The Making Money Experiment

It’s incredible! NeoBux is again adding Paypal as their second purchase and cashout option.  After a short testing period some days ago and the sudden drop from Paypal, it now came out that PP made a mistake and in fact nothing wrong happend. NeoBux hasn’t done something that’s against the Paypal TOS, it was only a fault on the PP side.

At the moment only the option to purchase stuff via Paypal is available, the cashout module will be re-implemented soon! It will make NeoBux the best PTC for sure, no other PTC site offers instant payments via Paypal. I find it funny, their biggest competitor aren’t even able to pay their members within 4 months and with NeoBux you’ll get your money within 4 seconds! Unfortunately I’ve promoted Bux.to, yes that’s the PTC with the long payment delays, way too long…

I can say it over and over, if you want to make some easy money, please join NeoBux! It’s definitely worth it!

Cheers,
Querblogger

Wohaa, I’m slowly heading toward one year of doing my Making Money Experiment! Ten months are already over now and today it’s time again for another monthly update on my current progress and earnings.

In July I earned $278, that’s even $72 more than back in June. Although far from letting me quit my day job, I’m happy again. I can slowly feel how things start rolling and I’m now somewhat more fluid when it comes to spend some bucks for my hosting, software and other things I need to build up my small online business.

July was ruled, and my earnings show that, by my efforts in building a nice downline in NeoBux. You can read about it on my NeoBux Squidoo lens if you will. After directly referring a total of 120 people so far plus 220 rented refs, I now make around $5 each day. This month I made a total of $141 from NeoBux alone. It’s a great PTC, probaly the best PTC if you ask me. They pay instantely, introduce one new feature after the other and the earning potential is quite high. I have already upgraded my account to a Golden membership, something I would highly suggest everybody who wants to make some good money with them.

I also earned $50 from Bux.to, but to be honest, I more and more doubt that it’s really worth it anymore. Although they have promised to clear their payment backlogs, nothing special happend so far. Sure, current payment dates for premium members with a Bux card have moved to the beginning of April, but that’s quite normal in a near 4 week time frame… (insiders may know what I’m talking about, otherwise move on reading more interesting stuff).

This month I also made my fourth affiliate sale from my niche site, it brought me $30 on Clickbank. It’s quite good because I haven’t done anything with this site for several weeks now but I still earn some bucks.

Another $20 I made from writing some articles for a friend from Belgium. He actually wanted me to write articles about NeoBux in both English and German. It was a nice work and he already paid me, no problems, perfect! Thanks again Stijn!

Around $30 were earned from selling links on my blog (yes, I am that evil). No need to further talk about because I won’t get into trouble with Google, hehe.

The rest, around $10, came from contextual ads (Speedyads, Kontera) and several other minor activities like my articles on Triond for example.

In July my blog received 3,500 unique visitors and this number isn’t moving in any direction right now. My Alexa ranking is at around 180,000 and my Pagerank hasn’t changed after the last Google update some days ago (although my backlinks have increased, needs some time).

Ok, enough? I think so. I try to write some new posts the next week before I go on vacation for two weeks. Maybe I’ll write some more posts that will automatically published while I’m away, let’s see.

Thanks to all my readers for your support and commenting. Keep on reading, tell your friends about your findings here and have some nice days!

Bye,
Querblogger

Some days ago I discovered that eToro, a relatively new Forex broker with some exciting and new ways to trade on the foreign exchange, has an extremely high paying affiliate program. Their program is listed via Commission Junction and they pay $100 per lead!

First of all, eToro is a platform that enables you to trade currency pairs on the Forex market. I’ve already written about the huge money making potential from doing Forex several months ago, take a look at my introduction to Forex and some helpful resources. What makes eToro so special is the way they deal with trading the market. Unlike many major brokers which provide full blown analysis and statistic tools that help you making a trade, eToro offers a dead simple software where everybody is able to trade the Forex in a funny, amusing and easy way, which doesn’t mean they are not professional! You may download their software and open a free demo account to see what it looks like, simply follow my link (no, I won’t get paid any money if you only use the free version) and try it out.

Really interesting is the fact that they pay you, as an affiliate, $100 for new users that fund their (real) account on eToro. Funding an account with real money is easy, the minimum you need is only $50 plus you’ll get a 50% bonus of up to $200 for your first deposit (e.g. if you fund it with $400). After you’ve added funds, you’re immediately able to trade the Forex market with real hard cash (but be careful that you’ll also face a high risk unless you don’t have any experience with it).

eToro looks like a good program to make some nice affiliate commissions from. Because you get paid for every new user that adds a minimum of only $50 in their accounts, chances are quit good to make some money with their affiliate program. There isn’t such a huge barrier for new users and it gets even better because of the 50% bonus, it’s likely that a person interested in Forex trading will effort that amount.

Right now I’ve place a banner in my blog’s header and so far I got only clicks but haven’t earned any commission. I have a CTR (Click Through Rate) of around 2% and that shows me that at least some people have an interest in eToro. Anyway, I will leave it their for some more time to see how it will perform or not (yes I know that I’m actually not exactly in the Forex niche with my blog…).

Should be all for now.

See you,
Querblogger

PS: I’ve just joined a nice webmaster forum called Qdoos. Feel free to head over there where you can also find me and my friend Tiberius a.k.a. Midwest, who’s already a Junior Admin. Congrats Tiberius!

Last wednesday I immediately upgraded my NeoBux account to a Golden Membership because the owners of NeoBux have temporary tested the new Paypal purchase module, which is now fully implemented by the way. I paid $60 for the upgrade and I’ll now show you some results I got so far within the last 4 days.

Since last wednesday, meaning since the last 4 days, I made a total of $37 net profit from NeoBux. I’m completely beside myself with joy (ok, let’s say I’m really lucky) because of that. In other words that means that I’ve made already 61% of my investment back within only 4 days! It’s absolutely awesome, especially because I know that they really pay that amount of money (within seconds).

You may ask why I’ve earned that much the last days. Well it’s not only because of increased earnings from my referral’s advertising clicks, it’s mainly because I also earn 10% of every referral purchase like an account upgrade or advertising purchases. Just today I made over $7 from these purchases alone. As I already said, it’s absolutely awesome!

Right now I can say that my account upgrade to a Golden membership is probably the best thing I’ve ever done. One could even argue that it’s maybe too good to be true to earn that much (I’ve “only” 220 refs by the way), but it’s a proven fact that NeoBux is really paying. Look at their site and see their professionality and all the different income streams, I think they CAN pay all their members easily! If you have doubts about it, please join NeoBux now, do your first cashout and prove me wrong!

Ok, enough for that update. I’m now waiting for the Paypal cashout implemention which should be come very soon.

See you later,
Querblogger

Today there was a real big surprise as the NeoBux admin temporary enabled purchasing via Paypal in order to let people test this brand new function first. Normally you only have the option to purchase stuff like membership ugrades or referral packs via your account balance or Alertpay, but since today there’s also the Paypal option. But notice that this is only temporary and for testing purposes, the option will be canceled before the new Paypal system will be finally integrated into the NeoBux script!

As I’m a great supporter of NeoBux because of their professionality and stuff like instant payments, referral renting and such, I’ve only waited for that day to come and instantely upgraded my account to Golden for $60. Before I wasn’t able to upgrade it in such an easy and fast way because I didn’t have enough funds on Alertpay and the only way to add money to my AP account would be per check, which is a time consuming thing with some extra fees involved. My original plan was to invest my earned money into refs in order to get even more bucks to pay for that upgrade.

The benefits of having a Golden membership are amazing! Instead of making only $0.005 per referral you now make $0.01, doubled earnings! You’ll also get 10% of all your referrals’ purchases, e.g. when one pays for a golden membership which costs $60 you’ll get $6.00. Referral renting costs only $0.20 per ref and month instead of $0.30. You’ll get way more ads to click on, today I already had 15 ads that I clicked. I’ve missed some more benefits for sure, but in general you can expect to earn (way) more than twice the amount from your refs as with a standard membership!

Later tonight I will also buy rent another 50 referrals, I already have 70 rented and over 90 direct referrals from my promotional work here on that blog and different other things.

If you want to join a serious PTC site that really pays in time (within seconds), I can only highly recommend NeoBux. You can join under me by clicking the banner below (notice you can also see my earnings and some stats from NeoBux on it).

See you soon,
Querblogger

UPDATE 07/19/08: The Paypal purchase option is now finally integrated and you can buy your golden membership, rent referrals and purchase advertising packages via your verified (!) Paypal account.

Today I will write about Kontera’s ContenLink ad publishing network and how it may help you in monetizing your blog. I thought it was time to continue my “series” about blog monetization methods that I began in December 2007. Back then it presented three different money makers called WidgetBucks, Bidvertiser and Fair Ads Network.

Kontera provides a full-featured advertising network that offers in-text advertising, another attractive method for making money from your blog (and also your regular website’s) content. It’s really simple, you place a short code snippet in your blog’s template (they even offer an automatic tool for Blogger.com blogs) where you want those ads to appear. Whenever a page of your blog gets loaded, the code parses your content for particular keywords that different advertisers bid on and it highlights them just like a regular hyperlink. When your site visitors click on one of those links, you’ll make money. You may see such links while looking at my posts here on this blog, they are double underlined.

I’ve implemented Kontera’s ContentLink technology some days ago after I got accepted in their publisher network. I use their very own Wordpress plugin to make my life a little easier with integrating Kontera on my blog. So far I made $1.77 in four days with an average CTR (Click-Through Rate) of around 2.50%. The average click price is at $0.30, but I must admit that I only have stats for those four days!

It seems that this ad publishing solution does work real good for content sites, so far that’s the highest CTR I’ve ever seen from all those advertising networks that I tested here on my blog. To give you an example, my CTR on Speedyads is at 0.20%!

Kontera pays at a Net 30 basis, meaning they pay you 30 days after a month’s end. In order to get paid you have to reach $100 as the minimum payout limit. Payments are made via Paypal, Check and even international bank transfer.

Kontera’s ContentLink looks very promising and I’ll leave it on my blog for some more weeks to get some better and more realistic statistics. Right now I’m very happy with their network, earnings are quite good so far and I’m really surprised to see such a high click-through rate, which is a good sign for making good money. As always, revenues also highly depend on your blog’s or website’s traffic, the more the better.

Bye,
Querblogger

It was a long time ago since I’ve last written a post about the famous Bux.to. Well I had my reasons for that. To be honest, I was really pissed off about Bux.to with all their delays and empty promises (and I’m still pissed off right now). Since months they promised to release their so called “new script”, also known as Bux Reload, to speed up payments for all their members. But besides a short beta test phase nothing special happend until know. People get more and more annoyed about Bux.to and many of them stop clicking on ads and don’t purchase new referrals. Honestly, they are months behind their normal payment schedule…

Yesterday Alt3rtnativ3, the programmer behind the current and future Bux.to script, has made a very promising announcement. He told us that, according to the Bux.to staff, the current payment backlog will be gone within 4 weeks, meaning until early August. They will handle all open payments until they are in their normal payment schedule where you get paid after 60 business days if you’re a standard member and after 30 days if you’re premium.

So far so good, but I’ve heard way too many empty promises lately. So at the moment I’m a bit in doubt if they will really fix their payment problems in such a short time (or at all). I mean, why didn’t they do that earlier? Some people arque that this is because Paypal is about to unfreeze the Bux.to account or simply said, that they didn’t had the money until now and weren’t able to pay their members in time.  Well I personally don’t know for sure. For me it looks like something strange is going on behind the scenes, but I very much appreciate if they ARE fixing their problems. Let’s see…

Bye,
Querblogger

PS: NeoBux is getting better and better. I love that PTC! On what I see, it will be THE big competitor for Bux.to in the future. I mean instant payments, renting referrals, script changes within hours, extremely nice support, Paypal integration on the way…features Bux.to can’t provide right now.

The last days I thought about what would be better and easier to market, a niche product with small competition and less traffic or a popular item with lots of competitors and a whole bunch of traffic?

Well I haven’t got the excact answer for that yet, but so far I’ve already found some advantages and also disadvantages from both affiliate marketing methods. First, and before I’ve read some very interesting threads on the Warriorforum and other sites, I thought that going niche would be the ideal way for promoting products as an affiliate and making some good money from it. Indeed, niche marketing really works. I’ve already made some sales from my personal Clickbank niche test site that I created some months ago. But is it the “holy grail” of affiliate marketing?

A good question if you ask me. Although niche marketing has many benefits like having fewer competitors and an easy search engine domination with your choosen keywords, there are still some major disadvantages. The worst of all is traffic, simply as that. A niche market is, you may quess it, tailormade to a small group of people that are interested in a particular topic. Therefore potential traffic to a niche site is usually small too. Less traffic means few sales means less money. But doesn’t one want to make more money from affiliate marketing? What about choosing a more competitive “niche” with more traffic, more sales, more money to make?

You know what I want to say? No? Ok, let me explain. What would be better, to get a big piece of a small cake or to get a small piece of a (really) big cake? I would rather choose the smaller piece, not because I’m not that hungry…

Establishing you affiliate business, the small piece of cake, in a highly competitive market, the really huge cake itself, has some benfits too. Although you have a lot of competitors you also have the chance to grasp a certain percentage of the high traffic that swirls around a popular product. You don’t necessarily have to get to the first search engine results for your particular keyword in order to get some of that traffic. Even if your affiliate site is ranked at the 5th or even 10th position, it will probably bring you enough traffic, depending on how hot the product/service is that you’r about to promote. Maybe even more traffci than from a tiny niche site.

So what’s the difference between creating a niche site that you have to get ranked on the topmost search results in order to get some traffic and creating a site in a competitive market with a ranking far behind the first sites but with a lot of traffic? I personally think, and that’s also the reason of this post and my thoughts, it’s the work involved in creating an affiliate site and driving traffic to it. What would be easier, to maintain a number one position in the SERPs or say position number 50? Sure, the second position.

To sum up my thoughts, I think going for a popular product or service should be easier to make money with than creating a niche site. First, a popular item means traffic, a lot of traffic. Second, you wouldn’t have to maintain a #1 position in the search results, hence less SEO work. Third, you have a lot of competitors that have choosen many longtail keywords that you can “spy out” (hehe, evil evil) and choose for your own site (which should be a bit better optimized than your competitor’s one).

Now my question, what do YOU think about it? Is niche marketing the fantastic affiliate marketing money maker or is it going after a popular product and so to say being a “parasite” that subsists from the huge traffic such a product has created?

As I already said at the beginning, I don’t have a correct answer yet, althoug I’ve read some other people’s thought about going broad is far better than niche marketing. Just want to know what you think about it.

So long,
Querblogger

Time is running and already 9 month are gone since I started the Making Money Experiment. I’m still happy with my money making progress and I’m currently working on even more projects that will hopefully bring me even more cash.

Because I’m currently heavily involved in creating a new website, this report should only be a very short one (also because not to bore you all)!

The best money makers for June 2008 were as follows:

1. $100.00 from Bux.to (also I won’t see this money anytime soon because of many delays)
2. $38.50 from Selling Links on my blog (no details or links about it, sorry)
3. $37.00 from Affiliate Sales (thanks to my niche site)
4. $13.44 from NeoBux, an amazing new PTC. They pay within seconds!
5. $10.67 from My Homepages Friends, a nice Get-Paid-To-Search service
6. $03.22 from Speedyads, contextual ads like Google Adsense
7. $02.94 from different other sources like Triond and such

That will give me a total of $205.77 for the month of June, not as much as last month but still very nice!

My blog is still ranked with a Pagerank of 2 and my Alexa rating has levelled of at around 183,000. At the moment I get an average of around 120 unique visitors per day, the last days even more than 150.

July will be a month full of work for me. As you may have noticed, me and Tiberius have stopped our project called Shrtnd.com because it wasn’t really worth it. I’m now working on creating a completely different website at this domain and you may already guess what it is about, no?

Ok, should be all for now. Thanks to all my readers, subscribers and especially the many commentors on my blog posts!

See ya,
Querblogger

Most online money makers, like PTC sites or advertising networks for example, offer a so called referral program. That means you get paid a certain amount of money for each of your referral’s activities. In the case of a PTC you would get paid according to your referred member’s clicks, like on NeoBux for example where you would get $0.005 for each advertisement click they do.

Many people are facing huge problems in getting those refs for their money making programs, they don’t know where to start and what to do in order to refer new members for getting paid more money. But on the other side they need those refs for differnet reasons, e.g. for getting paid faster (reaching a certain minimum payout limit) and (obviously) to make more money at all.

Because I’m personally at a point where I can say that I have at least a little knowledge about getting refs, I will share 10 tips with you that you might follow in order to build a small downline for your programs. The following list won’t provide a too detailed view on those different methods, but enough to give you some ideas from where to start. Ok, now 10 tips for getting referrals (in no particular order):

1. Write a Squidoo lens or create a Hubpage

Probably the best idea to refer new members is creating a Squidoo lens or a hub on Hubpages about the program you want referrals for. Both terms, a lens and a hub, are only other words for creating a website that you can constantly update with fresh information. Squidoo and Hubpages offer this service totally free of charge, you only have to create an account on their sites and you’re able to start your own lens or hubpage. Both websites are extremely popular and receive a lot of daily traffic and that in turn means that a lens/hub you create with them will most likely get a nice share of that traffic and hopefully brings you some referrals. Be sure to include your referral links and/or banners on these sites and provide good content, e.g a review on the money maker.

2. Create a Blog

First of all, you don’t have to start a blog like mine where you would have to pay for hosting and a domain name. There are dozens of free blogging platforms on the net that you might choose from. A very popular one is Google’s Blogger service (that’s where the journey of TMME began). After signing up with them you’re able to create a blog within minutes, it isn’t that hard. Just like writing a Squidoo lens for example, you should write about the money maker you want to get refs for, e.g. review the site or show your earning statistics. Your blog should be updated constantly and you’ll see first results soon. Don’t expect too much in the first days or even weeks, it needs some time before your posts get indexed in the search engines and rank high enough.

3. Create a Site on MySpace

Also I personally don’t like MySpace very much (ugly sites etc.), it’s worth a try to get some refs from creating a profile there while placing some referral links. MySpace is probably the most poular site on the whole web and chances for getting some traffic are fairly high, especially when networking with many friends.

4. Make a Video

For all of you who have some creative abilities, I would suggest creating a video and uploading it to major video platforms like Youtube, Metacafe or Revver for example. Videos can get viral when done well and if you place your ref links or a link to your lens, hub or blog on it, you’ll get decent traffic and a huge exposure for sure. Referrals will follow!

5. Refer your Friends

This sounds too obvious I know, but often times people forget about this. If you have many friends, preferable friends that at least know what the internet is, you should ask them for joining your money makers. Talk about the benfits to give them an incentive for joining under you.

6. Article Marketing

Article marketing can only be done if you already have a website, blog, lens or hubpage for example. Basically you have to write articles about your money makers and submit them to major article directories like Ezinearticles or Articledashboard for example. In the article you can often time only provide links in your author’s bio box at the end of an article. There you should point readers to your already existing site where you promote the money maker and have placed some referral links. Most times it isn’t allowed to directly place your referral links right within the text, therfore you should already have a website as said above wherte you can point readers to. The benefits from using article directories is the great exposure to your site and more “link love” to your site because those directories are already ranked very high in major search engines.

7. Buying Referrals

Well, this tip obviously will only work if you already have some money to spend. But usually it’s the most easiest way for getting referrals to your programs. To mention NeoBux again, there you can buy your first 10 refs for only $3.00! Make sure to re-invest your first earnings to buy even more refs. You’ll see an aconstant increase in your earnings for sure!

8. Use Referral Exchanges

This method is the moste “dangerous” in my opinion, as far as I’ve personally tested it. A referral exchange works simple, you join a certain money maker (PTC etc.) and in turn get some points/credits that you can spend to “buy” referrals to your own programs. It’s dangerous because the people who join a program under you, only do it to earn some extra points. In other words they’ll most likely be not active at all and totally useless. I would personally not suggest referral exchanges as being the best method for getting refs, but if you want to try one feel free to head over to GetRef, the most established exchabge rigth now.

9. Paid Advertising

You can also use paid advertising for getting referrals to your money programs. For example you could create an ad campaign on a PTC site where you have to pay for a certain amount of clicks. But please notice, not every click will bring you a new ref! Most times the conversion rate is far below 1%, meaning for 1,000 clicks you would get less than 10 refs (usually only 5 or so).

10. Forum Signatures

If you are a active member on differnet forums, it’s worth a try to place your referral link in your profile signature. But first make sure if it’s really allowed! If you want referrals for a PTC for example, it would be good to use the sig on PTC forum.

I hope those 10 tuips will help you at least a bit in getting some referrals for your money makers. A last recommendation: Combine different methods for getting the most out of it! Spare no efforts, it’s really worth it!

See you,
Querblogger