Make Money Online

I came across a website this morning through PayPerPost - Humidifier Information.  It is a great example of how to use a microsite to create a targeted niche content site that will successfully attract readers and provide extremely targeted contextual ads.

The site already ranks well in the naturalized search engine results (#1 under "humidifier information", and #11 under "humidifier"), and has some good general content about the benefits of humidifiers, different types of humidifiers, and the various different manufacturers.  In addition, it’s well written, has a well-presented template, and presents the contextual ads very cleanly.  Check it out, and consider creating a microsite in this mold.

(Please note that this is not a sponsored post, as this blog did not qualify for the opportunity)

I have added a "Sponsored Reviews" Category to this blog now to track Product and Company reviews I will be doing through Pay Per Post to support the continuance of this blog.  I mentioned in an earlier review of PayPerPost that you need to have a 90-day aged blog with a minimum of 20 blog entries in order to be accepted into the program. 

Well, according to my count, this is #20, so I’m ready to apply for the program.  My long-term plan is to bring most of the Pay-Per-Posts into my network of sites, to pick where they may be most applicable to the blog content (I even saw a PPP opportunity for a Sail Cover manufacturer the other day that would be perfect for Sailing the Northwest!).

In order to bring your other network sites into Pay Per Post, however, you need to have a minimum of 10 accepted paid posts, and your other network sites need to meet the minimum site requirements (again, 90 days and 20 posts without a 30-day gap between any two posts).  Of course, to gain access to the top opportunities, your blog really needs to have a combination of high Page Rank (most important!) and a Good (i.e. Low) Alexa Ranking, so I would recommend bringing your sites into the network in order of their Page Rank.

Congratulations are also in order for Pay Per Post, as they have had their first blogger cross the $10,000 level for paid posts!

StumbleUpon just released new functionality called StumbleThru that is very exciting for blogs looking to increase their pageviews per user.  StumbleThru is a random content discovery feature for a few selected sites currently (including WikiPedia and , and accounts for your user’s content preferences based on sites that they have previously stumbled.  If they are not current stumblers, they will be returned a random page from your site and notified that they can receive customized results by being a registered stumbler.

Kudos to Michael Arrington of TechCrunch for prompting WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg to create a random page plugin for WordPress that does the same thing on the same day that StumbleThru was announced.

Now hopefully StumbleUpon will be able to make their technology available as a widget, and throw in some additional functionality as well.  I would love to see you be able to specify websites within your network to be Stumbled through.  It would be a great way to get readers of one of your blogs to get exposed to other blogs that you maintain, or selected other sites within your blogroll.

Chitika eMiniMalls "bring product promotion to life on the web.  Provide your users with relevant content and comparative shopping information without ever leaving your site".

The Chitika eMiniMall is a contextual advertisement that brings in product reviews, pictures and pricing through a web-widget that is best described as a combination of Amazon’s Affiliate Program (product pictures, pricing and reviews) and Google AdSense (PPC, contextual advertising).

The company works through a network of 12,000+ online publishers (mostly blogs, I would imagine).  You are able to sign up for an account through the website, although it appears that the company is dissuading new bloggers from signing up until you reach a threshold of 10,000 visitors/month.

The ads themselves are contextually-generated.  This means that the ads will appear and show products that are the same (or similar) to the product being reviewed or the topic of your blog post.

I think that this advertising model will work best on a blog that leans heavily toward product reviews, and as such will be focusing implementation on my DV Gadgets and Online Video Sharing blogs.  I’ll keep you regularly updated on progress and performance of Chitika.  That is, of course, if my account is approved over the next two to three days.

Text Link Ads has a great program for bloggers. Through their system, they sell static html links on your site, which aid advertisers in improving traffic and Search Engine rankings. You can sign up to be both an advertiser or a publisher, and benefit from Text Link Ads managing all the billing and reporting.

As a publisher, you relinquish 50% of the advertising fee to Text Link Ads, but it is a great way to get your money making off the ground by submitting your site to an existing marketplace that draws advertisers.  It’s another benefit of my research switch to WordPress as well - TypePad is not currently supported as a blogging platform.  As far as I can tell, only WordPress and Blogger.com (new version) are supported.

Text Link Ads also has a product called "Feedvertising", where they will insert the text link ads into your feed as another enticement to monetize your blog.  This feature currently only works on WordPress. 

The setup of WordPress on BlueHost was extremely easy, and I spent some time tonight reviewing WordPress templates.  Your default installation of WordPress comes with two very basic themes, so you will definitely want to either customize your theme or find other themes to select from.

There are a number of free and paid themes that are available for you, and you can find a good list on the official WordPress Themes page, as well as a more comprehensive listing of themes (as well as how to build them) here.

However, I found that the free themes were all fairly plain and didn’t say enough about the personality of either myself, my blogs, or the readers that I hope to attract.  I believe the design of your blog is the third most important element to your success - right behind your selected niche and quality of your content.

Luckily, I found Template Monster, which has a gallery of paid themes available for your purchase.  Each of these themes is reasonably priced for either a non-exclusive (~$50) or exclusive ($750+) price.  Since these are paid themes, you are relatively unlikely to run across the other 4-5 people who have purchased the theme that interests you.  I think they will be well worth the investment.

In an earlier post, I reviewed three of the major blogging platforms availalable on the market today - Blogger (free), WordPress (free), and TypePad ($4.95/m).  I was most impressed with the full features and functionality incorporated into WordPress, but was put off by the limitations put on their free account. I landed on TypePad’s Pro account ($14.95/m, unlimited domains, etc.), but am today deciding to leave their platform for a hosted WordPress Solution.

The major reason is in how TypePad handles your blog posts. There are four primary limitations that I see, and in two hours of cruising their knowledge base and forums, I could not find an appropriate resolution:

1. Your posts are arbitrarily truncated at 15 characters (including spaces), meaning your url does not contain the full keyword-rich title you need for higher Search Engine Rankings.
2. Spaces are replaced with an underline "_" as opposed to the more search-engine-friendly standard of a dash "-", which means search engines see "your-keyword-phrase" as one word "yourkeywordph" in their crawler (including the truncation from #1)
3. You are unable to modify the Meta tags on individual posts.  Although Google represents they do not use the meta tags for search engine rankings, many other search engines do, and the description tag IS used for display in the search engine results.
4. Your title tag always starts with the name of your blog, followed by the post title.  A keyword rich page title is an important consideration for high Search Engine Rankings.

As a result, I have decided to move to a host that supports the Word Press Installation (and hopefully most of the widgets that have been developed for WordPress as well).  I have initially chosen to go with BlueHost, which was recommended by WordPress. 

I will start by putting one of my new blogs up on WordPress to see how BlueHost performs. The account specifications are much higher than with TypePad, and the cost is less than half. I’ll report back with my experiences.  Please let me know if any of you have had experiences with either the hosted version of WordPress as a blogging platform, or with BlueHost as a hosting provider.  I’d be interested to find out more.

It’s easy.  Setup a blog about your favorite topic.  Write a couple of pages.  Insert Google AdSense and Amazon Affiliate Ads and watch the money roll in.

Wrong!  Starting a blog is all about writing quality content that your (potential) audience is interested in, and more importantly searching for!  But how do you know about what users are searching for, and what you should write?

You could look at your log reports (Google Analytics offers a great free tool) and see the most popular keywords resulting in hits to your site.  Google’s Webmaster Tools also offer more detailed information on the phrases people use to find your site, but it’s limited to Google’s search engine.

But there’s another service - HitTail - which is a must have for creating quality content around subjects your readers want.  Even better, it helps provide you with ideas for when you hit the inevitable writers block.

As their founder states, "HitTail is a writing suggestion tool for bloggers and website
owners of all sorts — to help you grow your natural search traffic…
free."  They have both a free (up to 100,000 visits/month) and paid service (ranging from $9.99/m to $99.99/m), and the free service should be plenty for most bloggers starting out or for those bloggers who have hit a creative wall or traffic plateau.

How does HitTail work? HitTail gives you a piece of tracking code to put on your website. The
code works quietly on the background and records search hits and
keyword information. HitTail analyzes these phrases to give you suggested topics based on the underperforming
keywords that you can use to improve your results in search engines. By
using the suggestions in new website content, blog posts, or PPC
campaigns you can improve your search results to
attract qualified visitors to your site.

Through the use of HitTail, I personally used their suggestions to write content for StashSpace.Com that grew the percentage of our "Long-tail" hits from 20% of our overall traffic to over 75% over a 5-month period. 

If you are serious about building your audience(s), HitTail is a must-have tool in your SEO arsenal.

w.I’ve determined that my initial approach forward with blogs will be to segment my blogging into a few different niche topics.  I also arrived upon a domain name — lugnut22.com — for this blog to go along with it’s title, Making Money Online.  Why lugnut22? That’s a story for another time, but it has been my handle on the web for some time.

So what will my initial topics be? They are unfortunately not very similar, which would be an advantage, but fit the profile of what I think most people would be able to handle when first starting off.  Here they are:

1. http://www.KrummeFamily.Com
   My Personal Family Blog.  Does the world really need another personal blog?  In my case, yes.  With the relocation of one of my companies (stashSpace) to the Methos Valley - a remote rural mountain valley in North Central Washington - my family moved ~250 miles away from our closest relatives, and find little time to get across the mountatins for visits.  This will be a quick and simple way to keep them all updated on our activities.

   In addition, your personal blog is a great general platform to be able to write just about anything you might want to blog about.  A trip to the local zoo or aquarium can also include more general background information about the facility to make your post more informative.  Your family might just also get more variety in their activities — you won’t want to go to the same place more than twice!

2. http://www.Online-Video-Sharing.com/
   This is a personal blog about an industry that has been my life for the last 7 years.  My two companies have been involved in online video since 2000, long before anyone ever heard of "User Generated Content".  This blog will include information about Online Video companies, products and services; Video Tips and Tricks; Photo Sharing Tips and Tricks; and Video editing and storage services.
3. http://www.sailing-the-northwest.com/
   This is a blog about a long-time hobby of mine - sailing.  Growing up, my family spent 6 weeks each summer on our sailboat, and during my college years I managed a Sailing Club and raced 4-5 days/week over a five year period.  This will be my "hobby" blog.
4. http://www.funforafamily.com/
   This will be the family blog about activities that families can do together.  After all, part of the appeal of striving to earn money online is to gain more control over your personal life.  This blog will let the whole family feel like they are part of the process, and will give us some undisturbed, scheduled time each weekend to spend time together.
5. http://www.lugnut22.com/
   Wait, that’s this blog!  Well, this space will be where I document all my different approaches and track my results and lessons learned through this journey.  During the first few months, the blog may be a bit disparate in nature, but after getting these other blogs established and full of content, I will start to compile my various experiences and lessons into month-by-month activities, checklists and approaches to succeeding online.

I do have a desire to start another blog on a topic on which I am not an expert, but have an interest in.  I have not yet decided what this (or these) topic may yet be, but I will most likely hold off on starting it to make sure that my initial blogs are well-populated and get off the ground quick.

My last post indicated that I was going to be moving forward with my favorite blogging platform — TypePad — but I may now also give some consideration to moving my family blog(s) to Blogger and/or WordPress as well.

Why am I doing this? The answer is simple — Search Engine Optimization. Search engines (Google especially) put special importance on inbound links and their relevancy. But they also seem to be able to detect multiple links coming from the same IP address and don’t count these as highly as multiple links from different IP addresses. By maintaining different blogs (each with their own domain name, of course) on three different blogging platforms, and interlinking them through my blogroll, these inbound links will carry more weight.

Additionally, since I control the linking method, I will also be able to customize the "Title" tag in the outbound link to embed keywords in the link (WordPress includes this field as a default part of their linking method), as well as review my various blogs in relevant posts on each of the other blogs. This will help in establishing relevancy for each of the inbound/outbound links amongst my blogs.