How Not to Make Money Online
Posted on October 10, 2009
Category: make money online | 2 Comments
Welcome back to Blog Subway, where I want to take a cold hard look at one of the ways of how not to make money online. Blogging in the subway doesn’t mean I’m blogging in the, erm actual subway, if anyone is wondering! This is really just an underground look at what’s going on in the world of blogging and where people are using blogs to make money from blogging. So what’s the latest to hit the cyber streets?
Well, it may or may not surprise you to learn that Mr Problogger has created a paid forum where noobs can go and be taught a load of totally useless stuff by more noobs. They can pay $2 for the privilege, too! Ok, $2 is not going to hurt anyone’s paypal account but it will surely make a nice bit of extra income for Mr Rowse, the blog/forum’s owner.
Some of the big guns have already come out blazing about how this is such a bad idea for noobs (although a very good idea for Darren Rowse) and that it’ll just create a whole new bunch of clueless noobs doing everything wrong while they try to make money online using the hopelessly inadequate ramblings of the so-called experts who are running said forum.
On the one hand, its annoying and might even have got a similar derogatory response from yours truly, but upon reflection, the more noobs that learn all the wrong stuff from the likes of problogger, then the lower the competition for me. I’ve actually gotten to the stage where I’m not even going to give out any more information on what you really need to do in order to make money online. Why should I? I’d just be writing a whole load of stuff that you can find on one or two other blogs that tell it like it is and don’t spout the same tired old nonsense that a thousand other blogger spout day in and day out. And for what?
To teach people how to take money out of my own pocket?
You must be joking! There are still many fine ways to make money from the Internet and they still work well and don’t cause anyone to get ripped off or scammed, so I’ll keep my methods to myself and keep you all guessing. Much better, methinks!
So this was an entirely non-useful blog post for anyone wanting to know the right way to earn an income online, except for one saving grace and that is I told you how NOT to go about it.
How eBay Changes Affect Blogs
Posted on September 7, 2009
Category: blogs | 1 Comment
Welcome back to the Subway! In this post, we’ll be taking a brief look at how eBay changes affect blogs hosted on Blog Subway and indeed all other blog hosts that allow folks to create and manage their own blogs without them needing to own their own domains.
The first changes came about last month, where eBay made policy changes that affect all their affiliates who make use of free blogs to promote eBay items. Where before the changes affiliates had a pretty broad spectrum of places they could display ads channeling traffic to the eBay site and earning a commission on sales, that practice has been severely restricted.
Affiliates can no longer serve eBay ads on domains they do not own, either using RSS feeds, propriety software or ebay’s own widgets. Instead, affiliates are restricted to serving these ads only on their own domains that are registered in their name. This is so that eBay can more easily track where sales are coming from, or so they say. That means you can’t use your Blog Subway blogs to serve eBay ads using the revenue sharing system we have in place. It also means you can’t use places like blogger blogs, or any other free blogging platform.
Strangely, your Squidoo lenses can still display eBay ads as long as you use their own modules and not RSS feeds, which means you don’t directly get a cut of your sales. Same goes for Hub Pages, although in their system you do get a direct percentage of the sale.
What it really means is they have hammered yet another nail into the coffin of their affiliates, in their apparent drive towards keeping more of their sales revenue for themselves and not sharing it with the affiliates who drive most of the traffic to their website. Make of that what you will, but more changes came shorty afterwards.
Now, with the latest round of changes, affiliates no longer earn a percentage of the sales they generate. Instead, they are paid for the number of clicks they generate from their websites with earnings increasing if those clicks produce sales. Its a little more complicated than that, but if you are an eBay affiliate, you’ve doubtless already read their own explanation and if you’re not, then it doesn’t apply to you anyway.
So there you have it in a nutshell. The main message we want to get across here is that if your blogs were displaying eBay ads, then you must remove them! You won’t get paid for any clicks and you may jeopardize your EPN account, so don’t be slack about this or you may cause yourself more grief than you need!
Admin
Blog Subway
How to Serve Money Making Ads on Your Blog
Posted on August 5, 2009
Category: make money online | 1 Comment
In my last post here Blog Subway, looked at some more ways to keep things clean and tidy when it comes to running one of these blog hosts. Now its the turn of the revenue generating parts of the blogs.
There is a section in the user panel called revenue share and this is where you can set up your affiliate ids for a variety of revenue generating entities, such as adsense, eBay, Kontera and now Amazon and Chikita. The last two were just added with the latest upgrade to the system and they are both useful additions to your blog’s ability to generate revenue, or more basic to make money online.
Simply fill in your affiliate or publisher ids in the relevant boxes and hit the update button and your data is saved.
Now your blogs will serve ads for adsense, kontera and chikita automatically without you having to do a single additional thing. For eBay and amazon, you need to go to the relevant tabs in your settings and update each panel to suit the ads you want to appear and follow the instructions on how to insert the ads into your posts or pages.
A note on serving affiliate ads:
With eBay and amazon ads, it is actually a better practice to serve those ads in specific “pages” rather than actual blog posts. This is because the search engines don’t much like to see a page of affiliate ad blocks on a homepage of any website or blog and may penalize your blog if it sees them on yours. That could take the form of a serps penalty, which means less traffic for you or even the sandbox which will mean next to no traffic for you!
This is why placing affiliate ads in pages is far better with a link to those pages in a sidebar widget. That way, your visitors can see where you have stuff on sale and the search engines see a home page with a legitimate post with relevant content for visitors to read.
Easy when you know how!
Admin
Blog Subway