Earners Club

I never expect that a pro-blogger like John Chow would visit this new money making blog for newbies. Did I stole any of his articles? Was he looking for money-making tips? Did he find interesting topic(s) on this blog? Absolutely, NO. At his current level, being a pro blogger and an online money maker, he will find no interesting topics in this blog. Plus, what I am writing here are for newbies and I’m sure he already knew it a couple of months or years ago. It is also not an attitude of mine (and will never be) to copy the works of others, thus it is also not the reason why he came here.

How Come He Visited EarnersClub?
It’s pretty simple. You may read this tip a hundred times on traffic-building strategies. I think the real reason was quoted below.

From: Andy Hogans and Aaron Wall’s 101 Link Building Tips to Market Your Website
46. Link to other blogs from your blog. Outbound links are one of the cheapest forms of marketing available. Many bloggers also track who is linking to them or where their traffic comes from, so linking to them is an easy way to get noticed by some of them.

I was just writing about Making Money In Your Blog (Part 2): Selling Text Links and I just linked his article about How To Make Direct Ad Sales (his Selling Direct Ads - Making An Advertise Page was not yet written at that time) since it was somehow-related to my article. Surprisingly, his face appears on the Recent Readers on the next day I check out this site.

Try to apply tip #46 above and who knows it will also bring extra traffic to your blog

written by Ramil Alcibar

About 4 months ago, I launched a WordPress plugin called WP Text Ads. It’s goal is to let bloggers sell text link ads directly to advertisers, so they don’t have to pay commissions.

Benefits of WP Text Ads

1) Lower prices for advertisers.
People who have heard of WP Text Ads know that bloggers will earn more since they do not pay commissions. But few realize that advertisers benefit from that too. For example, if text link ads rates fall to $70 from $100, advertisers save $30, but bloggers do not lose out since they don’t pay 30-50% in commissions anymore. It’s a truly win-win solution.

2) Substantial traffic metrics
The WP Text Ads Marketplace provides plenty of traffic metrics for each site listed. It does not require any login or registration, and takes only 5 minutes to join. It is also free.

3) Active development and customer support
Believe me, when this is your livelihood, you work really hard to make your clients happy Enough said.

4) API
The WP Text Ads API allows any developer to write plugins to offer greater value proposition to advertisers. I have created 2 such plugins for free download.

5) It is free
Some have the idea that WP Text Ads costs $127. That is partially correct only. When you install it, it is free to use. If you sell so many text link ads that you need to remove the limitations on links, then you upgrade. Otherwise, the free version stays free forever, and it has all the features of the licensed one.

How WP Text Ads Could Do Better

1) Marketing
I’ve done a bad job marketing WP Text Ads. In fact, I wonder if it could get any worse.

2) Affiliate Program
Up to now, I’ve not released an affiliate program. I forgot that WP Text Ads exists to help bloggers increase their revenue, and an affiliate program will help them achieve that cause.

3) Better Interface
WP Text Ads appear as an Options page in WordPress. It’s currently too long and slightly unwieldly. I’ve added a quick links menu to help users navigate around, but that’s not an excuse.

4) No integration with PayPal
IPN is not used for PayPal payments. I’m a little nervous about integrating that because of security concerns. That’s something that needs studying, but clearly, advertisers and bloggers are not benefiting as a result.

As a one-man operation, I can’t do everything at the same time. Some of the problems will be rectified in the next version. I’d love to get feedback if you have comments. Please write to me at alexchoowk at wptextads dot com.

This is a guest post by Alex Choo. He is the developer of WP Text Ads, a free WordPress plugin that lets you sell text link ads directly to advertisers.

written by Alex Choo

To build quality backlinks, which is very crucial for SEO success, website owners usually do submission to directories, article submissions, posting in forums and many more techniques as mentioned by Andy Hogans and Aaron Wall’s 101 Link Building Tips to Market Your Website. In that great post, they have also mentioned about renting some high quality links directly from web sites. In reverse, this gives website owners (in this case, bloggers) an opportunity to make money from blogs by selling text links.

Direct Text Link Sales
You can directly sell text links in your blogs if you want a total control of your ads. Selling text links directly also cut off the middleman’s share and therefore you keep 100% of your sales, plus, you will have direct relationship with your advertisers. However, there are also some disadvantages with this type of selling text links. First, this is not an option for low traffic blogs or those that are new, thus only popular and high-traffic sites may used this method. Second disadvantage is that your potential advertisers are very limited - that is, only your visitors.

Bloggers usually put an “Advertise” page on their blog and put some details such as prices, traffic stats and other useful informtion that could catch attention to potential advertisers. Others also advertise that they are selling text links by posting on various webmaster forums such as DigitalPoint and SitePoint or placing it on classified ads sites. JohnChow has also a nice article on How To Make Direct Ad Sales.

For WordPress users, there are two plugins that could automate your direct selling of text links. These are OIOPublisher (free) and WP TextAds (free or $127/license - more review soon). You will also be able to get listed on the marketplace of these sites.

Text Links Brokers
If your blog is not so popular, you can use text link brokers which act as a middleman between you and a thousands of advertisers. This is a preferred method by most of the bloggers even if they received huge amount of traffic everyday. It’s because if they used these text links brokers, their blog will be listed in the marketplace of these sites thus it will be exposed to thousands of potential advertisers. Even if there will be a cut of your sales (you will not received 100% of your sales), the exposure it brings would outweigh the disadvantage. Listed below are some (there maybe new one that is unknown) of the popular text link brokers:

• Text-Link-Ads
  Sell relevant text link ads on your website. You can approve or deny the advertiser links that appear on your site. They pay you 50% of the sale price for each text link sold on your website. Additionally, earn $25.00 for new paid client or new publisher referred.
• LinkWorth
  Sell text links and other form of ads and make money. Earn up to 70% of ad revenue recurring monthly in most situations, suggested is 50/50 split. Earn more by referring advertisers to LinkWorth. You can earn $10.00 for each new advertiser signup and 5% of each recurring transaction amount for the life of the advertiser account.
• BackLinks
  Monetize your web site by selling text links to related web sites. Unlike most text link brokers, they DO NOT CHARGE any fees or commissions. You decide what to charge for your text links and you keep 100% the revenue. As usual, you have the control to choose what sites you would like to be advertised on your site. But, BackLinks only accepts sites with PR3.
• Adbrite
  Approve or reject any ads purchased for your sites. You also have the ability to sell direct ads with “Your Ad Here” links. Unfortunately, they have no option to pay your commissions via PayPal.
• Direct Link Ads
  You can earn 75% of the revenue of the link ads sold on your site. You may use your earnings to purchase links from other sites, or you may withdraw the funds at any time if your account balance is more than £50.
• LinkAdage
  Already teamed up with Text-Link-Ads.
• Buy-Sell Text Links
• Text  Link Brokers
• Live Customer

Empty/Looks-Underconstruction/Seems-Inactive/Beta Stage Text Links Brokers?

• Permanent Links
• LinkMonsters
• TextLinkAdvisor
• Text Link Ocean
• Buy Sell Trade Links

If you knew any other programs not listed above, please let us know by posting in the comments area. Additionally, you may share your experiences with us which among the programs above perform well with your blog.

Part 3 of monetizing your blog is coming soon next week. You can read Part 1: Making Money In Your Blog - Contextual Advertising here.

written by Ramil Alcibar

Zlio is a service that let you build your own online store and start selling thousands of products from their approved merchants. Currently, Zlio does not offer selling your own products, you must browse their existing products catalog, choose and add it into your own-built shop. Before I give a little more chit-chat, just take a look at this Online Health Shop I setup to give you an overview of what Zlio can do.

How Does It Work
Building your own online shop with Zlio involves a few mouse clicks and you can have your own online store in just a couple of minutes. The shop I setup above took me about 25 minutes to complete, it may not took too long if I decided immediately what products to be added.

1. Register free at Zlio.
2. Create a new shop in your control panel. This is basically providing some details of your store such as the URL (in http://yourname.zlio.com format or you can also setup with your own top level domain), shop title, template to used and more.
3. Add products to the shop shop created.

How Can You Make Money
Zlio provides four (technically only three) ways on how you can make money with your online shop.

• Pay Per Sale
  Earn commissions on every sell you make from your online shop. Commissions varies from 0.6% to 20% (the highest and lowest I’ve seen) depending on the merchants you choose.
• Pay Per Click
  You can also earn commissions when someone click on the products on your shop. Unfortunately, you cannot earn at all of the products on pay per click basis. Some just pay only on pay per sale basis.
• Referrals
  You can earn a lifetime 10% commissions on the earnings of your direct referrals + 5% of your direct referrals’ referral earnings.
• Google Adsense
  You can also display Adsense on your online shop. However, 40% of your Adsense earnings on the shop will be deducted.

More Zlio Features
Zlio has many features that let you maximize your online shop. Some of the important features are listed below:

• Thousansd of products to choose from, just select your interested niche that you think you can market.
• You can also display the products in your blog or website.
• Make your online shop more professional by putting it in your top level domain.
• You can have multiple shops with only one account. This means that you can have http://shop1.zlio.com, http://shop2.zlio.com an so on depending on the availability of the subdomain you choose.
• Nice templates are ready to use. You can even drag and drop elements around your page the way you like it. If you have some CSS skills, you can also customize the look and feel of your online shop.
• Shoppers may leave their reviews of the products on your shop.

I still have to make customizations and play around with the shop I created above. Sign-up now with Zlio and please post your experiences in the comments area below.

written by Ramil Alcibar

adgridwork is an advertising network that allow you (bloggers and website owners) to display your ads to thousands of highly targeted and related sites for FREE. In exchange for displaying your ads, you are required to also display ads on your site by putting a code snippet into your webpages.

Highlights and Benefits

• Free to join. You just simply display ads for free in return. You will not get paid, unlike Adsense, if the ads in your site are clicked.
• You can target where you want your ads are served by choosing the right category and by keywords.
• Improve your search engine rankings. Since your website(s) are displayed on network of sites, you are increasing your backlinks which is vital to increasing your rankings.
• Increase your traffic. As previously stated, your ads will be displayed to a network of sites thus there’s more visibility of your site.
• Free metrics and tracking tools for webmasters.

How It Works

1. Register at adgridwork, FREE.
2. Create an ad campaign by providing your site details, category and keywords. In this step, you must also choose what type of ad layout you will use to display ads on your site. You can also block sites that you consider as your competitor.
3. Copy and paste the code snippet in your site.
4. Your ad will now appear on related sites based on your category and keyword targeting.

adgridwork states that they are compatible with Adsense as stated on their blog. This means that you can have both Adsense and adgridwork ads on the same pages but I’m not really sure with it and I may not also using them at once. I highly recommend that you must contact Google first about this concern if you are planning to display Adsense and adgridwork ads together. Click here to register and learn more about adgridwork.

written by Ramil Alcibar