Earn Over the Web

If you are a blogger and you do not inclued links to related posts already, now may be a good time to start. They are a great way to recommend interesting posts that readers may like, increasing the value and interst of each page. There are a few things that related posts can help accomplish:

1. Related posts can help increase your subscribers/regular readers. Many users will arrive at single posts via search engines or links. Showing related posts encourages a reader to continue through your blog after finishing an article, letting them discover more content and be more interested in your content.
2. Related posts increase pageviews. This can translate into more ad views and clicks, and therefore more money earned from your blog. Since the related posts fit with the post, readers are a lot more likely to browse through them than they are to simply click on a post in your archives.
3. Related posts introduce readers to content they would not have otherwise seen. To someone visiting your site, discovering an interesting post about something they have been wondering about will add greatly to their viewing experience. A reader will come away happy that they have found something new. This builds loyalty within both new viewers and subscribers.

Adding related posts manually is a taxing task, and this is why there are methods available to do it for you. I personally use Aizatto’s Related Posts v0.5. This is a WordPress plugin that automatically inserts related posts at the end of each post based on keywords. It is fully customizable, via the admin panel, allowing you to do things like add excerpts, trim title lengths, and use custom CSS schemes.

If you own a blog or website and have been looking to monetize it, chances are that you have come across Text-Link-Ads. Of the many ad providers/affiliate proagrams available, TLA is at the forefront. They offer high payouts, targeted ads, easy setup, and more. They also take a relatively low comission compared with many other similar services. As a publisher, you can place:

• Text-Link ads
• Post level ads
• RSS ads (feedvertising)
• Affiliate links

They also offer a few free tools like a calculator for how much you will earn at different placements, and a ranking tool.Text-Link-Ads makes it easy to insert ads, once your site has been approved, you simply get the ad code and place it on your site. Even if your site is not approved, you can still earn $25 for a successful publisher or advertiser who is referred to the program through your link. This allows for you to place affiliate banners promoting the program almost anywhere, without having to have a minimum pagerank.

If you are an advertiser or publisher who is looking for monetization or alternatives to adsense, you should try Text-Link-Ads.

Now, this blog is about making money, not winning prizes, but I just had to write about eScavengers. Why? Not two hours ago, I won a Compaq Presario V6310US from them.

The premise of eScavengers operates around the fact that it is a real-time competition. Just about every other night there is something called an “adventure” You are presented with various webpages during each adventure, along with clues based on the content. Like a scavenger hunt, you follow the clues and find their corresponding text, image, or picture on the site, and click on it. Wrong answers yield a 3-second penalty, and correct answers move you on.

Since everyone competes at the same time, once you finish you get a report of the results. The first person to complete each adventure wins the grand prize. Almost all the prizes are worth over $100, and there are all kinds of categories of adventures. Having won, they informed me that you can claim only 3 grand prizes per year, but most will be lucky to win one.  Everyone who competes, whether they win or lose, receives “dubloons,” which they can trade in for things in the store. The current value of things in the store, however, implies that you’d have to win a heck of a lot of adventures to get anything.

eScavengers has only been around on the net for about 3 weeks, but they already have quite a few members, and the buzz about them is growing. The support there will answer all of your questions quickly, and if you win, they call you and congratulate you. It is the real-time competition aspect of the site that makes it so attractive, you actually have a chance to win based on your skill and speed. So let the adventure begin, with eScavengers!

Today I’m going to tell you about a site called SoftwareJudge. SoftwareJudge is a site that will pay you to write honest reviews of the software in their list. I emphasize the word honest because that is what the site stresses. They do not want all positive reviews or marketing BS, just clean, truthful accounts of the programs you review. You get paid up to $50 for each review, with a minimum pay of at least $1. You will probably get no more than $1 for your first few reviews, but depending on your quality, the payments can ramp up rapidly. You can spend earned money on software, or cash out at $200.  The selection of software up for review on their site is not too extensive, but does include programs from all kinds of categories.

Pros

• Software from many categories
• Allows negative reviews
• Every review gets paid
• Review form is organized and easy
• Active members are given freebies often

Cons

• List of software is not updated often
• Most reviews only pay $1
• Cashout method is tricky, especially with a minmum of $200 for actual cash
• Max of 3 reviews per day

Bottom Line

If you can churn out quality reviews, SoftwareJudge can make you a lot of money for writing the truth about the programs you have used.

Today I am writing a review of a site called Bassabids. I’ve been a member of Bassabids for a few months, and I’ve not seen any other sites which mimic their unique concept. Essentially, you purchase bids for their auctions at $2 each (some auctions like the iPod shuffles are usually given 10 free bids) and bid any amount. At the end of the auction, the lowest unique bidder wins.

Pros

• High net profit if you win
• Free auctions offer excitement
• Bidding through SMS is allowed
• Small community means higher chances

Cons

• Takes initial investment to buy bids
• No guaranteed strategy
• Auctions only end once maximum bids is reached

So far I have won nothing, but I have bid on many auctions with the free bids given to me. I think that anyone comfortable with investing a little into buying bids will be very successful. Imagine winning a car, computer, or TV for just cents on the dollar.

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If you’ve ever looked around at your options for advertising on your blog, you realize the efficiency of directly selling your own ads. Middlemen and large companies have monopolies over the industry. They get money instantly, take their cut, and pay you what profit is left weeks later. There’s nothing much you could do about it. There are plugins that allow you to handle the sponsoring of posts and similar things, but until now there were none that allowed you to sell text ads. This is where WPTextAds comes in.

WP Text Ads offers advertisers 3 ways to buy ads in content-relevant pages:

• Individual post
• Home page
• All pages

Rather than a fixed price, now your advertisers can choose to buy ads for $5 per post, $30 for the home page or $50 for every page. You set the prices, and he benefits from the savings.

These choices help your advertisers save money, and you are more likely to win them as new customers.

WPTextAds has tons of features, and is fully customizable. The free version should be enough for most small blogs, supporting two ads in each of the three site areas (home, post, full site). The full version costs $127, but there is a 180-day money back guarantee, it seems the creators are certain you will make profit. I think that if you are monetizing your Wordpress blog, this plugin is a must.

For anyone who wants to start a professional and respected blog, the answer is no.

If you don’t know about them, blog traffic exchanges such as UpMyRank (alexa) and BlogMad (general) are services that allow you to gain visitors/pageviews to your site by viewing the sites of others. The surfing itself ranges from software (autosurfs that popup windows for 30 seconds, then automatically move on) to browser-based approaches that have a navbar to navigate to the next site. After viewing a few sites, you earn credit, which you can spend for visits to your own site. Sound tempting? It is.

Here are the downsides:

• Visitors usually will not return; a simple 30-second pageview does not yield a return customer who is legitimately interested in what you have to say.
• Visitors will not click on ads. If you have already monetized your site, the views you get will be counted, but you will not get ad clicks, and your percentage of click-throughs will decrease.
• Ad networks often detect referral traffic or illegitimate pageviews and will suspend your account. Services like Adsense do not allow these traffic exchanges (Adsense TE Policy) or at the very least will not pay you for the clicks.
• You often have to sacrifice something for traffic exchanges, whether it be wasting your time surfing through random sites of no interest to you or installing questionable software on your computer.
• The traffic is not truly sustainable. If your site reaches a certain alexa rank or pagerank that is artificially inflated, you will need to continue the exchanges for an indefinite amount of time to keep your site there.

Of course, if you are looking to make quick cash from a parked domain, a throwaway blog, etc. then these might be just what you need, but think of your dignity when you do so.

The bottom line is that you could be investing your time and effort to providing users with interesting and worthwhile content that will keep them hooked and help them out.

I’m going to assume that all of you have heard of Firefox, and that most of you use Firefox. If you don’t, you may have noticed already that when you visit this site in IE, you get a message at the top of the page suggesting that you switch to Firefox. This message is courtesy of a script called Explorer Destroyer. Here’s how it works:

• Script autodetects IE
• Displays switch splash screen to IE users
• Switches people to Firefox
• Three levels of seriousness
• Google gives you referral money for switches
• Infuriates Microsoft

Essentially, you download the script, insert your adsense ID, and add it to your site. Visitors using IE (the inferior browser) will see a script at one of three seriousness levels, depending on your choice. At level 1, visitors using IE see a message encouraging them to download Firefox (with a download link) running across the top of the page. At level 2, visitors using IE get a friendly splash page encouraging them to download Firefox. At level 3, users cannot even access your site with Internet Explorer. Here is a screenshot of level 1:

Personally, I would recommend using level 1. Level 2 and especially level 3 are too unfriendly and may turn viewers away. Earning $1 per referral is not worth blocking access to up to 75% of users.

If you haven’t already switched to Firefox, I would highly recommend it. There are so many reasons to switch: security, ease of use, speed, stability, extensions, and looks, that the decision is clear.

The bottom line for registering domains:

The most important thing about registering your domain is to do it as soon as possible. Sitting around and planning a site around a specific name is no good if you can’t secure that domain name in time. While naming a site after a domain may seem backwards, the truth is that it sometimes must be done. At around $15 a year for registration, even if your site name or domain changes before it goes live, you can still park or resell the domain you bought earlier.

Just today I discovered a site called “Change Advertising Forever” (link). The premise of the site is based around user-created advertising. Creative users submit video, flash, and perhaps still advertisements, and promote them to their peers. Those that are chosen by the advertiser and those that are chosen by the community will earn their creators money, up to $50,000. They have not opened up yet, but there is a signup field for name and email, presumably they will send a bulletin once their service has debuted. According to the site:

• Paying advertisers post “Requests for Brilliance” on our site, seeking YOUR creative talents in a variety of advertising media.
• Feeling inspired, YOU choose to respond.
• YOU create an ad on your own— or by collaborating with other members of our community.
• YOU submit your ad and promote it among your peers.
• If your ad is selected by either the advertiser or the community,

• YOU can earn as much as $50,000