To learn more about making money online take a look at the authors pages (highlighted in the make money link) over at Hub Pages. If you’re really interested in paid surveys online you can visit the blogger blog in the survey link.
Six Quick Easy Ways to Make Money Online
November 11, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
Everyone seems to be talking about making money online these days and why not? Creating an online income now can protect you in the future if you get laid off. And it can even allow you to voluntary leave the ranks of corporate workers once you achieve a decent level of success.
There are many different ways to make money online. Here are 6 ideas to get you started thinking about ways you can start making money online today and protect yourself for the future.
1. Blog for Money
Blogging is a great way to make money. It’s easy, fun and you can get started for free with a service like Blogger.com or Wordpress.org. Or if you’re already a bit tech savvy go ahead and host your own domain. There are plusses and minuses to each way of blogging.
If you choose blogging as a route to making money online be warned that in addition to content creation you’ll also need to learn at least the basics or marketing and search engine optimization. This may seem difficult, but it can be very rewarding and will be a definite asset to your knowledge. The more you learn the faster you’ll be able to make more money.
If you prefer not to learn about the marketing of your own site you can still make money blogging for other sites. Services like Triond are a good place to start out and make a name for yourself. Later you can try to get full time work blogging for a network such as Weblogs Inc.
2. Affiliate Marketing
As an affiliate marketer you’ll promote the products and/or services of other companies and they will pay you a commission for the sale or leads. Think of it like an online sales job.
Affiliate marketing is a huge arena and there are tens of thousands of products you can potentially promote. To get an idea check out two of the largest affiliate networks, Commission Junction or Clickbank. Both have huge numbers of products you can sell online.
You’ll be amazed at the amount of money you can make through affiliate marketing, it is only limited by your own imagination and hard work. There are many successful online entrepreneurs making fortunes every month through affiliate marketing.
3. Starting An Online Business
Starting your own business online isn’t as hard as you might think. If you’ve got in depth knowledge of an industry and some good contacts within that industry you can very likely start a business providing a product or service related to that industry.
Starting your own online business allows you to sell your own products or services. Successful online businesses include web design, software development, copywriting and digital products such as eBooks or video courses.
You’ll want to make sure that you do some research before jumping in and make sure that your chosen business is viable and that you can handle the extra demands that business owners have. You can find a great deal of information at Entrepreneur.com on how to start an online business.
4. Domaining Your Way to Riches
Domaining is quite simply buying and then reselling websites and domains for profit. Domainers buy up web properties and then sell them immediately for a net gain or take the time to fix them up first and sell them for even larger profits. It is very similar to offline real estate investing without the huge capital requirements.
Often domaining is referred to as domain flipping and it can be very profitable for those that can identify good niches and develop attractive money making sites. To get some idea of how much websites can sell for take a look at the SitePoint Marketplace, you may be surprised.
5. Take Paid Surveys Online or Try Get Paid To Sites
Paid surveys and get paid to sites are two long standing and easy ways to make money online. You can find dozens of websites that are willing to pay you either for your opinion or to complete trial offers.
One of the great benefits of these types of sites is that you don’t need any technical skills or even a website to participate. Paid surveys are fun, easy and they are fairly risk free.
If you want to participate with the get paid to websites you should investigate first to see if they are reliable in sending checks. Once you do find a reliable site you can easily makes hundreds of dollars a month signing up for trial offers.
Paid Survey Success has a large list of paying survey companies as well as get paid to companies that do pay.
6. Freelance and Make Money Online
There are thousands of freelancers making money online and you can be one of them. If you’ve got skills in web design, programming or writing you can easily join the ranks of the online freelancers. Other freelancing opportunities other than the ones listed above exist in proofreading, transcription and translation.
Don’t expect to make thousands as soon as you start however. It will take you some time to build a client base and get to the point where you can command top dollar for your work. But it can be done with hard work and persistence.
When beginning your freelance career you’ll likely be taking low paying jobs from places like Elance, however as you gain experience and gather a client list you’ll slowly be able to move away from this and increase your rates.
I can tell you that writers especially have plenty of places to begin. In addition to the freelancing websites there are also web communities that will pay you to write for them. Associated Content is one such site. Another is Hub Pages where you get paid on a revenue sharing basis. This means you’ll get a percentage of the money made from your articles on Hub Pages.
Honestly the important thing is just to get started. You can use any of the methods listed above and there are likely dozens more ways to make money online that I haven’t covered. Don’t make the mistake of waiting and over analyzing, pick something you think you’ll like and get started today. That’s the best way to make money online!
The Future Value Of Your Blog
November 2, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
All the hype about the sale of Weblogs Inc. to America Online (AOL) has given rise to the now famous question – How much is your blog worth? In acquiring Weblogs Inc., AOL has provided some concrete metrics to future valuation of blogs. How much will traditional media be willing to pay for a blog? Conversely, how much would you sell your blog for?
AOL-Weblogs Inc. Deal – Benchmark for Future Blog Valuation
Weblogs Inc was established by Jason Calacanis and Brian Alvey in 2003. It is a network of blogs which includes under its wings successful blogs such as Engadget and Autoblog. Jason Calacanis pointed out that Weblogs Inc. earns in excess of $1 million yearly in Google Adsense revenues alone.
AOL purchased Weblogs Inc. for a confidential sum assessed at somewhere between $25 – $40 million. After said purchase, Tristan Louis came up with a blog valuation scheme based on the deal. He created a chart of blog value using the value of each inbound link to Weblogs Inc. as the basis. It is common knowledge that blog readers follow links. Search engines also act as users and primarily determine blog quality rankings based on linkage data thus direct and indirect value links are a great proxy for value measurement. In the blogosphere, conversations that nurture connectivity represented by links and indexes like Technorati give a vantage view of the value of a blog.
Tristan Louis itemized the publicly available data (list of blogs indexed) at Weblogs Inc. network including the number of inbound links (Technorati blog numbers) per blog divided by the purchase price to determine the value of an inbound link to a blog. At the rumored price of $25 million, the estimated value is $ 564 per link. At $30 million, it is $677.57 per link and $903.42 at an acquisition price of $40 million. Interestingly, the consumer segment chalks up the biggest percentage of linkage. Engadget represents over a third of the overall network traffic.
Applying Tristan Louis’s Weblogs Inc, sale, Dave Winer has also sold http://Weblogs.com to Verisign for a rumored price of around $2 million. Blog entrepreneur Nick Denton, founder of Gawker Media has signed a deal with VNU Media to publish Gizmodo (gadget blog) across Europe in six languages. VNU Media is a leading worldwide information and media company which owns ACNielsen, Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter, among others. With this deal, blog publishing has hit big time.
However, the value of a blog is not calculated based solely on links using AOL’s purchase of Weblogs Inc. Jason Calacanis, the man behind Weblogs Inc., disputed using links alone as proxy for the value of the blog network. He reiterated that the acquisition price was based also on the ever reliable revenue, earnings, management and other metrics.
Tristan Louis based his valuation scheme on links to a blog but he also acknowledged the significance of technology, talented management team, financial performance and growth. There is direct correlation between links, traffic, revenue and earnings capacity of a blog or blog network but it takes sound management to maximize all these potentials.
Value of a Blog – Some Metrics to Consider
How much is your blog worth? There is no one standard gauge yet. But one way to measure the value is to look at certain factors to gain a better perspective on how to measure the future value of a blog.
Aside from number of links as mentioned earlier, traffic level is a key factor in determining blog value. Highly trafficked blogs definitely have a bigger potential for earning compared with those blogs with few readership. A blog’s success is highly dependent on visitors/readers. However, ascertaining the value of traffic is a thorny issue. Some bloggers value traffic anywhere from $3 to $10 per hit a day. From this data, a blog with 2000 unique visitors (page views) would be worth between $6000 to $20,000. The downside to this valuation approach is that some traffic is more valuable than others. A personal blog might have 1000 unique visitors but more difficult to convert to revenue than a blog with 1000 readers that blogs on the topic of digital cameras.
Aside from diverse traffic streams that come from bookmarks, direct links or RSS subscribers will make risk of losing traffic low. Social bookmarking sites are inching their way to becoming prime sources of traffic, with peer referral at times carrying more weight than search results. There are a number of well known bookmarking sites you should link to. Top bookmarking sites include Furl, http://del.icio.us, Diggs, to name a few. By leaving an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed, you can feed you readers’ desire for information. Visitors can get automatic updates whenever you provide new content. Having a fairly good base of bookmarkers and subscribers ensure a steady flow of fans and repeat readers – the all-important traffic.
In the blogosphere as in any other field, revenue or earnings is a major focus. a logical approach to blog valuation would be to base its worth upon current and projected earnings, assuming that your blog is earning something to start with. Again, there are varying views on how to use current earnings to measure a blog’s value.
Some bloggers opine you should expect six to eight months earnings as your blog value. A blog with a daily income of $150 would be worth between $27,000 – $36,000. Still, others determine a blog’s value as being two years of current earnings. A blog earning $150 a day would be worth $108,000. Again, there is a huge disparity between these methods of assessing value. Having diverse streams in the form of multiple affiliate programs also increases blog revenue. An affiliate program is an advertising model in which a blog owner markets via his blog a given product, on behalf of another company. The blog owner is reimbursed a percentage of all sales sold thru his affiliate link. Reimbursement rates can vary from 1% and upwards. Google Adsense is a prime example.
Visitors access blogs throughout the Internet primarily through search engines. If your blog does not have a post appearing in the top ten search engine rankings, the chances of visitors reaching your blog is low. A blog’s presence on relevant search engines is a significant medium for maintaining a blog’s success. Search engine ranking and pages indexed in search engines is critical for generating traffic to a blog. Having your blog among the top results of a search or receiving a high Google PageRank (a system for ranking blog posts) would increase your blog’s overall value.
High quality content will always be a key factor for determining a blog’s value. As has been said time and time again – Content is King. Moreover, search engines can only “read” a blog. What attracts a search engine are the words, the content of a blog that explains, informs, shares and educates readers. Good content increases blog value.
All these aforementioned objective metrics can be considered in assessing the value of a blog. Added to all these, a talented management team behind a blog, its underlying tools and blog technology in use can further help to estimate the future value of a blog.
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FOR SALE
