Dot Com Note

If you want to become an instant webpreneur and make money online, you should start setting up as many niche sites as possible. The first step of the process is to find what people are buying online. How do you do that?

You need to know what others are searching in Google for the purpose of buying. Everybody goes through three stages of online search before they make a purchase. In the first stage, one gathers information about the product. Searching to compare prices is the second stage. Third stage of searching is done for the actual purchase.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chiaramarra/490464375/

In the purchase phase, most people will use keywords like purchase, buy, shop, new, cheap, etc. Google Suggest will help you determine what most people are searching for the sole purpose of buying. These people are ready to buy the product they are searching for.

Now I will tell you how to do a search in Google Suggest to find out what others are searching to buy. Go to Goolge and click more on the top link. A drop down menu will appear. Scroll all the way down and click the link even more. You will go to the More Google Product Page.

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Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jongos/229023255/

The holidays pass very quickly. The four-day weekend is almost over. I have to wake up tomorrow morning around 7AM and get ready for another day at my regular job.

I like my job but sometimes I wonder how long I can continue the routine. I am going no where in my corporate career. I am little too old for planning my career path for climbing the corporate ladder.

The money I bring in from my websites and the income generated from the money I had saved when I was operating adult web sites is enough for me to retire and retire very comfortably in a Third World country, like in Central America, Mexico, India, or Thailand.

The biggest fear of retiring in the USA is the medical expenses. I have to pay at least a thousand dollar a month for the type of health insurance that I get from my company. I should also be ready to drop 4K as out of pocket expenses in case of emergency.

I cannot quit my job when my online income matches incomes from my regular job. What will happen if my online income drops? Can I quit my job when the online income matches my current combined incomes (online income + regular job)? If I can sustain that kind of online revenue for a year, I would be able to quit my job.

I am not an online marketing guru or an SEO expert. I know the basic plot and how to implement it. When I see lots of people are trying very hard to generate even $1,000 a month online profit, I think I am lucky to generate the kind of of money I bring in now by running websites.

I had started seriously thinking about increasing my online revenues substantially in the last few months. I am also reading a lots of blog articles on affiliate marketing, social media marketing, stumbleupon marketing, and what not.

Come new year, I have to focus on one area for generating serious online incomes.

Image credit: google adsense click fraud

Becuase your site is an AdSense site and Bob has original contents that help mesothelomia victims. “Just because Tom gets $2 per click for his baseball site doesn’t mean you will get $2 per click for your baseball site”, writes Mark at 45n5.com while discussing inequal AdSense payouts for clicks from different sites for the same advertiser.  According to him, the following factors determine your payouts.

• Site theme

• Traffic geographic origin

• Quality of your AdSense account

• Traffic referral origin

• Traffic keyword origin

• Time of the day

I will not give much weight to the traffic referral origin. Google does not set a cookie using the the AdSense code when a visitor arrives at a site displaying AdSense units. However, if the visitor is coming from a Google  search, then they can track you using their cookies.  

If you have a foreign language website, your AdSense text ads are in the native language if Google has enough ad inventory in that language. In that case, clicks originating from the country where the language is native pay more than clicks coming from other countries.

Google is making some changes to AdSense click regions that may affect your incomes. You see, right now the entire AdSense rectangle is a clickable region. A visitor can unintentionally click on that region and you get paid for the click. Advertisers don’t like it and they consider it as a click fraud.

After the changes, a visitor to your site must click on the underlined ad title or the advertiser’s site URL. You can check out a mock-up of the differences between the old clickable area and the new clickable area at Google Blogoscoped.

I don’t know why Google has designed the entire rectangle as the clickable area to start with. We all know that it is bad for advertising. Did they realize it after two and half years?

I am not sure what are they exactly changing. Are they going to keep the rectangle as a clickable area and pay publishers for clicks on titles and URLs only? If they do so, that will be a very, very bad move. I am hoping they won’t do that.

They should make two text links, one for the ad title and the other for the advertiser’s site URL. A click on any one of these hyperlink should be considered a valid click. Let’s wait and see how our incomes are affected by these changes.

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.

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.