FlowMark - Making Money Online

Online Marketing!! Its everywhere, in your face, down your throat, in your ears, up your nose. Everyone is raving about it and no one sees past it.

However, the real world is awash with ways and means of marketing your new online money spinner and here’s a rundown of the top 5:

Flyers
The humble yet immensely powerful flyer. People forget about these too easily as they often get thrust them in busy shopping centres and so pass them by. However, a well placed bunch of flyers can do amazing thigns for your visitor numbers. A local company recently dropped a bunch of flyers at our offices. Absolutely every employee picked up a copy curiously devouring its contents. Precisely what you want!

Local Papers
If you can afford national then great - go for it!! But I figure many of you are still starting out and so an ad or two in your local newspaper or perhaps a specialist magazine could help boost reader and visitor numbers. Hot Tip: Try and do a series of ads as this helps re-inforce the ad and product/site in the minds of readers.

Word of Mouth
The good ol’ fashioned speaking to people!! Simpel really - you talk to your freinds, co-workers, family, everyone you can think of! The more the better! Too often people forget the people around them as they jump out for the people far away.

Stickers
Bumper stickers, window stickers, kiddie stickers, any stickers. Stick ‘em everywhere - though be sure not to get into trouble for it.

Business Cards
For the more professional meetings or locations its always worth having a stash of business cards to hand out to prospective custoemrs, visitors, etc. Many people tend to treat business cards with a lot of respect and are always willing to take down the number or at least visit the site as a courtesy.

So this is the top five but as always its worth thinking up new ideas - just remember that the online world isn’t the only world we have.

Tags: offline, media, traditional, online

One of the many tools in the black hat box of online money-making is getting your competitors banned from one or more of their affiliate schemes. Whether that be Adsense, Casale, Mirago, Miva or some other click based affiliate network. They all track and monitor for fraudulent activity to make sure their advertisers aren’t being ripped off but what they look for is precisely what can be exploited by a black hatter:

Clicks
Ultimately it boils down to clicks and what those clicks ‘look’ like from their side. Some of the key points on these click fingerprints are:

• IP - The ultimate and the most obvious. If large numbers of clicks are coming from the same IP address you can pretty much guarantee their fraudulent. For those that don’t already know an IP address is like a personal ID for a PC or other network device.
• User Agent - The browser or other app you’re using to click that link with. Firefox, IE, Mozilla, etc. are all User Agents. So again as above if many are coming through with the same info here its dodgy.
• Cookie - Many of these services will provide a cookie which is also checked for whenever you return. If the cookie is found its likely this is the same person going back and forth. Fraudulent in other words.
• Timing - Unless the site is massively popular the chances of it getting 150 clicks in 20 mins on the same banner is highly unlikely.
• Conversions - How many impressions turn into conversions? If every impression on that Adsense block turns into a click then something fishy is detected and it’ll be flagged.

Attack
So attacking your competitor couldn’t be simpler - you do everything you SHOULDN’T do from the list above to your competitors site. Either manually with a web browser or using a web ‘robot’. Now I may be a believer in free knowledge but I won’t go as far as to show how to make one of those!

Affiliate Leads
Just a quick note about other affiliate schemes such as leads and sales. One way to exploit these is by submitting via the competitor site to his affiliates a slew of bogus and bad data. This will normally get you banned by the likes of TradeDoubler, etc.

Tags: blackhat, click fraud, tradedoubler, adsense

Google have launched a mobile Adsense.  Its Adsense for your mobile phone geared web pages so there’s never been a better time to jump on the mobile bandwagon.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: google, adsene

If you’re looking for the Adsense API then you may be disappointed because Google recently increased the minimum impressions limit to 100,000 therefore making it far less accesible to small-time users.

Its possible Google may return with a cut down API for the lower end but so far no news on that.

On the other hand Google have announced an Adsense Webinar for all those interested in making hte most of Adsense.  You can read the story or register directly.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: google, adsense

I spotted a great article on choosing the best referal programs and maximising through put with the Google referal program.

Read here.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: adsense, google

Those new to Google Webmaster Tools heres the quick intro: They offer stats, information and utilities to webmasters. Such as chekcing for 404’s, spidering of content, sitemaps, etc. Why is this relevent? Because by knowing your site inside out it helps you work your site to the best of its potential.

So now to the update: Google recently added subscriber stats to their service which allows you to see just how many people have subscribed to your blog or site. This is a great new addition to an already stellar service and is most likely a result of Googles recent acquisition of Feedburner.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: google, tools

If your site, blog or forum hasn’t already got an RSS feed then get your skates on!! With Feedburner recently making a lot of its pro features free and Google Reader adding search now couldn’t be a better time to jump on the RSS bandwagon and make your content fly that little bit further.

Most forums (vBulletin, phpBB), and blogs (Blogger, Wordpress) have this functionality built in and all you need to do is switch it on.

Once you have be sure to sign up to the Feedburner service to help monetize some of your traffic - oh and Text Link Ads also provide for that too!

Blogged with Flock

Tags: rss, hints

The AuctionAds service which was recently taken over by Text Link Ads is offering all new publishers a free $25 credit for doing nothing more than signing up to their site.

Get in on it now!

Blogged with Flock

Tags: ppc, autionads, textlinkads

The internet is full of spam and if you’ve run a community interactive site such as a blog, forum, etc then you’ll have been a victim of some form of spam.

Now I’m interested in monetizing my web traffic so I don’t have much of an issue with people spamming me because I can learn from it.  Not learn what to do but learn what NOT to do!

For example when reading through and moderating my blog comments there’s a list of obvious spam mistakes:

1. Lots of Links
Having a load of links crammed into a comment is a dead give-a-way.  I’m amazed they even bother with this anymore as I’ve yet to see anywhere recently where it’s worked.

2. Short Messages
If someone comments: “Great post” as much as I’d like to believe it I can’t help but feel that URL they gave is nothing more than a spam posting trying to remain as generic as possible to slip under the radar.  Which brings me to my next give-a-way…

3. Irrelevant
Anything mentioning “Integrated Respiratory Systems” in the comments of a blog about marketing probably isn’t going to be a valid one.  So its binned immediately.

It’s also not just the site owners who do this but the search engines.  These patterns have been known and the search engines have tweaked their algorithms such that most of this spamming is utterly futile.

So what can be learnt form this?  It’s really quite simple and when you start doing it you’ll realise it pays off MUCH more than using these cheap, automated spamming bots that seem so popular.

Be genuine.

I know - astounding isn’t it.  Too think you can get a hefty page rank and visits simply by being a decent human being and NOT spamming.  So my list of do’s to get people to visit your site:

1. Don’t Advertise
Unless you’re using Adwords, Miva or some other PPC or affiliate network don’t plaster yourself over the net.  It’ll be obvious you’re spamming.  That doesn’t mean you never post your URL but if you do make sure its for a decent reason or after you’ve made a contribution.

2. Be a Good Site
It doesn’t take much to have a good site.  I’ve found all it takes is some time, honesty and willingness to learn.

3. Network
When you visit sites in your subject area and speak, comment, post to others then do it properly, genuinely and try to give something back.  That way the visitors are more likely to look up your site - hell the author/webmaster will likely chekc out your site and probably mention it later or stick it on their blog roll.

It all boils down to being a decent member of the net, talking, networking and being human.  Drop the bots, the crap and the marketing bullshit.  Be yourself.

Tags: blogging, blog, marketing

Text Link Ads have been around now for a few years and have a relatively unique way for publishers to monetize their site. Rather than working off a per-click or impression basis these guys simply charge a set fee for their advertisers to have a link on your site. So for example on one of my sites I may have a page in which an advertiser has put in a bid of $5 and linked from the word “widgets” on that page to their site. For that $5 they get a month with that link in place.

Its great for publishers because its a more certain and solid income stream. You know you’re getting that money for that month as opposed to the seasonal ups and downs of PPC/PPM.

I wouldn’t say its a replacement for other methods of monetization but its certainly a worthy component of a larger campaign to bring in the cash from your sites.

Tags: textlink ads, cpm, cpc, ppc, ppm