How to Make Money on the Internet

One more week has passed and here are my MAN: stats (It’s handy that they keep these for you in real time!):

Jorge’s Statistics

Site Statistics

Overall, you have 18 sites registered on the system. For those sites you’ve been presented with 352 articles for consideration.

You’ve approved 215 and rejected 135, which means you’ve rejected 39%. You have 2 articles waiting for your decision.

In total, the system has successfully published 215 articles on your sites.

Article Statistics

You have 14 articles registered on the system. Those articles have been presented 215 times for consideration by site owners.

The articles have been approved 186 times and rejected 2 times, which means your articles have a rejection rate of 1%. A total of 27 copies are still waiting for a decision by site owners.

In total, the system has successfully published 187 copies of your articles. “

187 articles published, times 3 links per article, means I have received 561 new, targeted, anchor link in-text backlinks since I started!

Not bad! Not bad at all. In fact, that’s pretty good!

Once you get an article in the system, they just keep publishing additional versions of it every week! And the links keep accumulating!

I plan to do a summary at the end of the first month. They say that the tool always shapes the hand of the user. Getting into how this works, some interesting strategies have come up, some still developing. I’ll tell you all about these in the first month’s report…

Thanks for visiting my blog!

Jorge

Things are moving right along.  A week after my last posting, here are my stats with MAN:

“Jorge’s Statistics

Site Statistics

Overall, you have 14 sites registered on the system. For those sites you’ve been presented with 227 articles for consideration.

You’ve approved 145 and rejected 82, which means you’ve rejected 36%. You have 0 articles waiting for your decision.

In total, the system has successfully published 145 articles on your sites.

Article Statistics

You have 11 articles registered on the system. Those articles have been presented 136 times for consideration by site owners.

The articles have been approved 117 times and rejected 2 times, which means your articles have a rejection rate of 2%. A total of 17 copies are still waiting for a decision by site owners.

In total, the system has successfully published 118 copies of your articles. This number may differ from the number of approvals received for your article. When owners remove sites from the network, the article approval count is affected, but this published count is not affected.”

117 articles accepted means 117 x 3 = 351 new, live backlinks
out there! Considering that alone it’s cost me $47/351 =$0.134 per backlink, and I’m only 17 days into the 1st month so far!

Plus I have added 145 unique articles to my (mostly brand-new) blogsites. Sure, I could have gotten them from an article directory, but then I would have to copy and paste them, and they would not be unique. The 145 I got were posted on my sites automatically and yes, they are ALL unique, due to the internal spinning setup at My Articles Network.

This is going very well. I have found out:

1. I can save time with article submission by using the (still) free spinner at:

http://thebestspinner.com/

2. The article submission software at MAN is very user-friendly. Surprising after working with lots of software still in beta or programmer done, barely usable by non-programmers like me!

3. The article quality is really quite good. I reject a lot because they are way “off theme” for the site they are being offered to.

4. The stats have a “snowball” growth rate. I am setting the max article posting rate at 2 per day. The sites I have already set up continue to get more content posted daily. The articles I have already written continue to be published every day…

More later. Look for a big summary at the end of the first month (about Jan. 18)

Have a great 2010!

Regards to all,

Jorge

Now I’m getting into the use of this tool/service and am moving right along. As of this morning (December 28) here are my stats, copied off of my membership area statistics page:

“Site Statistics

Overall, you have 8 sites registered on the system. For those sites you’ve been presented with 75 articles for consideration.

You’ve approved 53 and rejected 22, which means you’ve rejected 29%. You have 0 articles waiting for your decision.

In total, the system has successfully published 53 articles on your sites.

Article Statistics

You have 6 articles registered on the system. Those articles have been presented 53 times for consideration by site owners.

The articles have been approved 41 times and rejected 1 time, which means your articles have a rejection rate of 2%. A total of 11 copies are still waiting for a decision by site owners.”

Pretty neat, huh?  

Each of those articles has three in-text key-word anchor links. Each has been “spun” between 50 and 105%, so that the versions published will all be different.  The 41 accepted and now published articles means 123 backlinks pointing back at my websites from other members’ well-cared for blogs!

The articles I rejected for posting on my sites were about 25-30% for sub-par spinning and the rest for being too far off subject.

On 4 of my existing websites I have added a WP blog in a “blogsite” folder which is cross-linked to the main XSitePro-created website. Of these 4, 2 are existing, seasoned websites, 2 are brand new, just built on new domain name sites.

The other 4  of my sites submitted to MAN are pure WP blogs, set-up on the root directory. 1 of these was existing (2-3 months old, in promotion) and the other 3 are brand new.

I have experimented with putting blogs on existing websites before, with unrelated content. Observed that the blog traffic and page counts positively affected the KW rankings of the websites. Now this is my 1st time for trying to see if related text, in a cross-linked blog in a folder on the domain, will pass even more “link juice” to the associated website.

This is now possible because I have a source of targeted articles/posts that I don’t have to write!

Questions? Comments anyone? I would be happy to answer…

More later, as this develops…

Jorge

Hello, everyone! Here’s my first update.

After a couple of days to work with the My Article Network system, I now know a lot more about it.

On the “Articles for Content” side, I now have three sites connected up and receiving content articles.  With MAN, you can add as many sites as you wish. But each site must must have a remote publishing API, for it to be added to and become part of the My Article Network.  Sites that qualify include:

* Self-hosted WordPress blogs (WordPress 2.0.x and later) — (Probably most of those in the MAN system are this type.)

* Any Drupal site (must have the Drupal XML-RPC API enabled)

* Any Joomla! site (must have the Joomla! XML-RPC API enabled)

* Any other site that has either an XML-RPC API or an Atom API.

Since I have WordPress blogs, I started with connecting three of these into the network. At this moment (December 22, 2009) the system has already posted 5 articles on one site, 3 on another and 1 on the last site connected;  a total of 9 content articles already posted on my sites!

In accepting articles for content on your sites, you have a choice of auto posting or posting after approval.  Being new here, I elected to approve (at least until I get some experience with this!). I have rejected 4 articles, approved 9.

When you reject or accept an article, you have a chance to send a short feedback message to the author. Using that, I told the rejected authors that their “spinning” was out of kilter, leading to parts that made no sense.  So, let’s see… Rejected 4 out of 13, that’s 31%. Not too bad. Those articles were not TOO bad.  It’s just that I am picky about readability! Don’t want any semi-literate articles on my sites.

On the “Submit Articles for Backlinks” side, I have submitted two articles which have now been published 4 and 3 times, total 7 publications of my articles, complete with 3 textual backlinks each, means 21 new links, now live on the Web.

Unlike in article marketing, where you generally must put all of your anchor text links in your bio box at the end, here you can put up to three anchor links in the text of the article. That’s better, stronger linking because it is clearly related to the text, what is being said in the article. Gets more link-juice that way!

You get feedback on your articles page about acceptance-rejection ratios. So far, I am at 100%. All articles offered for publication have been accepted.  I guess that most members here use auto accept for articles, then just delete any weak ones later…  

You don’t have to spin articles at all, if you don’t want to.  As I see it, there are advantages for spinning. (1.) You don’t have duplicate articles out there so that the SE’s  only credit you with the first one. (2.) Website owners prefer spun articles so that they know they will get credit for an article with unique text.

[There's an option for receiving articles for posting on your sites that lets you reject any with less than 30% spinning. I checked that box for all my sites, to get mostly unique articles to post.]

MAN offers two alternative methods of spinning: By alternate sentences or by coding the text. Their coding system is similar to but a bit different from what I am used to. It’s a variation of the widely used curly brackets “{ }” and bars “|” system.

So it’s pretty easy to use. In fact it is much more flexible and easier to use than other article submission setups I have tried.

There are lots of categories and sub-categories for articles. Lets you zero-in on what’s relevant for your sites. That’s good!

O.K. I have gotten started now and more or less understand how things work here. Now the task will be to get a number of sites set-up to receive content. And to turn out a number of articles to get backlinks out there.

So far, so good. This is turning out to be easier than I thought! Now I just need to get into it and use it. There is no limit to the number of sites I can add or the number of articles I can submit for publication.  So the best way to get my money’s worth is to use it to the max!

I plan to enter and promote some new sites so I can measure the effects. Also plan to promote some existing sites to round out the sources of backlinks to them…

More updates about my experiences with My Article Network will be coming here soon…

Merry Christmas to all!

Jorge Chavez

In the IMer’s never-ending quest for more and better backlinks the methods, techniques and services available are constantly changing. Recently I have heard and read some pretty good things about My Article Network,  a service that helps its members build lots of good backlinks.

So I decided to sign up for the service and check it out for myself. This will be the first in a series of posts I plan to make to keep my readers informed on my findings…

Jorge Chavez

Making money on the Internet is very simple in principle. You put up a site, encourage visitor traffic to come to that site, then you monetize that traffic. Simple.

You can put up a web site or a blog or any number of variations on those, like Squidoo lenses, a Face-book page or a You-tube address. Actually, you don’t even have to put up a site. You could use someone else’s site with an affiliate arrangement so that you gain a commission, a percentage of sales made to visitors you send to that site.

The principles are simple. The devil is usually in the details.

How do you encourage visitors to visit the site of your choice?  There are lots of ways. You can advertise, send out e-mails, write articles and put a link in your bio box at the bottom. You can make posts on forums (and blogs that allow that), with a link in your signature…

One of the most effective ways to “drive traffic” is to use SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

70+% of the people who are looking for things on the Net use the search engines to find them. You go to the nearest search engine window and “Google it”, type in a word or short phrase that describes what you are looking for. When you hit the “Search” button, a page of possible answers to your search appear.

The phrase you typed in is called a “keyword phrase”. The pages that appear are called SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

Now, if you are selling “Red dog collars”, you will likely have a website or other location setup with a sales page to show off your merchandise, explain the benefits of your red dog collars and take orders.  So all you have to do is arrange to have a listing for your website (or whatever) to show up high on the 1st page of the SERPs when anyone types in “red dog collars”.

SEO is the art and science of arranging for YOUR listing to rank high in the SERPS for key word phrases that your buyers would be likely to type in. You see, there are almost always a lot of others who want THEIR sites to be listed first. And there are typically only 10 slots for listings on the first page.

The search engines (SE’s) want to provide a useful service. They want users to find what they are looking for. So they arrange the possible answers with the most probable first, on a “ranking” list that runs up to 100 to 500 positions, presented at 10 per page. The first listing on page one is “ranked number 1″, the next one “ranked 2″. The first on page 2 is ranked #11, first on page 3 is #21 and so on.

The SE’s use complex equations, algorithms, to weigh and value different factors to select the best, select the most likely over the less likely…

Searchers rarely look beyond the first three pages. 90% don’t go further than the first page. So the jockeying for position on the first pages is intense.  Ranking is everything. Listings on the first page in the SERPs, will get 10 times as many searchers clicking and coming to visit as will listings on the second page.

The search engines are constantly tweaking and adjusting their selection formulas to get better results. Thousands of SEO experts are constantly testing and trying to figure out what the SE’s are looking for.

One of the key factors for ranking is backlinks. Backlinks are links from somewhere else pointing to the site being evaluated. More important, more popular sites will have more links pointing to them.  From the point of view of the webmaster of a particular site, incoming links are pointing “back” to his site, thus the term “backlink”.

So there is great interest in and competition for getting backlinks to help increase your site’s rankings.

So how do you get backlinks? Ahh! Good question. But this posting is already long and must be finished here. The answer will have to wait for another posting…

Review of: WordPress Affiliate ClickBank Plugin

Many netrepreneurs are looking for ways to monetize their blogs, cover part of the costs, even make a profit, if possible. Up until now the options have been mostly limited to putting up banner ads for various products and services or signing up with AdSense. While these work to provide income, they are limited, often creating only marginal returns. Now, there is another alternative that shows a lot of promise.

“Boost Your Blog Profits With A Few Simple Clicks” the sales page says. “Thanks to the WordPress Affiliate ClickBank Plugin it has never been easier to insert ClickBank affiliate text link ads into your WordPress blog.”

What this plugin does is add short AdSense-type ads to your homepage and/or to individual blog posts. The key point is that the software cues off of the blog’s theme plus individual blog post tags or keywords inside, as well as the blog’s overall theme. This way it, like AdSense, can select ads that are highly relevant to the material next to where they are shown!

The software is easy to use. Just input your ClickBank nickname/I.D. once, specify the number and positioning of ads, set the font and colors and the software does all the rest.

Your blogsite visitors can be shown short ads, relevant to each post they see or read. When they click on an ad they are taken, under your hoplink/affiliate link, directly to the sales page of the product being shown. If they choose to buy you get 100% of the commission!

The software license is sold for a one-time price with lifetime upgrades included. One purchase is for an unlimited number of installations. You can put it on 5, 10 or 50 or more blogsites! The price is low enough that the software will pay for itself with just 1 or 2 sales. It’s not a cost, it’s an investment!

The ability to customize type fonts and sizes, colors and positioning means that you can make the ads blend in well with any blogsite. Looks great!

This is new, just launched on 25 November. Go here (watch the videos!) for full information just click on the link…

There is a great deal of hype, misinformation and consequent uncertainty about webhosting on the Internet. Many webhosting companies make claims to be the best and you see all sorts of pricing out there.

So if you are starting out, where should you start? Here are some guidelines that should help:

1. Remember that there are lots of webhosts out there, and there is much competition amongst them. If you shop around, you can find good deals.

2. Those that make the most “noise”, that advertise the most and aggressively seek new clients, are spending a lot on promotion, the costs of which will come out in the prices you pay. Go cautiously with these. Don’t get pushed into a bad deal.

3. What you want is good quality hosting with account options that leave you room to expand. Generally speaking, you will want:
A. High uptime (99.9%) with a guarantee. A cheap webhost whose servers go down frequently means that your customers will not be able to find your website and will go somewhere else. Uptime percentage is very important to you, the user. Also, many SAY they have 99.9% uptime, but it’s not true. Look for a guarantee with teeth, like one that refunds a portion up to all of your webhosting fee if they do not meet the 99.9% goal.
B. Accounts that allow multiple domains. In reality, the web host’s costs are mainly for storage space and bandwidth. You can find webhosting accounts that set limits on these and then let you put up as many domains as you wish within those space and bandwidth limits.
C. Good support, 24/7
D. Up-to-date servers that support all standard protocols and features such as fantastico, latest versions of php, etc.

4. It’s difficult to tell whether a given webhost lives up to its claims or really knows what “quality” support is. For this reason it’s best to pay by the month, at least at first. If it doesn’t work out, you can try another. Don’t get trapped into a one-year prepaid contract with a second-rate webhost!

If you want to study and learn a great deal about webhosting, visit Web Hosting Talk. That’s a huge industry forum of webhosts, with all kinds of info.

You can scroll down to the bottom of the home page to “Advertising Forums”. Under that look for “Web Hosting Offers” at the top of the list. Here you will find literally hundreds of webhosts offering their services, side by side.

That kind of cuts through the hype and claims; gets down to “What do they offer?” and “What does it cost?”    Like going to a farmer’s market where different vendors sell similar products. No way to price gouge, all sellers have to be competitive or they sell nothing…

Of course it takes time to sort through the offers. I went through that, tried several. One was a disaster! Search on my username there, (jorchav) to read about it. A few more were tried and culled out for one reason or another.

Finally I settled on three.

Cube Host for good service and excellent prices. I use them for plain-vanilla applications and websites and they are fine for that. Their prices start at $3.95 a month for 5 gb of web storage space and 75gb of bandwidth (that’s a LOT!). That comes with unlimited domains, sub-domains and e-mail addresses.

I also use Hawk Host for good prices and excellent support. I use them for high-volume sites and anything complex. They always help me out of problems. Each time I ask for support they solve the problem AND give me more experience and education in solving server-side problems in the process.

A basic account is 3gb storage, 30gb bandwidth, unlimited domains. It goes at $3.95/month, but you have to pay three months at a time. Well, what the heck! That’s only $11.85 every 3 months.

India Nets is another great low-cost webhost with excellent service and a friendly, helpful tech support group.  I’ve had two accounts with them for over a year now; I can testify to their better than 99.9% uptime!.

Their hosting plans start at 1gb of space, 10gb bandwidth for 1 domain at $1.99 a month or $19.99 per year, 2 gb space 2gb bw, 10 domains $2.99/mo.  or $29.99/year and go up from there.  They can also supply you with hosting on up to 100 different class C IP’s for about $2 per month each.

Why do I use more than one webhost?

Good question. I discussed that in in another blog entry here, “Defensive Webhosting and Domain Name Registration.”

Jorge Chavez

If you are going to do almost anything on the Internet, sooner or later you will need domain names and web hosting.  O.K.  No problem. There are lots of suppliers of domain name registration and web hosting space, right?

Right.  But it’s best to use a bit of planning first. Ernest Hemingway once said, “Life is a game. They put you in without telling you the rules, then shoot you when they catch you off base.”  No one told me the rules of the domain name and web space game. I had to get “shot” a couple of times and learn them as I went along.

What did I learn? Well, here’s a summary:

1. The sellers who advertise the most, push hardest, are easiest to find, are the most expensive.

2. Never get your domain name and your web hosting from the same place. Keep them separate.

[The reason is that if your web host has problems and their servers go down, you can simply redirect your domain's DNS info and have your site up and running on a different webhost in minutes. But ONLY if your domain is registered elsewhere. When problems come up (as has happened to me on 3 separate occasions, 3 different webhosts) the webhost will be unavailable for contact or unwilling to redirect your domain. With a separate registration service, YOU are in charge. With domain registration and web hosting at one place, that company will be in charge!]

3. Always have more than one webhosting account, each with capacity to handle the rest of your domains.

[Personally, I have 5 web hosting accounts, three of which each has the capacity to host all 60+ of my domains and websites. (2 are small experiments.) If one webhost goes down, I can move my websites there, immediately to another of my web hosting accounts. I can do this without having to ask anyone or open another account. I can do it at 2AM on Sunday morning on a holiday weekend if I need to. That way I am in control and relatively sure of being able to keep my websites up and running.]

4. Always have a recent copy of each of your websites on your hard disk so YOU can restore that site anywhere, anytime. Then backup your HD frequently.

[Either get a portable hard drive to use for backup, make CD's or keep backup copies online. You can get a free personal 2gb of backup space at mozy.com ]

So who would I recommend you deal with? Well, here’s the ones I use:

Registrars:

Name.com

Dynadot.com

Both are no-nonsense, low overhead, customer-oriented outfits with good prices, good service.

Webhosting:

Cube Host

Hawk Host

Both provide 5-6gb of storage, 30-75gb of bandwidth with unlimited domains and 99.9% uptime, starting at $3.95/month!

Also:  India Nets that can start you off with excellent  hosting for 1 domain for  $1.99 a month or $19.99 per year! 10 domains for $2.99/mo, $29.99/year!

All three provide great support, very good prices and over 99.9% uptime. Again, these are not outfits I have just heard about, they are the ones I use every day and have been using for over a year now.  I know from experience that these guys are good, and their prices are at rock-bottom for the quality of service they provide.

Jorge Chavez

Most of us have been through it, in spades. We have our plan to make money on the Internet.  We are working along on it, then something new/different catches our eye and we get distracted.

One IM friend called it the NNSO syndrome; Next New Shiny Object. It’s hard to avoid getting caught up in that cycle.

Marketers make a persuasive case for their particular NNSO, why it’s going to be the latest and greatest. They point out that THIS NNSO will put you light-years ahead of the competition; those that don’t get on board now will be left in the dust, etc., etc.

After a few days or weeks you look back and realize that you have spent more time exploring new approaches than you have in making anything actually WORK for you.

And your HD has bunches of free data you have eagerly downloaded and have not yet found the time to read/listen to/watch.

In that regard, there is a huge difference between acquisition and consumption…

Acquisition is easy; consumption is harder; effective utilization is harder still.

It takes a lot more time to read an eBook than it takes to download it! It takes still more time to absorb what it teaches and apply it.

We’ve all been there, right?

So how do you deal with it? How do you manage this type of Internet Overload?

The answers are to be found in three words: Priority, Focus and Discipline.

There is an old Chinese saying to the effect of, “A man who chases two rabbits will catch neither.”

The same is true in Internet Marketing.

First, make your plan. Then, every day you set your priorities for that day; what do you need to get done next in order to accomplish your plan.

Second, focus on doing the things most needful in order for you to accomplish your plan. All else are “busy-work” distractions. FOCUS.

Third, concentrate, don’t waiver. Find, cultivate and maintain the personal discipline you need to stay on track, to work your plan. Tell yourself that when you get to the initial finish of your plan, THEN you will look around, read those eBooks, etc.

When you catch yourself going off course, grab yourself by the scruff of the neck and haul yourself back to doing the things that are necessary to carry out your plan.

Remember that one plan completed is worth 10-20 in process. Sure there will be other opportunities other NNSO’s out there. They won’t put any money in your pocket. They could use up your valuable time. Visualize how happy you will be when you receive the first actual money that your plan will bring you. Concentrate on making that happen.

Become aware of how you are actually using your time. Use this test:

Is what I am working on know contributing directly to completing my plan to put money in my pocket? If it is, do it.

If not, ask yourself why are you doing it? Why are you wasting your time? Do you want to make money or not? Focus.

Think of those NNSO’s as Sirens attracting you to put your boat on the rocks. Don’t let them. Stay on point.

At the end of each day, ask yourself, “What did I accomplish to forward my plan today?” You’ll have good days and bad. When you have good days, congratulate yourself. When you have bad days, resolve to do better, starting tomorrow morning.

When people want something today, they go to the Internet and “Google it” . They type some words that (to them) indicate what they are looking for, into the nearest search engine “search window”.  (There are many search engines: Yahoo, Google, MSN (now “Bing”), etc. They all work in essentially the same way.)

What next emerges on the screen is the search engine’s idea of what you are looking for.  This is called the Search Engine Results Pages or “SERP’s”.

If you are an Internet Marketer, selling let’s say, “dog collars”, you want your website to appear in the SERP’s whenever anyone types “dog collar” or “dog collars” into search engine search window.

Since an estimated 70% of the people who want to buy something on the Net use the search engines, it is essential to most marketers that their listings appear on the SERP’s whenever anyone searches for their products or services.

The best place to have your listing appear is on page 1 of the SERP’s.  Preferably “above the fold”. There are typically 10 natural listings (plus some paid ads) on the first page.  The top 5, the first 5, appear on the initial panel. You will  see these 5 first, without having to scroll down. That position is called, “above the fold”.

Now, as you might imagine, there are lots of sellers.  And ALL want to be on that first page.  But the search engines try to put the most important, most relevant sites first.  So they “rank them”. The top 10 get on the first page, in order, with number 1 at the top down to number 10 at the bottom of the page.  The next ten get on the second page and so forth.

So how do you convince the search engines that YOUR website is important enough and relevant enough to be on the first page?

Aha!! That’s the question. And, in a nutshell, that is what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is all about!

SEO is the art and science of getting recognized, of being important and letting the search engines know it. Of getting high search engine rankings. Of getting YOUR website listed on the first page of the SERP’s.

How do you do that? Well, there are two elements:

1. The internal, in-house things you do at your website to be recognized

2. The external, links back from other entities on the Net (websites, blogs, squido lenses, social networking sites, etc.) that show the search engines how important you are.

Details? Well… That we’ll cover that in other postings here…

Jorge Chavez

Welcome to our blogsite! This is all about how to make money on the Internet. Under construction but coming along…

Emphasizing affiliate marketing and adsense…