The Oddsmonkey Acca Matcher Accumulator No Lay Method Accumulator Lay All at Start Method Accumulator Lay Sequentially Method What Don’t I Like About Oddsmonkey?What Do I Like About Oddsmonkey?Where Can I join?Oddsmonkey Review Summary

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If you’re feeling really really lazy, and don’t want to read the whole article then we’ve got 3 great alternatives for you:

WATCH THE SHORT FILM:

WATCH THE FULL LENGTH MOVIE:

CLAIM YOUR 30 DAY MONEY BACK TRIAL:

I’d like to say at this point, that I am in no way connected to Oddsmonkey, other than providing affiliate links at the bottom of the page, which will give me a small commission if you sign up with them.

This is my honest review after using the service for a few months now, and I wouldn’t recommend or advise on something that I did not believe in.

What is Oddsmonkey.com?

The Oddsmonkey.com team aim to provide a one stop shop to your matched betting needs and through a combination of tools, guides and a very active community go a long way to providing this for you.

They give you advice not only on sports betting such as Football, Horse racing and Tennis betting, but also give comprehensive information around Casino and Bingo offers

Oddsmonkey at a Glance

After doing our Oddsmonkey review we’ve pulled out the most important items that are included in the box, when you pay for the monthly subscription:

Oddsmonkey Basics

5 x Basic Tutorials – These are useful for the total beginner and take you through the basics behind matched betting, how to use the Oddsmatcher and get you up and running with some sample bets. These tutorials are also offered free if you sign up.

Training

New Account Offers – A comprehensive list of offers for you to sign up to split into different types of offers and rated by difficulty

Existing Customer Offer Guides – A list of guides for how the matched bettor would approach the various types of recurring reload offers

Casino & Games – The Oddsmonkey team give you a series of guides to approach the various casino games eg slots, blackjack

Bingo – Series of guides for the various companies providing Bingo offers

Tools

Oddsmonkey Oddsmatcher – Provides an up to date feed for you to compare odds between bookmakers and exchanges across the top sports.

Daily Offer Calendar – Showcases a list of all of the sports and casino offers available each day

Oddsmonkey Calculator – One of the best calculators out there with a really simple to use interface

Dutch Search – If Dutchings your thing then you’ll find all the latest matches on these search listings

The Racing Matcher – An invaluable tool for matched bettors who take up the horse racing offers. Provides a list of all offers available each day and with one click you can see what your qualifying losses will be. Provides links directly to the correct race and horse on the bookmakers websites

The Eachway Matcher – For the more advanced matched bettor but Oddsmonkeys Eachway matcher gives you another way to top up your earnings even on accounts which have been gubbed

Advanced Calculators – Estimated Value calculator (To help you calculate value from casino offers), Each Way Calculator, Each Way Reverse Calculator (To help you with partially matched bets), Risk Free Bet Calculator

Spreadsheets – A suite of spreadsheets to help you with Accounting, Accumulators and Dutching Extra Places

Community

A really friendly useful community full of experienced matched bettors.

If you’re stuck then you’re bound to find help in this community. It’s also monitored by ‘Oddsmonkey Staff’ and ‘Helpful Community Members’ so you’ll get your questions answered pretty quickly.

Blog

One of the Oddsmonkey staff gives a daily account of the offers they placed and the profits they made.

FEELING SLIGHTLY TEMPTED???

Ok, so you’ve just read a bit about Oddsmonkey, and may even have watched one of our videos, so by this point in time you MUST realise that it is a great piece of kit, so why not

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OK, so that’s our overview, but we’ve done an in depth review of the following key features as well:

Oddsmonkey Oddsmatcher

I’ve used this tool for a long time, even when you used to be able to get a free version of it that only updated every 30 seconds it was pretty useful.

The paid version is even more awesome and has up to date feeds from over 50 different bookmakers, which you can compare against the 4 major exchanges (Betfair, Smarkets, Betdaq and Matchbook).

This tool is essential for both selecting close matches for your qualifying bets, as well as finding matches that will give you the highest returns on your free bets. It’s also a pretty useful place to visit if you’re looking for close matches to place your mug bets with.

The key screen is split out as follows:

Oddsmonkey Oddsmatcher Screen

The main things to note on this screen are:

Type – Weather this is a correct score, winner, match odds, HT/FT etc

Rating % – This is a really useful indicator to show how close the match is between the back and the lay odds. The higher this number the better.When this number is displayed in red it means it’s over 100% so an arb would be available to take at this price, however, be really careful with this because you’ll have your accounts quickly closed if you do too many

SNR % – Another useful metric to show you the % return that you should get from your free bet if it is Stake Not Returned. Anything over 80% is typically good here.

Info Icon – This generates a pop up, which has summary information, a link to display similar odds at other bookmakers and also a link through to the Oddsmonkey Calculator which is pre-populated with the details of the match.

Bookmaker / Exchange – Clicking on these will give you a direct link to the event in the bookmakers or exchange site. The good thing about these links are that they go via SafeURL, which means the bookmakers can not detect that you are coming from a Matched betting service otherwise they would be quick to restrict your account. These links save an awful lot of time when searching for close matches.

Availability – Gives you a quick snapshot into how much liquidity there is in the exchange

Clock icon – Just shows you how long ago these prices were taken. It’s best to just refresh the page as often as possible to get the latest rates, however, some feeds take longer to update than others which is why this is a useful indicator.

Oddsmatcher Filter -If you’re using the Oddsmonkey Oddsmatcher then you’ll also find the Filter that is provided to be really useful as this helps you sort through all the different types of matches available.

For example there may be an offer that you have played that is restricted to the correct score market for odds over evens (2.0).

Using this filter you can quickly enter these credentials and see what’s available for those conditions.

Disabled Bookmakers – Yes, you’re going to get gubbed at some stage so just add the list of bookies here to stop their results showing up.

Alerts – This is another handy tool, which allows you to set up to 6 filters which will send you emails if there are any results for that specific filter.

Dutch Search

Dutch Search Screen

The Dutch Search provides you all the info you need to place your dutching bets, and functions in exactly the same way as the Oddsmatcher.

The Oddsmonkey Calculator

We reviewed this calculator recently as well, and to be honest it’s my personal favourite as it’s just so easy to use.

The Oddsmonkey calculator is split into 2 different modes:

Simple Mode

Oddsmonkey Matched Betting Calculator Normal

This will do your basic calculations for you and allows you to enter back stakes, odds, and commission, and if you enter the lay odds and commission it will simply tell you how much you need to add for your lay stake and give you a handy link directly through to the bookmakers and exchange to do this.You can do this for normal bets and both your stake not returned or stake returned free bets.

Advanced Mode

Oddsmonkey Matched Betting Calculator Advanced Mode

If you activate this mode it will give you further options of what you could overlay or underlay and what your potential returns would be if the event won at either the bookmakers or the exchange.

Part LaysThere will often be an occassion as a matched betor when your exchange bet did not get fully matched as the odds fluctuated. This leaves you in an awkward position of not knowing how much you should counteract with to place the remainder of your exchange bet.

Luckily Oddsmonkey have thought about this and have a unique ‘Part Lays’ feature.If the odds fluctuate you just need to enter the new odds, and the amount that has been matched so far as a partial lay, and it will calculate the amount you should now lay at the new odds.

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If you want to see us using these features in action then hop on over to our Youtube Channel:

FANCY A GO YOURSELF??

You have to agree, these features are pretty cool, so if you fancy trying these out yourself then Oddsmonkey will give you a 30 day 100% money back guarantee!

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Bookmakers Offers Listings

Daily Offer Calendar

Scanning the internet for reload offers is a time-consuming thing, so having all of the available offers in one central place, is a really neat feature.

Daily Offers List

Oddsmonkey split the offers that are available out into a daily offer calendar, which are categorised as easy, medium or hard offers to play and give you an indication of the potential profit that you can make from each offer.

The best thing about this feature is that each offer comes with a write up of the rules of the offer as well as a strategy for the best way to play this offer, which can often take up a lot of time and headscratching in itself.

Offer Tips

If this isn’t enough then each offer has a link through to the community where members will proactively be discussing their tactics.

New Account Offers

Whilst there is an awful amount of value to be given to the more experienced matched bettor, there is also a great deal of value for the beginner.

Most useful of all is a really well structured set of guides to the different sign up offers that are split out into easy, average and hard and categorised as the different type of offer that you will have to play:

Bet X Get X Sign Up Offers
Risk Free Bet Sign Up Offers
Rollover Bonus Offers
Multi Step Offers
Enhanced Odds
Mobile Offers

New Account Sign Up Offers

Each of these offers then has a comprehensive guide, giving you step by step instructions of how you should play the offer, what the requirements are and even a link to the Oddsmatcher with pre-filtered results.

Basically it makes these sign up offers as painless as possible, and of course, if you’re ever in doubt there is a specific section in the Community to discuss each of these offers.

There are guides available for Bingo and Casino offers as well as your standard bookmakers offers.

FEELING LAZY?

Prefer to see a movie? It’s not exactly Spielberg, but we’ve put together a video of the Oddsmonkey offers pages in the video below:

CHECK THE LATEST OFFERS?

If these step by step offers and guides are what you need then why not try out the Oddsmonkey 30 day 100% money back guarantee!

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The Oddsmonkey Racing Matcher

For me, this tool has simply been awesome. I used to spend a long time flicking between different screens to get a close match on a race, only to find that the odds changed and I was too slow to put the bet on.

On top of this, on a standard racing Saturday, this used to take up a huge amount of time going through all the different races with the different bookmakers and trying to get on some good matches.

Now, most of that pain is taken away with the Oddsmonkey Racing Matcher.

The Racing Matcher

As you can see, for every given day it lists all of the races, with a list of all the offers available on that particular race at the different bookmakers.

If you click on the button it will bring up a feed showing you all of the closest matches that are available.

This means that with one click you can see whether there is a close match and what the qualifiying loss will be for that offer.I

If you find a match that you want to get on then all you have to do is click on the link, which brings up a pop up with the following info:

Eachway Calculator

Each of these windows has Safe links through to the bookies, in most case with your bet pre-selected.

My process now is a lot simpler as all I have to do is click on each of the bookies that I’m not gubbed from, check out if any decent matches are available, then simply click through and place the bet.

You can hit the refesh button as often as you like to get the latest odds.

Simply Awesome!

FEELING LAZY?

Watch our video with live action using the Oddsmonkey Racing Matcher:

Take me to the races!!!

Do you want to have a quick and easy way to view each days racing offers and profit from a 30 day 100% money back guarantee!

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The Oddsmonkey Eachway Matcher

No, if we’re talking of awesome and you’re looking for a way to print money, then the Eachway matcher is going to knock your socks off!!!

This clever bit of software takes advantage of arbs in the Eachway market rather than on the Win market, so these go under the radar of most bookies.

To understand how this works we need to understand that an Eachway bet is made up of 2 bets:

A bet that the horse will win
A bet that the horse will be placed

The general principle is that to calculate the place odds the bookmaker usually arbitrarily just divides the win odds by a fraction of the starting price, usually 1/4 or 1/5.

However, in the exchange the odds are more based on probability as they are not set by the bookmaker, but rather by the market force instead.

This means, that in certain circumstances ‘arbs’ will occur and you will be able to make a profit whatever the result of the race.T

he best thing about this software is that you can use it on gubbed accounts and you don’t need to rely on offers. As long as you have an account still open and the stakes aren’t restricted then you can use this tool.

So what does it look like?

The Eachway Matcher

Key things to note from this screen are that it provides SafeURL links through to the bookies as well as the exchanges for the Win and the Place part of the bet

Runners – Depending on how many runners there are in a race, the number of places that a bookie will payout will change.

There are often horses that pull out an are non-runners and this can mean that the bookie will update the number of places that they are paying out, however, you won’t be able to change the payout from the exchange..

If by bad luck the horse finishes in the place that has been withdrawn then you can actually lose quite a bit of money as you will still have to pay out the exchange liability, but won’t receive anything from the bookmaker.

This is a nightmare scenario so you need to be careful not to place bets too far in advance. Oddsmonkey will highlight the race in red if one more non runner will change the number of places that the bookie will payout.

Rating % – Same as on the Oddsmatcher indicates the percentage profit for your bet and SNR% is your return if using a free bet

Arb Rating % – Shows the rating of the normal arb on the win part of the bet. We want this to be less than 100% so that it isn’t flagged as an arb with the bookmaker.

Max Profit – How much you’ll make from the race

Filters – The Channel 4 or Extra Place filters come in handy and there are a number of parameters that you can configure in the Filter panel such as removing bookmakers and also selecting to hide races where one withdrawal will change places paid.

Setting / Alerts – You probably don’t want to be sitting in front of your computer all day so you can set up both visual and audio alerts to notify you when a suitable match for you becomes available eg you may only want to try and get on matches that have a profit of £5 or more.

Refresh – Another nice touch is you can set the screen to autorefresh at intervals of 30 seconds, 1 minute of 2 minutes.

The Each Way Calculator

Once you’ve found a match that you want to bet on, just click on the ‘Open Calculator’ link and you’ll find exactly the amounts that you should bet:

Eachway Calculator

You can adjust the odds and the stakes that you want to add and the profit will update accordingly, to see if this is worth you betting on.

Because you have to place 3 bets, often you’ll find that by the time you get to place the third bet, the odds will have changed so it’s handy that you can just plug the numbers into this calculator and readjust your lay stake.

Oddsmonkey Eachway Matcher Drawbacks

Now unfortunately this Eachway Matcher isn’t all milk and honey and there are a few things you need to consider:

This is an advanced tool so shouldnt be used with big stakes by beginners because you can easily lose a lot of money if you place the wrong bets
You need to be really quick to place your bets. Thousands of people are probably watching the same matches on a Saturday so you need to be quick off the draw to place your bets
Sometimes you won’t be able to get your bet fully matched, which can be a real pain as you will have to try and recalculate a partially matched Each Way bet, which gets complicated
If there are a lot of retirements you can easily get caught out by Rule 4 and if you’re unlucky will payout a large liability. This also means that you can’t place bets well in advance of a race as there is more likelihood of horses pulling out.

Overall, however, I absolutely love this tool and recently have been making most of my Matched Betting money out of this.

It’s so much better than hoping that a horse comes in 2nd to the SP favourite or some other rubbish offer, because this will guarantee profit time after time.

It’s also great for the Extra Places as well, and you can easily cover a few horses in the race and hope that they come in on that extra place to give you an amazing extra payout.

This happened with me on a couple of horses recently and I won over £200 each time

FEELING LAZY?

Watch our video with showing the Oddsmonkey Eachway Matcher in action:

GUARanteed PROFIT???

Do you want to stay under the bookies radar and make money from the eachway market, regardless of the result?

YES, Give me Risk Free Money!lorem ipsum dolor

The Oddsmonkey Community

I’ve found the Oddsmonkey community to be very active and I think with more and more people joining it’s just going to get better over time.

The community is basically split out into new sign up offers, reloads and general themes:

In general, I’ve found the community members to be really helpful and quick to respond and you have both ‘Helpful Community Members’ and Oddsmonkey staff to help you with your enquiries.

The Oddsmonkey Blog

This is basically just a blog where one of the Oddsmonkey team members is trying to hit a target of £600 a month, so he goes step by step through every offer that he plays.

It’s not the most useful feature but is interesting to see how other people can still make money from matched betting and the kind of offers that they go through each day.

Oddsmonkey.com Blog

The Oddsmonkey Acca Matcher

There are a number of other tools out there at the moment including Accumulator Generator, that are offering services to find you the best Accas, and the Oddsmonkey team have just added their own version to their subscription service.

At the time of writing this was still very much in its infancy and has just come out of beta phase with 3 options:

Accumulator No Lay Method

This is what I would call the lazy method where all you have to do is to add the legs of the Acca on the Bookmakers website and you don’t need to lay these off.

The idea is that because there is a potential to get a free bet, then over time you can expect to earn the ‘Expected Value’ figure per Acca.

The thing with this approach is that you could lose all of your stake and you could win big on each Acca, however, you need to look at the results over time.

The minimum number of Accumulators that they recommend to give you this average is 100.

Oddsmonkey Lay All Accamatcher

Accumulator Lay All at Start Method

This is similar to the No Lay approach, apart from you will also need to lay your bets off at the exchange

Accumulator Lay Sequentially Method

This technique requires more effort on your behalf, but can also be more rewarding as well. The general approach is quite simple again, where you need to lay off each leg of your Acca, until one of your legs loses.

As soon as you lose a leg, you stop laying off, and hope that the rest of the legs win, so that you can hit your refund.If all your legs win or you lose more than 2 legs, then you will end up making a loss, however, the legs are chosen to give you a competitive advantage against the bookies in the long run.

Oddsmonkey Lay Sequentially Accamatcher

As you can see in the screenshot below the Acca screen gives you a dropdown to select one of the bookies that has an Acca refund / insurance offer on, and then the software will pre-populate the screen with matches that fit the offer criteria (ie the correct leagues and minimum odds).

The most useful thing to look at on this screen is the widget below, which shows you the different scenarios of the Acca, how likely they are and what you would win/lose if that scenario happened.

On top of this it gives you the Expected Value, which is the value of the Acca you would get on average if you did the same Accumulator a hundred times.

The Accumulator selection is chosen for you, however, you can swap in and out legs yourself and update the Acca.

This is something I would recommend to keep you under the bookies radar, because I imagine a lot of people will be doing the same Acca selections from this oddsmonkey tool, so it could raise suspicion.

Once you’ve chosen your Acca, you can save this and then goto the ‘Saved Accas’ section:

Saved Accas Screen

This is the screen that you will need to visit after each leg of the Acca has finished. You’ll need to enter whether the leg has won or lost and then update the Acca.

You’ll then be shown how much you should lay in the next leg, and if the lay odds have fluctuated you can update them here, and it will automatically re-calculate your lay stake…. genius!

This is another great addition to their suite of tools and I would say that this alone is worth the £15 a month subscription.

What does Oddsmonkey Premium Subscription Include?

At the moment Oddsmonkey are running a limited time offer of £15 per month premium subscription, which you can cancel at any time and also comes with a 30 day money back guarantee.For this money you’ll get everything that I’ve talked about in this post:

Access over 100+ tutorials
Access the Oddsmatching tool
Access to the Dutching tool
Access to the Racing Matcher
Access to the Daily Offer Calendar
Access to the Acca Matcher
Access to the online Community
Full online customer support
No minimum contract cancel anytime

FEELING LAZY?

Watch our video review of the Oddsmonkey Acca Matcher in action:

GUARanteed PROFIT???

Do you want to stay under the bookies radar and make money from the eachway market, regardless of the result?

YES, Give me Risk Free Money!lorem ipsum dolor

What Don’t I Like About Oddsmonkey?

It’s pretty hard to find any negative points really.

If I’m really looking for something then I’d say that on the Eachway matcher some of the feeds like Betway for example tend to lag a little, which means when you try to place the bet, you’ll find the odds have changed. However, I suspect that’s more to do with the feed than the Oddsmonkey service.

I don’t like the claims that you can make £1500 a month from Matched Betting as I don’t personally believe that’s possible, at least for an extended period of time, unless you’re spending hours doing it, or you’re multi accounting, but I understand it’s a sales tactic.

That’s about it really, everything else is really positive and I think the price of £15 a month is fine as well, considering the value it gives you.

What Do I Like About Oddsmonkey?

To be honest, everything that I’ve mentioned above!

The Oddsmonkey team are obviously experienced in matched betting and know what some of the key issues are for matched bettors.

Where possible they’ve provided tools and shortcuts to make Matched Betting consume less of your time and give you the most profit.

For me, the Eachway matcher is an excellent product that you can just use again and again, without having to deal with the hassle of redeeming bonuses, rollovers or the threat of getting your accounts banned, so this is the standalone benefit for me.

The Racing Matcher is simply awesome as it saves you so much time trying to find close matches and I’m sure the Acca Matcher is going to develop into another killer product.

For Beginners as well this is an excellent product as it gives you great step by step tutorials and provides and excellent community to back you up with any help or support you may need.

Where Can I join?

If you hop on over to oddsmonkey.com you’ll find 3 different options available for you.

You can either:

Sign up to a free account, which will give you access to some of the basic tutorials and give you enough info to get started
Sign up to the premium monthly subscription for £15 a month
Sign up to the annual subscription for £150 per yearIf you have any doubt about this then I suggest you sign up to the free account and give it a go.

If you’re still in doubt sign up to the £15 premium subscription and if you are not comfortable with this after 30 days you’ll get your money back

Oddsmonkey Review Summary

Price:

Money Making Potential

Value For Money:

Ease of Use:

Passive Income Rating

My personal opinion, is that without this product you’re just going to be spending a lot more time doing things that you shouldn’t be wasting your time on, when they can be done a lot quicker with a tool like this.

There are also some unique tools like the Eachway matcher that you won’t be able to do yourself, without either being a maths genius or having to work with a lot of different crazy excel sheets.

I’ve tried the product, I’m making money from it every week, so can’t recommend it highly enougy.

However, like I say if you’re in any doubt, just sign up to the free account and see if this is the right product for you.

FREE

Introduction Training Guides
Earn up to £45
No card details required
Immediate activation
Basic online customer support

FREE

TRY NOW

PREMIUM MONTLY

Earn up to £1500 per month
Access over 100+ tutorials
Access the Oddsmatching tool
Access to the Dutching tool
Access to the Racing Matcher
Access to the Daily Offer Calendar
Access to the online Community
Full online customer support
No minimum contract cancel anytime
30 day 100% money-back guarantee

£15 / month

TRY NOW

PREMIUM ANNUAL

Earn up to £1500 per month
Access over 100+ tutorials
Access the Oddsmatching tool
Access to the Dutching tool
Access to the Racing Matcher
Access to the Daily Offer Calendar
Access to the online Community
Full online customer support
No minimum contract cancel anytime
30 day 100% money-back guarantee

£150 / year

TRY NOW

STILL FEELING LAZY?

If you’ve got this far, then congratulations…but there’s more…. WATCH THE VIDEO BELOW FOR FULL DETAILS AND LIVE SCREENSHARES OF THE ODDSMONKEY TOOLS IN ACTION:

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!