How I Invented the Free Lunch

So just like everybody else I decided to try and monetize on my blog. I tried multiple things for over a year and just recently discovered what works for me. I finally have a site that generates an average of $20/day (or about $7,000/year). To do the same exact thing will take you about 2-3 days…. It won’t pay your rent or mortgage. But you can think of it as a Free Vacation or as I like to call it - Free Lunch. Keep in mind that I have invested about $300 in it for hosting, marketing, and other tools. You don’t have to do all that, there are free alternatives for most. But I recommend getting your own hosting/domain + some marketing budget.

( Original Article and Screenshots available at http://www.asenski.com/archives/10 )

I believe charging for information like that is lame! This was written in the hope that it will be useful and is provided to you for free. Links to most services have been provided for your convenience. The rest you can probably find on Google.

Here are the steps I went through with this experiment:

1. Hosting:

You can probably skip that step as I’m sure most of you already have a hosting plan. But if you were for some reason dissatisfied with your current provider read this. I’ve tried many different hosting companies including but not limited to cphosting, imhosted, ipower, ipowerweb, and I’ve had all kinds of problems with all of them. cphosting was my first one and they were just a small reseller. ipower and ipowerweb were the biggest disappointment I got a virtual private server and it turned out it wasn’t managed. Some people like that. But I don’t have time to play with Apache configuration. I want to work on my websites. Then imhosted for the most part was pretty good service but when it came down to their fantastico scripts (where I tried to install wordpress) it just won’t work. Well so I downloaded wordpress and installed it myself but it’s just an unnecessary pain in the ass. Then my server got hacked and they restored it with data from 2 weeks ago I was mad because I have just done major upgrade for my sites. HostGator

And then a miracle - I discovered HostGator! And now I am a happy camper! Their pricing is competitive and the service/support is outstanding. I have signed up for their reseller account for $25/month which gives me 5GB space + 50GB transfer per month + unlimited domains + cpanel + fantastico (which is what I used to install this WordPress blog). I highly recommend it and as a proof you can see that this site along with all my other domains are hosted on their servers. I would imagine their cheaper plans are not much different it’s just I needed more space/bandwidth for my clients so I signed up for reseller. If anyone has a smaller package please don’t hesitate to post in the comments section about your experience. I would also be curious about their dedicated servers although they seem slightly expensive. (But I would pay extra $50/mo if I know I’m getting the same outstanding quality/support)

2. Content

Like many other people I have a blog. I started posting things about Game Development (I work in the Game Industry). Then more and more I started posting random things starting from email jokes I got at work to web programming. I had about 100 visitors a day and page rank of 4. But still when you look at it - I only had less than 50 pages of content. So how do you monetize your blog? If CTR (Click Through Ratio) is about 1% then that means I get 1 click a day from AdSense. That’s pathetic. I can’t even cover my hosting plan.

So among many things I tried - I signed up for Amazon Associate. It allows you to sell anything that you see on their site for a small commission on each sale made (starts at 4% and you can build it up to 8% but that’s unlikely you will probably get to 6% and stay there).

Then I discovered the Associate-o-Matic:

For the people on a small budget out there - they have a free version that makes every 5th link associated with their ID instead of yours. But I just signed up for the paid version. It’s the best engine I could find. It’s very easy to use. And the best part IT IS VERY SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY. You HAVE to set it up so you use dynamic pages. That means that even though you only have one script you are showing to the search engines millions of pages with content. And guess what Google like it and started sucking it in as a sponge. So as soon as I did that and the marketing strategy described below I started having over 1000 hits/day. (And that was only few days after I did all this). And you can see for yourself. On top of everything I thought that the Amazon store is not even going to generate income so I put AdSense because I figured well traffic means profit with AdSense. (So in a way my Amazon store was like a lure for the traffic that was bound to click on the ads):

This is when I put AdSense and I also kinda used it to track my traffic:

And to my surprise this is what the Amazon store generated in profits:

So yeah go ahead and definitely sign up for Amazon Associates as well as get the Associate-O-Matic. It’s worth it!

3. Bringing the Traffic. Here comes the fun!

So I got the hosting covered but how do you bring traffic? My website has been around for awhile but it was only bringing like 100 unique visitors a day.

Now this is the million dollar question. I’m sure everything you do helps. But just what really works? I will tell you what worked for me. You be the judge yourself and find how and if it will work for you.

If your site has at least 500 visitors a day or a page rank 5 you can skip this step. And worry about it later after you setup the rest.

The most traffic I get is from Google Search. In order to get that you need to make sure that Google puts in their index as many pages from your site as possible. If you fit the description before with a good page rank and traffic, you don’t need to worry, chances are Google will index your pages fast enough.

But what if Google doesn’t care about your pages? (And I am not covering the situation where you are blacklisted, we are talking about how to market a site with reasonably good content here)

What you need to do is make sure you get as many back links as possible. I used 2 products for the job. You can try other techniques/services but aim for the same results.

Instant Article Submitter - I used this tool and it generated hundreds of back links to my website. I believe paying $97 for about 100 backlinks was worth it. And keep in mind you can keep reusing the software and resubmit more and more articles increasing the backlinks everytime. Their website looks just like any infomercial and I was skeptical but I don’t regret the purchase. Of course you can develop backlinks the natural way but it will take too much time.

Well good I got tons of backlinks but none of them are pages with good page rank. So how do I get those? The best direct text link broker I have seen so far - Text Link Ads. The prices may be somewhat steep for an advertisement. BUT! The good news is that they are all direct links so the search engines see them as an actual link to you. They have a promotion of $100 FREE for spending so I bought advertisement on a site with page rank 7 which was normally $150 but because of the promotion I only paid $50 for it:

Text Link Ads

Receive Links - A Free service that allows you to populate direct links on other people’s sites.

4. Advertising

I suggest you stay away from AdWords. AdSense is the winning end of it, AdWords is the loosing and that’s that. Of 1000 people that come to my website after a web search only average of 4 buys something. So out of 250 people one buys. That means that if you pay say even as low as $0.10 per targeted click you will spend $25.00 before someone buys something. And unless you are making more than that off of it, don’t bother advertising. Of course if you believe that that customer will return and pay you more in the long run then it’s worth it. But most keywords I use start at about $0.40 so that’s now like $100 per actual customer you are paying. Again… Don’t do it, unless you really know what you are getting into.

AdBrite can generate you traffic with a much lower Cost per Click (CPC). If you really need to advertise with CPC programs I strongly recommend this service. Months ago I did another experiment with them and it was successful. I found a site that had 1 million page views a day (abum.com) and it was a promotion for only $100/month. that was like $3 for 1 million impressions! So I put an advertisement for a product that was generating me $24 profit per sale and I was even in few days, then made a total profit of $150 for the month.

5. Other Tools/Services Amazon is not the only place you can sign up to be a mass product affiliate. Just remember it is important to represent it well to the search engines and to bring in the traffic. Then the profit will come too.

Share-A-Sale - The easiest affiliate portal I have seen. They provide datafeeds and what not. Signing up is very easy. Commission Junction - Very hard to deal with. They want only serious big players. LinkShare - Don’t have much experience with them yet. ClixGalore - I only know of this because of the Associate-O-Matic. Have no clue about the product line. ClickBank - This is mostly for infomercial products but it works well with low CPC programs like AdBrite.

FireFox- I love my FireFox and the many extension plugins for it. Especially the Web Developer ones. Google Sitemaps - I made my own Perl script to crawl all of my pages and generate a Google Sitemap. Most likely I will have to wait few weeks before I can gauge whether that was a good or a bad thing. I will keep you posted on that subject.

Have a Nice Web Development! Cheers!

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