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.

Affiliate Marketing - Introduction

Affiliate marketing is an internet based form of marketing where the seller of a product (be it an individual or a business) rewards it's affiliates (which can be numerous in number) for each new customer or visitor that is a direct result of the affiliates marketing efforts.

The growing trend of affiliate marketing has evolved as a direct result of the internet and therefore lends itself perfectly to websites and blogs alike.

Affiliate marketing has become an industry in it's own right with many individuals earning significant income as a direct result. Many of the top bloggers on the internet state that the income received from affiliate marketing is in fact their top earner.

Internet marketing is of the utmost importance to companies trying to make a name for themselves and their products. Affiliate marketing is the perfect tool to get a brand out there, which has led to a great number of companies and individuals getting involved, including affiliate networks, affiliate management companies, affiliate mangers (within companies), specialised third party vendors as well as many other types of affiliates/publishers who try and sell the various products available.

Web 2.0, including blogging and online communities has led to a rise in quality of the affiliate products that are available to promote, this is a direct consequence of the fact that a poor quality product can be exposed across the entire web in double quick time.

In this day and age affiliate marketing is rightly seen as a crucial part of product/service promotion. The other advantages of an affiliate programme is that it doesn't cost much to implement and will generate a consistent source of online profit. On the other hand it is also a great tool for affiliates as it is a way of generating an income using someone elses product.

It is usually accepted that Affiliate programmes will fall into two basic categories, these are:

1. Pay Per Performance.

2. Pay Per Click.

Pay Per Performance or PPP

Is the most commonly used form of affiliate marketing by individuals and companies trying to promote their products or services. The company/individual only has to pay the for an affiliate referral when it leads to a direct sale. Look out for multi-level or tier affiliate programmes, they will reward you for other affiliates that you sign up, meaning that you get commission for your direct referrals as well as that of your sub-affiliates.

Pay Per Click or PPC

PPC affiliate programmes are by far the most common place and are very simple for an affiliate to implement. Google adsense and Blogger are a perfect example (adsense is ready made to be added to your blog via your blogs layout). You get paid a small amount for every click on an advert that is featured on your site. Remember once someone clicks an advert on your site, they are gone!

How you implement affiliate programmes into your blog is entirely up to you. From what I have read and can ascertain from the top bloggers out there, they all seem to say that there main source of income is via the sales of product and not through adsense. Personally I have started with adsense before moving on to the product side of affiliate marketing. Find out more about adsense by clicking on the adsense page link.

Affiliate Programmes

You can sign up and promote various affiliate products via PayDotCom or Click Bank. They are by far the most popular site to promote affiliate programmes, are well established and therefore a reliable source.

Write an Article - Build a Reputation

Do you want to build your online reputation?

Do you want to inform the public about a specific topic?

Why not write a featured article for Blog Addick.

You Get:

• A Life Time Link on Blog Addick.
• An article on the web for free.
• Your message out there.
• A small piece about you and your blog (one short paragraph only).

Quality, Quality, Quality:

Don't forget you are in the spotlight here, so write a quality piece about your chosen topic. The better and more interesting the article the more people will visit your site and remember your name!

Article Requirements:

• At Least 250 words per article not including the short paragraph about yourself.
• A uniquely written article by you.
• Exclusively written for this blog (not to be posted anywhere else).
• Your allowed 1 affiliate link per article.

The Way Forward:

Simply write your article and send it here. I will do the rest!

Build a Money Making Blog

The whole point of Blog Addick is to see if it really is possible to make money from blogging.

I am only a week or so into the development of Blog Addick as I write this post and am now sure that you can make some money blogging; the questions on my mind now are:

• How much can you generate?
  
• Is it enough to live on or is it just going to be pocket money?

The great thing is that you can start to build a blog for free so any money you do make will be profit. Whether or not you start to spend money to further enhance a blog depends on how quickly you wish to drive the blog forwards.

The purpose of this post is to act as a guide in developing a blog that will generate some form of income. Of course as I keep building Blog Addick and hopefully keep increasing the amount of money I generate from this Blog as I do I will share that information with you via posts.

Here are the steps that I have taken so far:

1. Choose a topic to Blog about.

This is crucial! You don't want to start writing a blog about something that you have absolutely no interest in, your readers will soon get bored and stop visiting. You don't need to be an expert in the matter that you are blogging about, the blog can be a journey describing how you have learned about the topic, your readers can help you to learn. I definitely do not claim to be a blogging expert, but the web is a great tool that can help you to learn a great deal very quickly.

I have a blog that I have started about cricket and in particular the ashes series between England and Australia. You see the site here The Ashes 2009 News. It's just something that I love and want to write about.

2. Create your free Blog.

You can do this for free (like me) with Blogger, all you need to do is follow the instructions. I have chosen blogger for the very reason that it is free! Many of the experts out there say that you can build better and more successful blogs via wordpress and your own domain name. Whilst this may be true, it is not for me at the moment, it may well be another blog building journey for me somewhere down the line. Right now I want to see if I can build a blog for as little money as possible and to make it as popular as possible. Try and think of a good original name for your blog that means something to you!

3. Optimize the Layout and Colours of your Blog

Once you have your blog created you will need to start optimizing the layout etc of your blog. I changed the template to a four column one in order to create more room on the page. I would suggest that you decide on three or four colours that you are going to use in your blog, you can mess around with this in the web layout page of blogger.

I visited two sites that have helped me enormously. They both provide blog development tips specific to blogger.

They are Tips For New Bloggers and Blogger Tips and Tricks. I think it's great that these guys are willing to share their secrets and tips with us, otherwise I know I would be lost. I strongly suggest that you add both of these sites to your favourites so that you can refer to them whenever you need them.

4. Keywords

I have used Traffic Travis to generate keywords. The programme has proven very useful throughout the building of Blog Addick. Find out more about Traffic Travis by reading the article dedicated to Traffic Travis.

5. Content

It is crucial to provide you readers with some decent content to make sure that they keep coming back. Search engines also scrutinize the quality and information provided in a blogs content to ensure that it provides it's customers (the people searching information on the net) with the best service.

There are many providers offering Blog content, the issues with these is that the content is often not that unique.

Experienced and established Bloggers usually have a number of people they use to write articles/posts for them; this is fine if you have the money. Personally I am going to build my blogs with my own posts (initially anyway).

Tip: To find decent and informative content on your niche subject search the web. Break down the category's that you consider important to your subject and put together posts on those topics. If you want to write about breaking news in your niche, simply set up a Google Alert, that way everytime a story breaks on your topic you will be able to upload a post onto your Blog. Re-write it of course to make it your own, using a story is fine as long as you give credit to the author.

How to make Money Online

Is it all in the Title?

I have just read a very interesting article about how to make money online using adsense. The article suggested that the title of a post plays a huge part towards the amount of traffic that will find it's way to your site.

This post will provide me with first hand evidence whether or not the post title does indeed generate more traffic or not!

The article went on to say that, a post entitled "How to make Money Online" generated twice as much money as a more descriptive article Heading. I'm not sure that you should be starting every post "How to make money online" as that would become rather dull. However if your not particularly interested in keeping the attention of your reader then it could be the perfect way to lure visitors to your site.

The other issue is that there must be literally thousands of posts entitled "How to make money online" so the odds are that you will be down the list on that particular search. The competition will be fierce so you better make sure that your SEO etc is all up to scratch.

You can read my ongoing article on Ways to Generate traffic and Make Money online to help optimize your blog.

The other issue with the headline is the relevance to the adsense ads. Of course there are many adverts related to "how to make money online" which will pay very well and will probably be clicked very often. The more out-there the post heading the less likely google is likely to find a relevant advert; if an advert is not relevant to the reason your visitor searched and found your site via the search engine, then why on earth would they want to click the ad. Very simple Eh!

As with all of my other stuff I will keep you up to date with any results I get from any of the discussed topics.

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.