Make Money Online

I’ll be in Fort Wayne Indiana next week for the first annual KillerApp Expo, sponsored by Broadband Properties Magazine. The KillerApp Conference and Expo is the first and only venue to explore the high-bandwidth applications that are driving broadband use and adoption worldwide, and changing the way we work, live and communicate.

As the founder of a web-based personal video editing and sharing company, I was invited to speak on two panels: "Your Media Your Way" and "The Opportunities Internet Applications Offer Broadband Providers."

The first panel, Your Media Your Way, will show how application developers are expanding consumers’ choices and their control over the content they create and purchase. I will be joined on the panel by Chris Brogan, Community Director of Network2.tv, with Masha Zager, Editor of KillerApp.com moderating.

The second panel, "The Opportunities Internet Applications Offer Broadband Providers," will profile AT&T’s approach and strategy of partnering with applications developers, as well as how and why applications providers want to establish business relationships with network providers.  I will be joined on this panel with Ken Tysell, Executive Director, Three Screen Services for AT&T, and Scott Lomond, President and COO of SightSpeed, with Geoff Daily, Assistant Editor of KillerApp.com moderating.

So if you happen to be out in Fort Wayne next week for the conference, please stop by and say hi, I’d love to touch base with you all.

Category Web/Tech | No Comments »

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.

Category Uncategorized | No Comments »

Your friends and family can certainly be part of your traffic-building strategy for your blogs, especially in your early days.  StumbleUpon, BlueDot, MySpace, etc. are all great ways for you to be able to connect your online friends with your new blogs (don’t have accounts & networks with these services yet?  Spend some time and do it now!).

But what about your family?  Chances are you only know the email addresses for your immediate family, or don’t even know how large your extended family is.

That’s where a new company that launched in January of this year comes in.  Geni is an easy-to-use online tool to map your family tree, and is extremely viral.  Within one week, my tree (initially populated with my immediate family), has grown to 203 people - 39 blood relatives and 163 in-laws.  My wife is now also able to track her mother’s side of the family back to 1510!

In addition to being able to finally understand the complicated relationships in my wife’s family, I also hope that this will serve to to open up the lines of online communication with my extended family once again and get some of them interested in maintaining online sites.  Trading links with existing personal blogs among your family is also a great way to increase your SEO and Technorati rank.

You can find out about new updates about the  product on the Geni blog, or be able to ask questions and interact with other Geni users on the Geni Forums.

Category Web/Tech | No Comments »

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.

Category Weblogs | No Comments »

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.

Category Weblogs | 1 Comment »

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. 

Category Weblogs | No Comments »

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.

Category Weblogs | No Comments »

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.

Category SEO, Weblogs | No Comments »

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.

Category Weblogs | No Comments »

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.

Category Affiliate Programs | No Comments »