To Donate or not to Donate

In the beginning I thought offering visitors the option to Donate was a bit cheeky!

However, after reading an article by Steve Pavilina, I am starting to come round to the idea being a valid option to make money online. I have therefore decided to put a Donate button and page on this website.

In his article Steve Pavilina informs us that Donation's are in fact his second biggest earner behind Google Adsense (his site currently brings in $1000 per day, a very impressive sum!).

In fact his top six income streams are:

1. Google Adsense.
2. Donations.
3. Text Link Ads.
4. Chitika Mini Malls.
5. Affiliate Marketing Programmes like an Ei42 Shop.
6. Individual Advertising.

To date I have only begun to use Google Adsense, Donations and Affiliate Programmes in my quest to develop money making strategies.

It's great to imagine a blog or site bringing in $1000 per day but it is also impossible to achieve without large volumes of traffic passing through. I have started to document my ways to generate traffic and will see how many visitors the methods described bring to this blog.

Anyway back to Donations!

The article continued, stating that an average donation is around $10, but that Steve has also received a number of $100 donations too. It is very simple to add a donate button via your PayPal account. Simply sign into or create your account, merchant services, click donations in the useful link section and follow the instructions.

By providing your visitors with a donate button you are offering them a means of voluntary contributions, should they wish to support your site/content. It is definitely a win-win situation as it doesn't cost you anything to set up and therefore qualifies as a genuine possible way to make money online via a blog.

Donations will give you a sense of pride in your Blog as it will give you an indication of the value readers put on your site. After all if they are willing to give money for something that could be free to them, then surely that has to be one of the highest complements.

Easy ways to Make Money Online with an ei42 shop

An ei42 shop could be a great little money spinner! The only problem is that it is currently only available in the UK.

I personally came across the site whilst reading Mikes Money Making Mission Blog (he has just begun a test to see if owning a shop does to prove to be a good source of making money online).

The Great thing is that setting up a shop is Easy and Free meaning that it is Risk Free!

What is ei42?

Essentially ei42 is all about shopping.

There are 1,507 retailers to choose from and not just any old shops. These are the UK's biggest brands including the likes of Debenhams, New Look, HMV, Tesco, Amazon, CDWow, ebay, Play.com, Boots, Waterstones, Currys, Marks and Spencer, the list just goes on and on.

Basically any shop that you would visit whilst shopping especially leading up to Christmas.

Once you sign up you get your free shop, which is created with ease via their basic template. You can choose the colour. Here is my shop to view: Drews Bargain Shop

Getting Paid.

You get money back through commission earned, these are:

1. Personal Commission; Purchases made on your own shop (you will of course need to market your own shop to get people buying). You will also receive commission on your own purchases giving you discounted shopping.
2. Team Commission; You earn a percentage of sales from sales generated by people you introduce. The commission earned is on 7 tiers of introductions which could lead to a large network (this is of course a form of MLM or Multi Level Marketing).

When you share Ei42 with your friends/readers of your site you automatically qualify to earn a percentage of the commissions generated from sales made by your whole team up to and including seven levels (which is a lot of people).

Some other benefits of an ei42 shop include:

• With other loyalty schemes your earnings are limited by the amount you personally spend but with Ei42 those limits don't exist because your team of friends is getting bigger every day.
• Every time you refer a friend to Ei42 you grow your business because every new friend adds a new shop to the Ei42 shopping network. More shops equals more sales and more profits that you can share in.

Commissions rates offered by each vendor vary but the Affiliate control panel is very clear and concise.

I will of course update how the shop has been working for me and if it is a viable form of earning money online. I will also inform via Blog Addick if there are any major issues with the site.

At the very least it will be a discounted form of buying products online from the top stores.

Adsense Ready Sites

I've just started to read a few articles on Adsense Ready Sites and the question is:

To Buy or Not To Buy!

There have got to be advantages and disadvantages with regards to buying a pack of these ready made sites.

Could these ready made sites provide us with an easy formula to make money online? Or are they just another form of corner-cutting that will ultimately lead to making someone else a lot of money instead?

Disadvantages

I have already discussed that google is looking for unique quality content to send it's visitors to. If you are buying websites that give no guarantee of being unique and are duplicated all over the web, then how are you going to get traffic to your site?

Search engines will pick up on duplicate content and will not feature the site very highly or will not feature the site at all. To earn money through adsense you need clicks, to get clicks you need traffic and so on. As far as I am concerned Search engines are currently a vital part of the traffic generating model, so you need to keep them happy with quality content.

The other issue I foresee is; can you guarantee that the site and content are legal. Many articles on the web have copyright's which of course means that you cannot use it. How are we to know if the entire site that we have just purchased is not a copy of an existing site. If our sites are copies of existing sites then, once we upload the site and content we will be breaking the law.

I have recently read a number of articles that have indicated Googles heightened attention towards MFA or Made For Adsense sites. It appears that the search engine is trying to clamp down on sites that don't really offer it's visitors any valuable information. If this is the case then you have to ask yourself if it really is worth spending money on a site that may not be featured on some of the main search engines.

Advantages

As far as I can see it is possible to buy packs of websites that guarantee unique content. If this is the case then it would be a dream to be able to pay for 10,50,100 or 150 sites that were ready made. I suspect ,like anything in life, that you would have to pay through the nose for premium content sites. I am a great believer in getting what you pay for; if you pay very little for something then the likelihood is that the quality will not be there.

Conclusion

As far as I can see Adsense Ready Sites would be a good idea if you can guarantee unique quality content. The question I keep asking myself is, why if someone has produced 150 sites with unique quality content, that will bring in a significant residual income from adsense, why would they sell them?

I personally believe that it is a far better method to create blogs one at a time. Pick a subject that you are interested in, get the site looking how you want to, do all the steps to generate traffic, incorporate google adsense into the blog or site and then update the blog once a week or month.

Of course this means work, as I haven't found a work free route yet, then my opinion is that putting work in initially is the only way forward.

Easy Ways to Make Money Online

Are their easy ways to make money online?

As far as I can see there is always work required if you want to make money online!

Sure it is easy to create a blog with Blogger, but you need visitors to visit the blog if you are going to make money.

It is also very easy to add Google adsense to your site but again without visitors your blog will not make you any money.

Traffic to a blog is crucial!

Getting Traffic to your site will inevitably require work. This includes listing your site on submission directories for one way links. The same has to be done for the blogs RSS Feeds.

The layout of the site is also very important, whether you are trying to make money via affiliates or adsense. To optimize the site and make any form of meaningful money will require time and effort.

Content is also of the essence. Even if you only want visitors to come to your site to click google ads the content is crucial. Search engines such as Yahoo, Google etc no longer base their rankings solely on meta tags, they now have a far more refined search that picks out the most relevant sites for content relating to the visitors search query. Therefore if you want your site to be the one the visitor and the search engine selects then you need quality and unique content.

Of course you can play the numbers game and start up as many blogs as possible skirting over the various web 2.0 issues but are you going to get rich by doing that. My guess is no!

The moral to this post is that in order to create a blog that is going to bring in some extra money you are going to need to put in time and effort. There is no way round this fact. Of course as you become successful you can pay people to write articles or look for advertising etc, but I fear this is a little way down the line.

Adsense - The Easy Way to Start Making Money Online

Adsense has got to be the easiest way to start making money from a blogger blog!

The best thing with Blogger is that adsense is set up for you once you have registered for an account and picked your Blog name.

Although many expert bloggers choose wordpress as their Blog tool of choice, I have decided to go with Blogger as it is free and very simple to start with.

A very simple and basic equation that I found on Problogger is that:

Adsense Revenue = Traffic Levels + High Paying Ads + Relevant Ads + Optimally Positioned and Designed Ads

Here are a few things to remember when you are adding adsense to your Blog:

• When looking to implement Adsense into your site remember to keep it simple.


• Simple Blogs make more money from Adsense - Fact!


• Look at other adsense advertisers, click on a adsense links to get idea's from other sites and users.


• Position of Ads - The great thing about the Adsense programme is that you the freedom to choose the best position for your ads. Positioning is a key element to an ads success, make sure that visitors to your blog can see the advert; underneath your heading or on the top right of the page is usually a very visual and successful place to locate them.


• Design of Ads - Google also alows you to choose the color scheme for your adverts. It is usually wise to make the ads blend in nicely with your blog so that they don't look too ugly.


• Make sure that the adverts are relevant to the information on your Blog. Remember though, once a visitor has clicked an ad, they are lost to another site!


• Once you have positioned your ads, start to work on improving the traffic to your site. Remember content is as important as SEO (search engine optimisation) these days. I will go into trying to generate traffic in a separate post once I have started to try and drive traffic to this site.


• Ads vary in the amount they pay, search the web to find the best paying adverts. Forum's may be a good place to start. I will go into this once I have tried to ascertain the information myself.


• Try new things - If a position of an ad isn't generating any clicks then try various other one's. Don't be afraid to mess around with your adverts until you find a formula that works.


• Block ads that have no relevance. It is possible to block adverts that are not relevant to the content on your site, I have not had to do this yet but I am told it is quite simple.

If you have any other tips or advice that you feel is crucial to running a successful adsense campaign add them below.

One ebook that I have been told to buy over and over again is Rob Benwell's blogging to the bank 3.0. If you have any feedback on this book let me know.