The Newest Ways To Make Money Online

In 2007, after working for small screen-printing companies for nearly a decade, April Wade, 32, and her boyfriend Justin Sellers, 27, decided to strike out on their own. Anchor Screen Printing, in Fort Walton, Fla., made custom T-shirts with designs created by local churches, schools, businesses and walk-in customers. Two months after opening, revenue was but a trickle and the twosome–staked with a $25,000 loan from a friend–couldn’t cover rent on their 2,000-square-foot store, which included a printing facility.

Then one of Wade’s friends told her about Etsy, an online brokerage that connects artisans with buyers. Wade and Sellers printed custom-designed T-shirts (some drawn by outside artists) and posted them on Etsy’s site. Good move. “We couldn’t have kept the business going without it,” says Wade. “It kept us afloat while we were building up our business.”

Over the past two years, Deadworry, the couple’s subsite on Etsy, has moved 5,000 T-shirts, cotton dresses and bags, generating $150,000 in sales. Etsy’s take: 3.5% sales commission ($6,000), plus a 20-cent listing fee for each item. Better yet: no advertising expenses. Etsy’s large audience–now 3 million to 4 million unique visitors a month, according to the company–handles that. “So many people are looking at it and they just see you,” says Wade. Etsy still accounts for about half of Anchor’s annual revenue.

The Anchor duo is part of a new wave of online entrepreneurs–those looking to supplement their income, as well as the 10.4% of the U.S. workforce scrambling to stay afloat while they hunt for a new job.

Established virtual marketplaces, such as eBay and Craigslist, laid the groundwork in the ’90s. Now there’s a new crop of vibrant sites catering to niche groups of buyers and sellers. Just two examples: Infochimps facilitates the sale of data sets (such as numbers on current cigarette smoking by sex and state), while Sittercity matches parents with babysitters.

Plenty of e-commerce sites flamed out in the dot-com bust of 2001. “The knock on new companies like these was always there’s not enough liquidity to create a viable market in something so small,” says Paul Kedrosky, a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation, a Kansas City, Mo., nonprofit that studies entrepreneurship. “Now you can find big marketplaces in small obscure areas, mostly because of how gigantic the online population has become. There’s more liquidity in small marketplaces now than large ones like eBay 15 years ago.”

Online commerce has remained relatively healthy, even through the recession. According to the Department Of Commerce, e-commerce sales in the third quarter ended in September hit $34 billion, up 1.8% from the same period last year. Meanwhile, total retail sales decreased 7.5%, to $920 billion during the same stretch.

While still small, Etsy is becoming a bustling bazaar. During the month of October, artisans sold 1 million items, generating about $17.7 million in revenue, 11% more than in September. “It’s hard for a generalized marketplace like eBay to get into these niche areas, because they can’t pull a community together,” says Steve Barsh, partner at DreamIt Ventures, a Philadelphia early-stage venture firm.

DreamIt, in May, plunked down $25,000 for a 6% stake of Notehall.com, a marketplace where students at 14 universities, including the University of Arizona, Purdue and Drexel, can sell notes and study guides for classes. Price: 25 cents per upload for notes; $1 for study guides. Notehall’s take: a steep 50% commission on every stale. Founder Sean Conway says Notehall attracts 65,000 unique viewers and handles about 10,000 transactions every month. Conway aims to expand to 50 universities by May 2010. (For a list of six new online marketplaces, see our slide show.

Bill Tai, a partner at Charles River Ventures, smells a renaissance for e-commerce. “Every other segment in the Internet has been remade except for e-commerce,” says Tai, who in 2007 invested $6 million in Glyde.com, a marketplace for used CDs, books and video games. “During recessionary periods, people get creative about getting cash and monetizing what they can.”

Indeed, the U.S. unemployment rate fails to capture what Kauffman Foundation’s Kedrosky calls “atomized” forms of employment. “I’m not going to say we’re not seeing horrifically high levels of unemployment,” he adds, “but our measures are wrong, and people have more opportunities than ever before to make money off the grid.”

How To Make Money Online

Fifteen billion smackers: That’s the value Microsoft recently slapped on Facebook when the computer giant invested $240 million for a 1.6% stake in Mark Zuckerberg’s online social-networking site.

You could seethe with envy–or you could chase your own fortune on the Web.

Some online businesses require only a few hundred dollars in equipment, while others demand significant hardware and perhaps even a warehouse. Some might make you rich; others might just cover beer money. And all involve various levels of time, capital and technological skill.

In Pictures: Eight Ways To Make Money Online

“Some people have dreamed about owning their own business and have not followed through because of the investment in resources,” says Jim Griffith, head of eBay University, for those aiming to set up shop selling goods at the online auctioneer’s site. “The Internet allows people to at least try without making a large initial investment.”

Army veteran Brandi Ramos of Springfield, Ill., did it. As a single mom in need of extra income, she started her online retail career peddling “big and tall” men’s clothing on eBay.

Three years later, Ramos, 32, makes a good living working online out of her 600-square-foot basement packed with hanging displays and baker’s racks piled with tupperware containing underwear and belts. Ramos aims to offer quick service, answering all e-mails within four to six hours. She claims to net $25,000 on $100,000 sales a year, and even earns a few bucks per order on shipping.

If managing inventory seems too big a chore, play virtual landlord and charge other retailers monthly fees (or per-transaction fees) for the opportunity to market their products on your site. Amazon.com nabbed 28% of its revenues this way in 2006.

Craigslist is another take on this model: The 25-person company, worth a reported $2 billion, charges businesses to post help wanted ads in San Francisco, New York and L.A.; it also collects fees for apartment listings in New York City. Total page views per month: about 5 billion.

Then there’s every pajama-clad blogger’s dream: producing content supported by advertising dollars. Selling advertising is how thousands of established online media outlets pay their electric bills. They charge advertisers two ways: by the number of overall Web pages (called “impressions”) served up, and by the number of people who click on the ads.

Setting up a blog requires not much more than a basic publishing program, a server and software to track ad clicks. The hard part, though, is attracting enough eyeballs to make it worth someone’s while to pay to advertise on your site.

To have any prayer of attracting large advertisers, sites need to attract at least 500,000 unique visitors per month, says David Hauslaib, publisher of Jossip.com, a media and gossip blog that counts Coca Cola and Sketchers among its advertisers. Sadly, even if you do generate enough traffic, the “click-through” rates on ads tend to be quite low–in the neighborhood of one half of 1%.

Subscription-based models are even harder to crack. Unless your site fulfills an urgent need (for tangible investment ideas, a potential mate, etc.), users aren’t likely to pay for the content.

One way to garner subscription revenue is to run a virtual marketplace. These sites collect by allowing buyers and sellers easy access to each other. Many of these marketplaces flamed out in the dot-com bust, but some persist. Mfg.com, for instance, matches equipment manufacturers with smaller component suppliers. Dating sites like Match.com charge subscription fees for access to their members. And H2Bid.com links municipalities with wastewater-equipment vendors.

As with tangible real estate, you can buy virtual plots (URL addresses), flip them and make a buck. GoDaddy.com sells unused domain names for under $10 dollars apiece. To attract buyers, run tests to determine how often certain key words are searched so that you can demonstrate the likelihood that your URL will show up in a Google or Yahoo! search. One tip: The best domain names are short, sweet, specific and easy to remember. (For more on this model, check out “Meet Noah Of The Internet” and “The Most Expensive Web Addresses.”)

As Internet usage grows, so too will the sophistication of online business models. Take 3-year-old Yoonew.com, which sells futures contracts on sports tickets.

Fans buy the right to take delivery of tickets if their teams make it to a coveted playoff game, perhaps months away. Given the uncertainty of the bet, those contracts sell for a fraction of the future market value of the underlying tickets. If your team makes it to the big game, you’ve locked in a cheap seat; if it falls short, you lose that insurance premium.

Yoonew makes money when the revenue it collects from selling all those contracts exceeds the cost of delivering a small number of very expensive tickets on game days. The danger: If ticket prices spike, or there are no seats available, the company could suffer a loss or alienate its customers.

Sure, you can make money online. But no one said it was easy.

6 Ways to Generate Traffics for Your Blog

Whatever the reason of putting up a blog, it is very essential that there is good traffic diverted to it so that there is a large audience reading your blog. Here are some ways that depict how to generate traffic for your blog:

1. Guest posting

Instead of writing a blog and waiting people to come, it is better to reach out to the targeted audience and guest posting is a very good way of doing this. Guest posting implies putting up posts on other blogs, exposing the person and his writing skills to an entirely different audience. If the content is very well written it could attract lots of new people to your blog. Moreover, backlinks, which are the basis of getting high rankings in the search engine ratings, can be obtained in the process. A person becomes a better writer by writing for others and in the process can make new friends and get the required exposure.

2. SEO marketing

Search engine optimization (SEO) signifies the promotion of a website such that it is highly ranked in the search engine ratings. SEO marketing techniques help the websites or the blogs to be rated highly in the search engine rankings, so that when a user punches in a keyword, the blog or the website, if related is mentioned in the initial few pages of the search engine. Traffic to a blog can be generated by putting in relevant keywords in the blog so that when the search engine searches for content on a particular topic, your blog is highlighted. SEO marketing emphasizes on the techniques that make a blog highly rated not because it pays the search engine to do so but because the blog has the related content.

3. Article marketing

This technique involves the writing of articles on some topics and putting these articles on other websites and blogs for free. The purpose is to make the readers aware of your expertise in writing on a topic. Well written content can drive new traffic to a blog. If writing on a topic is a person’s forte, he can attract readers by first submitting articles on popular directories and then diverting the readers to his blog.

A good article requires adequate use of keywords and best SEO techniques to be picked by the search engines.

4. Blog commenting

This refers to the social and interactive nature of a blog. Since blogs are a way to opine on a particular subject, opening it to comments is a good way of making it interactive. A static website is one where a person cannot put in his comments, even if he disagrees with the information on the site. However with blogs it is different. They should be interactive and allow people to voice their opinions and that is what blog commenting does. The links that are left behind by those that are commenting can be a resource for finding new blogs and more bloggers.

5. Social media

One can increase traffic and gain trust by going the social media way. Interacting with potential customers on social networking sites is a good way of back linking them to your blogs. You can provide relevant content at these sites so that readers know that a particular blogger exists and would want to read your blog whether in a niche area or in general.

6. Press releases

Writing press releases about your blog is a good way to divert traffic. A well written eye-catchy press release can generate high traffic for a website or blog. Anchor texts and relevant keywords placed in the press release can provide high search engine rankings. Additionally, you can use these anchor texts to put back links to your blog. This way you generate more traffic.

7 Ways to Generate Income from Your Blog

A recently coined term, blogs have become the order of the day. Blogs actually mean Web logs, which can be explained as periodicals on the internet that depict the personal views or perception of an individual on a particular subject or topic. The blogs are regularly updated by the blogger and often, popular blogs have huge fan following. Although blogs are mainly written to express one’s views on certain topics or subjects, they are also seen as a potential money making venues.

Business minded bloggers have come up with many ideas that make them earn money through their blogs. Some of these ideas have been discussed as follows:

Display Ads from Advertising Networks

This is probably the simplest, easiest and the most popular method of making money from your blog. Often you might have seen contextual ads from Google displayed on the blog or website you are surfing. All these are Google AdSense ads, which displays advertisements related to the topic, on the blog. While going through a blog, if a reader clicks this ad to gain more information, the blog owner is paid a small sum. Thus, more the number of readers clicking on these ads from Google more will be the income for the blog owner. A very big advantage of displaying advertisements of Google AdSense is that it is free. Moreover, since ads from Google are generally unobtrusive, the readers do not get irked by them or cause them to leave the blog for another website or blog.

Google AdSense is the biggest advertising networks on the Internet. Other close alternatives of Adsense are Yahoo Publisher Network and Bidvertiser. If for any reason you can’t use AdSense on your blog, these alternatives are your best solution.

Sell Ad Space

This is where you sell ad space directly to your prospective advertisers without involving any third party advertising network. You will need to write an advertising page to describe the type of ads you are offering with price details included if possible. You’ll place an ‘advertise here’ link to the advertising page on your blog top navigation menu or sidebar. The prospective advertisers who are interested on adveritising on your blog will click on your ‘advertise here’ link to read what you are offering. If an advertiser order an ad spot, you’ll insert their ad code into your blog theme to have their ad live on your blog.

Bloggers generally sell banner and text link ad space on their blog. But if you have some creative ideas of selling ad space on your blog, you can always implement your ideas to see if they works.

Note:
Remember to you use the ‘nofollow’ feature if you are selling text links on your blog to avoid any possible penalization by Google.

In-Text Advertising

The ad network called Kontera has created a unique way for bloggers to monetize their content. It is the in-text advertising. Bloggers who join Kontera can implement the Kontera In-Text ads on their blogs right away by installing and configuring the special plugin provided by Kontera. Once the Kontera set up has completed, the Kontera system will double-underline most of the keywords in your content pages. If a visitor points his/her mouse on a double-underlined keyword, an ad will pop up. If the visitor become interested on the ad, he/she can click the double-unerlined keyword link to check more about the ad. You’ll get 70% of revenue share each time somebody click your Kontera in-text link.

The great thing about Kontera is that it can be used in conjunction with other ad network like Google AdSense. So, on a same page you can have both the AdSense ads and Kontera in-text links showing at the same time. This certainly can help increase your blog revenue.

Affiliate Marketing

Another popular form of making money through a blog is by promoting other people products. Affiliate marketing is the lifeline of internet marketing. Therefore, product owners are always on the look out for people that are interested in pursuing affiliate marketing. Blogs that have a very good amount of subscribers and followers can make money by offering their readers products related to the topic or any other product. The blog here is like a conduit between the online website owner and the readers. It is a win-win situation for both the parties involved as the readers get related product there and then without having to scour the internet and the product owners get a ready-made targeted audience to which their products can be offered for sale.

Offer Services

Although blogs are meant to just vent out one’s feelings towards a particular subject or issue, they also become potential money earners as they help in deepening the bond between the blogger and the reader. These readers are potential customers, which can be ushered to make them aware of the blogger’s special skills, if any. Moreover the blogger can provide consulting services to other people citing his own example. He may offer other services or his own products to his readers. With a constant one-to-one connection, the bond does strike. Even if there are not repeated customers, there always are references that are passed on, if services offered for the first time were satisfactory.

Write Sponsored Reviews

This is where the online companies or marketers pay the bloggers to write about their products or services. There are several marketplaces on the Internet allowing you to find companies and advertisers that are willing to pay you for writing sponsored reviews. If you get into these marketplaces, you may get some sponsored review orders constantly. However, you should avoid doing too much of sponsored reviews. Posting sponsored reviews frequently on your blog will annoy your visitors and readers which will then hurt your reputation. Moreover, the search engines especially Google will penalize blogs that post sponsored reviews regularly.

So if you are writing sponsored reviews for some quick bucks, make sure you keep a limit on it. Perhaps posting one or two sponsored reviews monthly wouldn’t affect anything.

But for the bloggers who want to make sure their blog wouldn’t get any kind of penazation by the search engines, they choose to not writing a single sponsored review on their blog.

Ask for Donation

Some reputed bloggers are doing quite well with it. You can follow them by Adding a ‘PayPal Donate’ button or a text link like ‘donate to us’ or ‘support us’ on your blog sidebar. This might become one of your blog revenue sources

5 Steps to Start Making Money Online with Blogging

Blog is no longer just a personal journal or dairy nowadays. People use blog not just for sharing what they know but also use it for marketing and making money online. If you look at the successful bloggers today, you’ll find that they are so popular in the blogosphere and also at the same time earning a life-changing income from their blog.

For the individuals wanting to earn money online, blogging is really a great option for them. Many of those people who live off with blogging now are just ordinary people at the time when they just started in blogging. They wrote blog posts and built traffic constantly; and so their blog grew from time to time. Eventually they became a successful blogger.

It will take several steps to get started in blogging. Below you’ll learn how to get your first blog set up and launched on the Internet to make money:

Step 1 – Decide What to Write

Before you create your blog, you need to figure out what topics you should write on your blog. There are plenty of topics you can choose when it comes to blogging but it is suggested that you start off with a single topic that you love. Writing and sharing on something that you’re passionate about are enjoying. And you will have more ideas in your mind when creating content of your favorite topic.

Also if you are good at something or you are an expert at any field, these can be your blogging topic as well. People always like to learn how to do something. So you can  help them by sharing your knowledge and expertise with them.

Step 2 – Set Up Your Blog

Once you have decided the topic to blog on, you can move on to set up your blog. You’ll need to use a blog platform to start a blog. WordPress is a highly recommended blog platform in this case. Many of the successful bloggers use WordPress.

Installing and launching a new blog using WordPress isn’t very complicated but you do need to learn some technical stuff to get thing done properly. Don’t be too worry about  WordPress blog installation as it is not going to be difficult. There are free step-by-step video tutorials that can help you out in the entire WordPress blog installation process. You can access a series of free WordPress installation videos presented by a reputable blogger in Becomeablogger.com. Everything you need to know is shown in the videos, so you just follow the instructions and get 

your first blog launched.

In addition to that, there are now web host companies providing easy WordPress setup solution. Hosts like Godadday, Dreamhost and Bluehost allow you install and set up a WordPress blog with just few clicks of mouse. Here are some tutorials showing you how to start a blog quickly with these hosts:

http://www.ehow.com/how_6004153_install-wordpress-godaddy.html

http://www.themepremium.com/how-to-install-wordpress-on-dreamhost

It will cost some money to start a new WordPress blog. You need to pay for a custom domain name registration and also web hosting to have your blog up and running on the Internet.

You can change the theme of your WordPress blog anytime. There are thousands of free WordPress themes available on the Internet. Just type in the search terms like free WordPress themes or free premium WordPress themes, you’ll find a lot of websites that offer wordpress themes free of charge. So you can be certain that you’ll get a right theme for your blog.

However, if you find WordPress isn’t for you, you can always use other blog platform such as Blogger. Blogger is one of the good alternatives of WordPress. Starting a new blog with Blogger blog platform is easier and faster. Blogger is an ideal option for those who have no time to learn about the technical aspects of blogging.

Step 3 – Publish Content on Your Blog

After completing blog installation, your blog will be launched on the Internet. You are going to be excited to see your blog live on the Internet. This is the time to post your content. You should publish at least 5 posts on your blog before you show your blog to the public. This ensures that every new visitor who comes to your blog will find some interesting content to read. Then you should update your blog with fresh content on a regular basis to make your blog become more resourceful from time to time.

All your blog content must be originally written by you and not copying from elsewhere on the Internet. Each of your posts should be formatted well. Always use bullets when there are important points that you want to emphasis on your blog post. Adding some relevant pictures or photos to your posts is also good because this can make reading more interesting.

Step 4 – Promote Your Blog

Blog marketing and promotion are the keys to success in blogging. You are going to need to work in blog marketing and promotion to get as many visitors and readers as possible. There are a variety of blog marketing methods that you can use to generate traffic for your blog. You can start off with methods like blog commenting, listing in free blog directories, guest posting on other blogs, participating in forum discussion and article marketing.

If you have some money to invest in blog marketing, you can instantly drive quality and targeted traffic to your blog by using pay per click advertising programs such as Google AdWords and Bidvertiser. These pay per click advertising programs are good for the new blogs that need instant targeted traffic.

Search engine optimization is another method that can provide steady source of targeted traffic. So you should take some time to learn about search engine optimization and work on it to increase your search traffic.

You should keep on doing blog marketing to maintain and grow the traffic of your blog. Find the marketing methods that work, stick with them and you can ensure your blog traffic grow from time to time.

Step 5 – Monetize Your Blog Traffic

When your blog have gained a steady stream of traffic, it is time to monetize the traffic to generate income. You have various choices when it comes to monetizing your blog. You can place Google AdSense ads on your blog pages. Earning with AdSense is easy. You just have to insert the AdSense ad code on your blog pages and subsequently the Adsense ads will run on your blog auto-pilot. Each time your readers or visitors click on an AdSense ad, you get a share of the ad revenue with Google.

Besides Google AdSense, there are a number of other advertising networks that can help you generate additional blog income as well. Some of the good ones are Yahoo Publisher Network, Bidvertiser and Chitika.

Selling advertising space on your blog can be a good source of revenue to you as well. You can set up banner and text link ad spaces on your blog header and sidebar for sales. The prospective advertisers who are interested will contact you directly. If the advertiser decides to advertise on your blog, they will pay you to buy an ad space on your blog.

Note:

If you are selling text link on your blog, make sure you use the ‘nofollow’ feature to ensure Google wouldn’t penalize your blog.

Another way to monetize your blog traffic is by doing affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing on blog will take more time to get the result. But it is worth trying it because affiliate marketing can potentially make you big money. You need to build a list of blog subscribers and loyal readers first. Once you have gained more readers and subscribers in your list, you can start promoting affiliate product to them. An effective method to do so is by writing and publishing affiliate product reviews on your blog. Your product recommendations will encourage the readers to buy through your affiliate links which will earn you commission.