Make Money Online

I’ll be on the road to Digital Hollywood in LA from June 11 through the 14th, as we will be exhibiting stashSpace.com’s high-quality in-network video-sharing solution for broadband providers.

Many of the cable & dsl partners we are exploring partnerships with will be speaking at the event, and we thought it would be a good time to expose more of the industry to our unique consumer offering in the personal video space.

If you happen to be attending the show, please stop by!  We will be in booth 11, and would love to talk with you!

So I just found out that PayPal has two levels of Accounts, and in order for your account to receive payments from PayPal Website Payments or Instant Purchase for Auctions, you must go through the process of verifying your account.

This process essentially means that you need to enter routing and bank account information for one of your bank accounts.  PayPal will then make two small deposits in your account, which you must verify by confirming the amounts of these two deposits (this can take up to three days to show up in your online account).

I got notification last week that my first bid through Sponsored Reviews was accepted for Photo Frame Show.  The process was easy. I submitted one of my PR3 blogs - Online Video Sharing - for the service, and then bid on 2 of the posted projects from advertisers.  One of the bids (for Photo Frame Show) has been accepted, and I was given 10 days to create the post.  Unlike some of my blogs, Online Video Sharing is an editorial site largely given to (unpaid) review of existing online video and photo sharing companies and their enabling technology.  It is a site that I am very selective with in terms of paid compensation, and only accept paid reviews for sites that are relevant or companies that I would normally look to promote.

I’ll let you all know how the paid review process continues with Sponsored Reviews.

In business, everyone has business cards, so why don’t you create some for your online business? While you are certainly spending a lot of time creating your online community, don’t miss out on the opportunity to spread the word by handing out business cards whenever the opportunity arises. I can’t tell you how many times I have met someone on the plane, in the espresso line or at a party who ran an interesting site. If I don’t get a business card, the chances of me actually remembering their web address is virtually nill.

Check out ProfessionalBusinessCards.com if you don’t know where to start. They have a great selection of cards, and you can start by getting 100 business cards for only $3.95.

My newest blog will be launching May 20 at DVGadgets.com. DVGadgets will be a website devoted to news, analysis and review of
digital video and audio products and services, and the technologies
that make them possible.  Topics will be wide-ranging from Online Movie
Downloads to Set-top DVRs to Home Theater Systems to the latest in
Digital Camcorders, Digital Cameras and Mobile Devices.

I was notified this morning that this blog was accepted into
the Pay Per Post network. I was greeted
with a quick dose of reality that will be true for all bloggers starting
out. Blogs without a Google Page Rank
have extremely few “qualified opportunities”. Out of the total number of opportunities available in the Pay Per Post network, less than 10% were
available to those of us who do not have a Page Rank as of the time of Google’s
last ranking, and half of these opportunities (at the time of this post) related to student loans.

Since there is a limited pool of qualified opportunities for new bloggers,
this presents a bit of a quandary. Do you post
about companies/products that do not relate to the content of this blog until you achieve a higher ranking? Or do you
focus on continuing to create quality content in which your readers will be
interested?

There’s another consideration here for you as well. If you are creating segmented blogs (i.e.
having different blogs for different general topics such as travel, technology,
sports, etc.), you also need to get past an initial 10 sponsored postings for your
initial approved blog in order to get your other sites into the network.

After considering the options, I think I will be taking what
I hope is an acceptable middle road. Here’s my plan:

1. I will take on 10 initial opportunities until I am eligible to have my other site(s) accepted into the PPP network.
2. After the initial 10 opportunities (or until I have another blog accepted into PPP), I will then review only those opportunities that truly interest me, and/or are relevant to the content of this blog, and/or are related to the content of another blog in my network that has not yet been accepted into PPP.
3. I will also post reviews for opportunities that I am not yet eligible for, but have an interest in. After all, the PPP network can also serve as a generator of ideas for good content.

Affiliate programs can be a lucrative way to add income-generating possibilities to your websites.  Google AdSense is a quick and easy way to get started with Advertising on your site, but are inherently limited by the number of people that are coming to your site and then clicking through the ads.

Affiliate relationships, on the other hand, can offer much higher returns on a per-visitor basis (with higher payouts), and as a bonus, can also provide you with topics to blog about!

So how do you get started?  Luckily, there are a number of companies that have created an aggregated affiliate marketplace, bringing advertisers and publishers together and managing all the tracking, auditing, management and financial transactions so you can concentrate on creating and maintaining a quality site that will attract users.

I signed up with three affiliate sites today - Commission Junction, Link Share and ShareaSale - and quickly went through their merchants and applied for the affiliate programs.  There are a great variety of merchants available, from financial services to photo sharing to baby supplies.  A few of the Affiliate programs for which I was accepted included Sony, Philips, BlockBuster, CinemaNow.com, Babies Online, Stamps.com, Baby Universe and Netflix.

Some of the programs automatically approve you, others review applications by hand, and may accept you (or not accept you) if your site meets their traffic ideals, subject area, and does not contain offensive material.  Interestingly enough, I was denied by most of the financial services programs, although I hope to be able to reapply once my blogs have gained in traffic, popularity and page rank.