Dot Com Note

So you want to start an online business. You have surfed the web, read some blogs and have found that lots of people are making some decent mullah. But you are frustrated due to the lack of any new idea. Don’t worry. There are still many ideas that you can implement using a little money, lots of efforts, and some persistency.

1. Think about your hobby. What you would like to do in your spare time? May be you like to go hunting, or scuba diving. May be you want to make dolls. List some of the annoyances and inconveniences you encounter while pursuing your hobby. Search in Google to find solutions to your problems and then write a small e-book. Sell the e-book using clickbank dot com.

2. If you are an artist, crafter, or designer, check out etsy dot com. You create your own shop by signing up for free. Listing an item with photos cost 0.20 cents. The selling fee is 3.5% of the final sale price. You can accept payment through PayPal.

3. Start a blog. But don’t start a blog on making money. Find your niche and sign up for free at Blogger to create your blog. You need to select a name for your blog. Select the name of your blog carefully. Write down half a dozen names that tell something about your blog topic. Check out those names using the overture keyword selector tool for search popularity. Use a name that people search at least more than a thousand times every month.

4. If you decide to use the number 3 (starting a blog) method to generate incomes, sign up with ReviewMe, PayPerPost, and Chitika for writing paid reviews of other companys’ products and services. This will supplement your Google’s Adsense incomes.

5. If you are good at computer programming, write a simple online tool, e.g calculating carbon foot print of your visitors, or total body fat. You get the idea. The program should be simple to use and easy to develop. Build a website around your tool and sign up with affiliate programs for revenue generation.

6. If you frequently go on short trips or vacation, buy a good but small and high resolutions digital camera for easy carrying with you all the time. Take at least 200 pictures on each trip and put them for sale on shutterpoint dot com. There are a few other websites where you can put your photos for sale. Check them out by doing a Google search.

7. Participate in paid survey.But don’t pay to join any program for paid survey. Use Google to search for paid survey and visit a dozen paid survey websites. Review their offerings and write those down. Now search webmaster forum in Google and then sign up in a couple of webmaster forums. Ask about others experiences with paid survey companies and pick a good one.

Now you have these seven unusual ways to make money online. You will not make a ton of money overnight. But once you gain experiences in online money making opportunities, you will explore other methods to earn big bucks.

Daniel at DailyBlogTips had announced another blog writing projects on 9/11. After reading the announcement, I had decided to submit something but I completely forgot about it. Even if you don’t win any prize, participating in these types of projects is an opportunity to get backlinks from some high trafficked blogs.

I checked the announcement again. I have till next Tuesday (September 25) to post my entry. The coming weekend will be a busy one with lots of things lined up for me to do.

He just announced the submissions he has received till today. The list of 121 submissions is here.

I was surprised to see only five submissions on making money online. Everyday more than a dozen people start their make money online blogs with the hope of making money online blogging or what I call as rehashing money making tips they just read in their favorite webmaster’s forum.

None of the five from make money online category has Alexa ranking less than 100,000. Go figure.

This is an old post in Mashable. I am posting it for those who have not seen it elsewhere. It will serve as a resource for companies that pay you to write reviews, affiliate networks, contextual ads, and every thing else.

Tripit is a travel organization site that just came out of private-invitation-only memberships. It is now open for anyone to sign up. It is an interesting site for do-it-yourself trip planners. You organize all your travel related website bookmarks, travel plans and itineraries in one place. In addition to printing your itinerary, you can also share it with your social network.

Tripit calls it the first intelligent travel organizer. It draws information from Google maps for directions, NOAA weather services, SeatGuru for airplane seat advice, Wikipedia for city information, Eventful for current event, and Flickr for city photos. It is the ultimate mashup wrapped into an intelligent travel organizer system.

After you sign up, you download and install a toolbar extension called TripClipper. As you browse different travel related sites, you clip things like restaurant, activities, reviews, etc. and add those to your trip plan using the TripClipper. You create a trip plan for each trip and add contents from different sites to your trip plan.

You can comparison shop different reservation websites from within TripIt for flights, hotels, and car rentals. Once you purchase your trip from a site, you email the information to plans@tripit.com. The system stores and organizes your information in a trip plan.

There are lots of other features and some of them will amaze you. Economist has mentioned this site in the context of semanatic web.

I used to believe that the anchor text “click here” is so archaic. We have been living and breathing in the web for almost a decade. Everybody should know what a link is for. And It is for clicking.

Apparently, it is not so. Brian Clark from Copyblogger has solid data to back up his claim that “click here” improves click through rates. I think that’s why Google forbids “click here” or any other actionable texts near AdSense ads. They don’t want to influence click through rates in any way.

It is very interesting. Sorry, I have to go now to change all my anchor texts to “click here” 

ProBlogger is reporting Amazon’s announcement of a suite of widgets for bloggers. There are 16 widgets and a few are open to everyone and others are available only to Amazon affiliates.

A few widgets are interesting like the Unbox Videos that show previews of classic movies and tv shows. The quick linker widget allows you to link to Amazon products easily as you write your blogs. You can offer Amazon product reviews from your site using product previews widget.

If you wish, you can litter your contents with contextual links to Amazon products by activating context links, or blind your readers using banner widget. It is up to you.

AdSense has introduced a contextual ad service for mobile website operators. However, your webpages should be mobile compliant to display AdSense ads on mobile devices. Google suggests:

If you don’t currently have a mobile website (and chances are, if you’re not sure, then you don’t have one), you can create one by rewriting your existing website in a mobile markup language, such as XHTML, WML, or CHTML. You’ll also need to make sure the layout of your website is properly formatted to display on mobile phones.

Only text ads are available now and they come in two sizes. The single size ad shows one ad and the double size ad displays two ads.

If you have a website that offers something to people on the road, you can make some additional money by making your website available to mobile users.

A list of some mobile websites is available here. Check them out to get ideas about the look and feel and contents of mobile websites. The W3C Mobile Web Best Practices Checker is here.

Read/WriteWeb has a post about massive layoffs at Eons, a social networking site targeted to baby boomer generation. Bernard Lunn at Read/WriteWeb concludes that a site should connect to its visitors around contents rather than age. On the surface it seems to be a good suggestion.

If you are running a blog around personal development, your reader-base is people who are interested in self-guided improvement of their economical, social, intellectual, and emotional lives. You really don’t care their age group. You provide your insights for a college sophomore who wishes to increase his dating success as well as for a 40-something mid-level corporate manager who wants to reduce his job stress.

However, for a social networking site like Eons, it is different. The site does not generate contents. It expects its users to generate contents. If it is targeting a particular age group, it expects people from that age group will join the site and generate appropriate contents suited for its members.

Among other things, sites like Eons fail because they limit their potential memberships to a fraction of the population. Unless the site provides tools that are particularly suited for an age group, there is no reason to limit your potential visitors. I don’t no what age-specific tools Eons provides to its members. I will guess none.

BlogRush is a blog post title link (BPTL) exchange widget. The widget has five BPTLs. For five BPTL impressions on your blog, you get one BPTL impression on a network member’s blog.

If another blogger becomes a member of the network using the widget displayed on your blog, she is in your downline. You get one BPTL impression for five BPTL impressions she offers.

With one person in your downline, your two-person network offers ten BPTL impressions and receive three BPTL impressions.

What happens when another person joins your downline? Let’s say your immediate downline recruits the third person. You get three, your immediate downline gets two and the last person in the downline gets one BPTL impressions, a total of six BPTL impressions. And your three-person network gives 15 BPTL impressions. Now you get the math?

Like any multilevel program, if you are the first mover you can reap enermous benefits. Sgn up if you think it is a good traffic exchange program for you. Whatever you call it, I still consider it a traffic exchange program.

Are you tired of submitting your posts to digg and reddit? Are you upset that you only got a few diggs on an article that you spent hours researching and writing? This happens to many bloggers.

AjaxNinja says to stop submitting articles on the most popular sites like digg or reddit and he recommends submitting to niche sites. You can find a list of some additional social media sites here.

Sphinn is another digg clone. People have reported good returns on investment on the site. I checked out a few stories and found zero dugg stories had made it to the home page of Sphinn.

Write a powerful headline. CopyBlogger has three articles on how to write headlines that attracts social media crowds like a magnet. You can read the the three articles here, here, and here.

Create contents to touch your readers. We live in a sea of information. If you are like me who subscribe to hundreds of feeds, I know you are flooded with posts every morning.

My take on content is that your readers should feel the urge to visit your site to get new insights. You should also provide information that is buried in a dozen websites. It will be like a one stop shop for information in your niche.