It’s really quite straight forward. Create the best content possible. That’s what people want.

People go to websites because they want something. It could be to buy something, to learn something, to be entertained by something, or any number of things. The better you are at giving people what they want, the more traffic you will get.

I don’t spend much time working on getting Facebook likes and getting top search engine rankings because it’s quite often the bi-product of great content.

Below I have outlined what you can learn from the 50 articles that send IncomeDiary the most traffic.

1. The articles that get the most traffic are lists… Shock!

Out of my 50 top articles, 35 start with a number. When I write, I write in a way, I would like to read. Being dyslexic, I like to summarize things, make it easy on myself to consume information. That’s why I think I do such a good job with lists.

Here’s 4 examples of top lists:

1. 30 Most Influential People In Blogger
2. 10 Christmas Gifts For Photographers
3. 20 Health Experts To Follow on Facebook
4. 10 Reasons Why It Rocks To Be a Young Entrepreneur

Here’s some examples of my favorite top list titles.

2. Mentioning famous people gets you traffic

9 out of 10 of our top articles mention people in some way.

Think about it this way:

If I wrote an article called: 10 Things Usain Bolt Does To Run Faster

I don’t need Bolt’s permission to write about him, but I get all of the benefits of having his name associated with mine and what it represents about what is written.

Usain is the fastest runner in the world. That means these tips must be the best tips in the world.

If I write about how to run faster, no one will want to listen.

3. Linking out can increase the time someone spends on your website

4 out of the top 5 articles on this website link out to over a dozen other websites. These articles also had noticeably longer visitor times.

Don’t be scared to link out and show some love. If you recommend something or someone and your reader likes where you sent them, then they will end up trusting you more.

4. The title can make or break an article

Something that is made really obvious when I look at my top 50 blog posts is… the title can really make or break an article.

If you are stuck trying to come up with a title of a post, go to the supermarket and look at the magazines. Modify titles of articles to make them relevant to something you want to write about.

5. Motivation beats inspiration and instruction

8 out of the top 10 articles on IncomeDiary are motivational. Here’s the breakdown for the top 50 articles:

• Motivational: 24
• Tutorials: 17
• Inspirational: 9
• Reviews: 0
• News: 0
• Interviews: 0

Motivational, is the type of posts that make you take action and start working.

Tutorials, are articles showing you how to do something. These can often be monetized well by recommending products required to do what you instruct in the tutorial.

Inspirational, is the type of post that gives you ideas.

Reviews, we review products and mention them in our customer autoresponders.

News, often something I would shy away from because it’s not evergreen (always relevant) content. If it gives me a positive ROI, then I will publish them.

It seems people value motivation higher than anything else. It’s not often lacking the skills that holds us back, it’s our work rate. Motivational posts help us focus more on our goals.

Although Reviews and News are not featured in the top 50 posts, they are still a relevant part of my blogging strategy. I just prioritize.

6. Have a content plan

I’m a systems guy. I like to follow a blueprint when I’m doing something because it’s tried and tested, proven to give the best results. I have a doc called Contest Strategy which I send to writers to make sure they have every required to do the best job possible. The better job they can do, the more traffic I get, the more traffic I get, the more money I make. This is some of the information I provide for everyone who writes for us:

• Image sizes
• About the author
• Blog post template
• Post publish time & date
• Post title review
• Post titles swipe copy
• How to optimize post for search engines
• PSD graphic files which writers can edit

7. Articles are worth paying for

A large percent of articles published on IncomeDiary are paid for.

One of the highest performing posts on IncomeDiary was published last year and has so far received 9,883 visitors in the last 30 days & 106,338 visitors in the last year. I paid $120 for that article.

I published a post in 2011 that cost me $100. In 2017 it makes me over $1000 a month.

The easiest way in my experience to get people to write for you is to ask. If asking fails, offer them money. We put together a training video on how we pay people to write our posts.

In this screen shot, you can see that the article is now getting more traffic weekly then it did in it’s first week. I have done nothing to it since the day it was published. None of us are SEO experts. All we focus on is great content and let the universe do the rest of the work

To Conclude:

To write posts that drive lots of traffic, make sure to:

• Write it in a list form and number it.
• Mention people your readers will know, it will draw them in.
• Link out to other websites.
• Write the perfect name for your article. This should be thought about.
• Motivate your reader.
• Keep to a plan & implement.

What type of blog posts are sending you the most traffic right now?

Read next: ‘How To Promote Your Blog – The Fastest Way To 1000 Visitors Per Day’

The post 7 Lessons From 50 Blog Posts That Send Me The Most Traffic appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

Traffic to me is the simplest thing on the planet. It is so easy to get! All you have to do is provide people with a solution to their problem and they will come and read it & they will share it with their friends!

I have created over 100 ‘top list’ type posts which have been viewed by millions. They are so popular and well received that they have been featured on Reddit Homepage, New York Times, Yahoo News & one even became a Trending Topic on Twitter! The best part… I can get these types of posts created for just $25. Let me teach you how.

Why Creating Lists Will Drastically Increase Your Traffic

When you Google, think what you are typing in, lets say you are looking for a cure for a health problem. Just for example, you are going to type in Cure Acid Reflux. That’s a big search term. Same with anything else in the industry that people are trying to cure. Firstly you would be surprised how many people don’t name the article what people are searching for in Google. This blows my mind. Why are you calling your article something fancy and using words people don’t ever use, just to make yourself look smart. No one is typing that in Google, so you shouldn’t be naming your posts that.

I’m no SEO expert, there I said it. But I do get around 200,000 visitors a month from Google alone so it’s kind of a big deal for me. Here’s what I believe: Google ranks sites which are naturally awesome. Forget everything about buying links and social love. Just imagine that your posts are so cool, people spend ages on your site and people love to share your stuff. That’s what GOOGLE wants! Great content because they are in the content industry. There job is to provide users with the right content and the best possible option, if yours is not that, then you don’t rank so well.

Back to my health post, I will call it :

10 Ways To Cure Acid Reflux

Somewhere I heard that odd numbers work better for open rates and marketing so I often will change the 10 for 7, 11, 13, 17 basically any odd number that looks good. I will decide how many I want before I even create the post.

But lets look at those silly people I love that make my life easy when I try to out rank their articles because they name their articles something stupid, for example:

Surefire Ways To Eradicate Acid Reflux

Are you freaking kidding me. I’m sure some idiot will type in Eradicate Acid Reflux every month or two but Surefire Ways? No Way!

You think this is an extreme example? Heck no, this is a nice example.

Tip 1. Name Your Posts Something People Search For!

Here’s where top lists dominate:

• Firstly, they are quite long so people tend to spend a while reading them.
• Each part is in section, for example, our Cure Acid Reflux post, its 7 cures, so we have 7 headlines with each option. Because of this, people can quickly decide YES, there’s something here I am willing to do, so I will read it all. I think a lot of articles don’t do well because people are not prepared to commit time to read a page if they don’t think it’s going to help them.
• The title says exactly what you get, so you know what you are getting into.
• When shared on social media, again, people know what they are about to get. I swear, people will retweet and share stuff just because of the title, not even knowing if the article is good or not.

Step 1. To Dominating Any Industry

Post a crap load of top posts. That’s what I do, I show up in dozens of industry’s and just do the same old top list posts but for different industry’s. Here’s some examples:

Blogging/Make Money Industry

• Top 30 Most Influential People In Blogger
• 10 Reasons Why It Rocks To Be a Internet Entrepreneur
• 10 Christmas Gifts For Entrepreneurs
• 17 Tips To Cure Bloggers Block
• 20 Bloggers To Follow on Facebook

Photography Industry

• Top 30 Most Influential People In Photography
• 10 Reasons Why It Rocks To be a Photographer
• 10 Christmas Gifts For Photographers
• 17 Tips To Fix Bad Photos
• 20 Photographers To Follow on Facebook

Health Industry

• Top 30 Most Influential People in Natural Health
• 10 Reasons Why It Rocks To Be Healthy
• 10 Christmas Gifts for Super Healthy People
• 17 Tips To Cure Acid Reflux
• 20 Health Experts To Follow on Facebook

Young Entrepreneur Industry

• Top 30 Most Influential Young Entrepreneurs
• 10 Reasons Why It Rocks To Be a Young Entrepreneur
• 10 Christmas Gifts For Young Entrepreneurs
• 17 Tips To Stop People Treating You Different Because Of Your Age
• 20 Young Entrepreneurs To Follow On Facebook

Are you getting the gist yet?

And it doesn’t stop there. Each post can be done in so many other ways. For example:

10 Reasons Why It Rocks To Be a Photographer… you could flip this on it’s head and do 10 Reasons Why It Sucks….

Tip 2. Turn One Top List Into a Series of Top Lists

Remember our post suggestion: 20 Bloggers To Follow on Facebook

How about doing that with every social network:

• 20 Bloggers To Follow on Twitter
• 20 Bloggers To Follow on Youtube
• 20 Bloggers To Follow on Pinterest
• 20 Bloggers To Follow on Google+

Instead of doing a post such as “20 Ways To Improve Your Website” – you could split it into a series and niche each one down, so for example:

• 10 Ways To Improve Your Websites Load Time
• 10 Ways To Improve Your Websites Usability
• 10 Ways To Improve Your Websites Blog Layout
• 10 Ways To Improve your Websites Conversion Rate

Step 2. Getting Articles Created (20 at a time)

So in order to achieve great success with my blogs, I need a crap load of content…. by doing basically no actual work. Want to know how I get articles written for $25 with a 24 hour turn around period, 20 at a time.

Just to confirm. I pay $25 for each article, I often buy 20 at a time and each article only takes 24 hours and can be written by thousands of different authors. The best thing is, if I don’t like it, I either get them to edit it or I can refuse to pay for it. Incredible?!?!!

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Love what you have read so far?

Get the rest inside Traffic Domination – online training that will teach you exactly how we get over 100,000 visitors every month to multiple sites, year after year.

You will also get access to a new bonus, 110 copy and paste blog post headlines that have got me 10,000,000 visitors!

The post How I Get Over 100,000 Visitors a Month With Top List Articles appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

This blog makes money by selling our own online courses, software and other peoples products as an affiliate.

However, there are a lot more than two ways to make money online.

Every site needs to be treated differently.

It can take a while to work out how to best make money from a website. If something doesn’t work, try something else. Don’t just give up. The main reason people fail with blogging, isn’t because their idea or website is bad but because they give up too soon.

Here are the 14 ways you can monetize your website:

Best Ways To Make Money Online

1. Email Marketing

This is one of my favorite things to talk about because it’s just so powerful.

Building an email list can make you a lot of money, help you build a solid brand and of course help readers come back to your site, time after time.

Email marketing can be seen to make you money in a few different ways, such as direct email promotions, to deliver free reports that are monetized and my favorite, to drive traffic back to your site where you make money from other methods.

Gone are the days of finding it hard to get people to subscribe to your website.

A few years ago, we added a lightbox popup to IncomeDiary. Over night, we went from getting 20+ subscribers a day to well over 100.

At the time, most websites hated the idea of using popups because of the negative association people have with them. But these popups are different. Instead of popping up in another browser window, they popup as part of the page you are on. It was a lot less intrusive. Even better, it wasn’t to promote something spammy, but rather something of value to the reader.

After seeing the massive results, we decided to create our own software, so that other website owners can experience the same huge gains we have. We called it PopUp Domination.

At the start, some big names in the industry spoke out, saying they didn’t like them and wouldn’t use them. That didn’t last long, once they saw how well they worked. Now it seems like every site uses popups and despite that fact, they still perform so well!

Love it or hate it but a big reason for the success of popup opt-ins is down to this site you are on right now.

PopUp Domination works on any website. Has over 30 different designs, each pop is customizable to match any colour scheme. We offer a full 60 day, no questions asked, money back guarantee, so there is no good excuse not to give it a try.

Another list building technique you should be trying, is a squeeze page. A squeeze page is a dedicated page on your site to getting a visitor to sign up for your mailing list. You can see an example of a page like this by checking out our squeeze page for our Traffic Domination video! If you want to create amazing high converting squeeze pages (+ a lot more), check out Optimizepress.

Here is an example of a squeeze page we created with Optimizepress for our photography blog:

In order to start collecting emails, you need to sign up for Aweber, which hosts your emails, which you use to send messages, create follow up campaigns, split test etc.

Personally I would say you should also get PopUp Domination, not because I own it but because it’s the best thing for email marketing. 63.9% of our email subscribers come from our popup.

Benefits:

• Very direct way to market.
• One email can make you thousands.
• Anyone can do it.
• Considered by most to be the no1 way to make money online consistently.
• Can work on autopilot, if you setup a autoresponder series.

Drawbacks:

• If subscribers don’t like your emails, they will unsubscribe.

2. Promote Products as an Affiliate

Another hot topic here on IncomeDiary.

We earn around 30% of our income from promoting products as an affiliate. What this means is we receive a commission when you buy something.

Don’t be alarmed, we promote what works for us, not because we will earn a commission. Fortunately nearly all products that exist, have an affiliate program. If you can’t find an affiliate program for a particular product, type product name + affiliate into Google. For example: PopUp Domination Affiliate. This should bring up their affiliate page, if they have an affiliate program.

In my experience, affiliate marketing works best when paired up with email marketing. Top marketers consistently agree, year after year, that email marketing is their most important income source. Combine that with affiliate marketing and you have a winner.

There are so many ways to go about finding a product to promote, it often depends on your industry. For a fitness blog, you could go to Clickbank, find a product about six pack abs and grab an advertising banner from their resources area and put it up on my website.

You could also do a blog post such as, 7 Ways To Get Six Pack Abs, then at the end, promote the product.

We have a photography blog. One of the ways we use affiliate marketing is to promote the cameras and accessories that we use. All of these are available on Amazon. So we signed up for Amazons Associate program and receive a commission every time a customer buys something through our link. We also get a commission on anything else in their shoppingcart which is kind of them.

Benefits:

• Can earn you big bucks!
• Easy to setup and doesn’t require much support.
• Passive income.

Drawbacks:

• Earnings are not guaranteed, can earn $100 one month, $1000 the next.
• Great products can have low converting sales pages.
• High converting sales pages can have rubbish products.

3. Create & Sell Your Own Digital Product

Something I’m experimenting more and more with and I’m not sure if it’s just me.. but it seems like the world has gone crazy about making products, they are everywhere which has educated the market so they know they have to purchase content now. The simple version of creating a product is as followed, create a 30+ page word document about something, turn it into a PDF and sell it.

You can find out more about creating a product and selling it online by reading these posts.

Personally I think your first steps would be to ask your audience what they want to know more about, create a product around that and sell it!

When it comes to selling any product of your own, I recommend using SamCart for your checkout page, upsells and affiliate program. They have a free trial, so make sure to try it out.

Benefits:

• Affiliates send you traffic, build your business.
• Passive income because of affiliates promoting it.
• Great for building your brand and authority.
• Big Money Earner.

Drawbacks:

• Time consuming to setup.

4. Sell Advertising Space

The most popular way to make money from a website is by placing ads on it. We all know what ads look like, but did you know that they function in many different ways such as Pay Per Click, Pay Per 1000 Views or Pay Per Time Frame.

The biggest downside of website adverting, is that most people know what they look like and avoid clicking them.

When selling advertising, you typically have two choices:

1. Find and work with advertisers yourself.

or

2. Work with a middle man who takes a cut for bringing you advertisers.

It all depends on you. Is this a business for you or is this just an opportunity to make a bit more money?

I always lean towards finding advertisers myself. In my experience you get paid more, build better partnerships and can do a better job for them.

Advertising sales makes up only a small portion of my earnings but it’s nice to know that money is almost guaranteed to come in every month.

Be warned, Google does not like the practice of buying and selling text links. People buy text links because Google rank sites better based on quantity and quality of links. When you link to someone, you are telling search engines that you trust this site and you are giving them some of your authority. Google likes this to happen organically. So when you buy/sell links and get caught, Google will punish you by slapping your site down in the rankings.

Benefits:

• Often guaranteed income.
• Little effort to monetize.
• Saves you a lot of time.
• Great way to connect with others in your industry.

Drawbacks:

• Takes away from user experience.
• If you set a set price per month, you can’t make any more even if you double your traffic.
• Advertisers come and go, you have to spend time editing, adding, deleting and finding more advertisers.

5. Create a Job Board

This works like so:

People looking to hire someone will post a job on your board and readers will apply for the job. This is a great method of monetizing a website which I have seen done by a lot of authority websites.

On the other hand, I have seen smaller blogs try to do this and completely fail because it’s competitive and if you can’t send them anyone to apply, it’s pointless for them to post a job. Jobs can be anything from, writers to trainers.

As for what software to use, I recommend you check out ThemeForest, they have a good selection of different job board plugins and themes.

When it comes to marketing your job board, you will want to use some of your advertising space to promote the job board so that readers will see it and apply for jobs.

Charge a low price at the beginning so that you can attract a lot of customers and if they get applications they will be happy to return.

Benefits:

• Completely hands of, you don’t have to do anything.
• Adds to credibility

Drawbacks:

• Doesn’t work for small blogs
• Very competitive at times.

6. Selling Services

Selling services is a very popular technique people use to make money from a website and is often the reason for them building a blog in the first place. They want to get more clients, to do that they need to get traffic and blogs are great for that!

The easiest way to start selling your services on your blog is to create a new page within WordPress and call it services. Here you can put in the information about what you offer, testimonials and a buy now button.

To collect payments, your best two options is either PayPal or Stripe.

Benefits:

• High converting, they see your blog and want more!
• Highly profitable.
• Easy to deliver.
• Low refunds.

Drawbacks:

• Exchanging time for money.
• Customers are always right (which we know isn’t true).
• Can be periods of time where you have no customers!

7. Review Products as an Affiliate

I know quite a few people who review products on their blogs, it makes great content and if the product you are reviewing has an affiliate program, can make you a lot of money. You can review anything from software, to bikes, cars, hotels, holidays, food, anything you could think of and it’s all tax deductible (I believe) if you buy something to review.

Check this post out about How To Start a Review Blog.

I personally want to review one product a month, it’s not so many that readers will be turned of but enough that it will make up a high proportion of my income. Doing small amount of reviews means you can pick all the best products and don’t have to speak about negative ones.

Benefits:

• Great source of income.
• Converts higher then banner ads and email promotions.
• Free products sent to you to review.
• Connect with industry leaders.
• Get noticed as a top affiliate.

Drawbacks:

• You can’t always say nice things.
• If you say bad things, don’t expect to work with that person.
• Products become irrelevant quickly in some industry’s.

8. Offer a Membership Site or Premium Content

This technique has become more and more popular over the last few years.

The idea is simply, people come to your website because they want to read your content. They love it and want more. So you offer them even better content, for a price.

Your first step should be to work out what you’re going to offer. Then, you will want to go ahead and create a membership area for them to login and see the information you’re selling.

Once you have set it up, you will want to focus on marketing it. For best results, I recommend focusing on email marketing and adding an advert at the bottom of every page, mentioning that if they liked what they have read so far, they should take a look at your even better paid content.

Another option would be to release an affiliate program for your membership site. This not only will increase sales but will bring you even more traffic.

For billing, checkout pages, upsell pages and affiliate program software, I recommend you use SamCart.

For your membership site, again you could use ThemeForest to find a good theme.

Benefits:

• Continuity income, keep making money, month after month.
• Can be set and forget, if you time release.
• Affiliates will send you traffic!
• Can be a huge earner, it accounts for over $90k a month for Tutsplus.

Drawbacks:

• Can be a lot of work to set up.
• Regular work to release more content.

9. Sell Paid Directory Listings

This isn’t very common but I believe it should be.

I see it as a smart way to sell advertising, you see instead of putting adverts on your sidebar, you have a directory on your blog where you link to different company’s and websites in your industry and charge a premium for the listing. If you charged a monthly fee, so for example, say you had 1000 people listed in your directory and charged $7 a month, you would earn $7000 a month in continuity.

In some ways, this is actually beneficial to the reader, say you have a website about becoming a model, in the directory could be a section for photographers, where photographers pay to list their services. Models will come and look for the right person to take pictures of them for their portfolio, helpful and profitable.

Just like a job board, I would add adverts to my blog, promoting the directory to make sure customers are happy with the number of people seeing their ad and the traffic they get. To start with, I would even advertise on other sites to get people to list in your directory, as well as reaching out to people and company’s to buy a listing.

Benefits:

• Highly profitable.
• Useful to readers.
• Makes you stand out as your doing something different.
• Nearly guaranteed income.

Drawback:

• Costs to setup.
• Smaller sites may not work so well.

10. Host Webinars & Sell Something

Webinars are great at selling high price products, either a the product owner or as an affiliate.

Alternatively, you could set up a free webinar that you replay once a week, teach something and then at the end you sell them into 4 more webinars. Once you complete the webinar series, you now have a product that you can sell as a home study course

Here is a great introduction to how to sell with webinars.

Benefits:

• High priced, low amount of customers, so low support.
• Readers want to connect with you.
• Highly beneficial to those who buy.
• Great way to teach.

Drawbacks:

• If your doing live webinars, your exchanging time for money.
• Investment for software.
• People have to turn up at a specific time, hard for different time zones.

11. Write Tutorials & Promote Something

Another thing I don’t see often, but I love to do!

Content is what everyone is after, that’s why they come to your website, so create content which includes them buying something so that when they do buy, they buy via an affiliate link, and make you money!

What I do to create a tutorial, is I start with the product, find one that you are using and you get a lot out of, it of course needs to have an affiliate program. Then do a tutorial about doing something using that tool.

So for example it could be a post about Photography and take a specific type of photo but you need this lens to do it.

Benefits:

• Makes great content.
• Good for search engines.
• Profitable long term.
• Quick to produce.

Drawbacks:

• Finding enough products that have affiliate programs.
• Some people may not be interested because they don’t yet have the product.

12. Publish a Book

A lot of people want to write a book, however they have no audience.

A blog can bring you branding, can help you connect with other people in your industry, help you understand what people like to read about, more importantly what people don’t like. All this can help you write a best selling book.

A lot of people don’t consider a book because you only get a couple dollars a book but that’s not just what you earn.

Publishing a book can allow you to then launch a product because people always want more, also a more exciting prospect is being paid to speak. If you are published, you’re automatically seen as an expect, it doesn’t matter if you never sell more than a dozen books, this means you can charge to speak and charge a lot more for consulting.

There’s so many different ways to go about publishing a book, most choose self publish but if your blog is successful, either they will find you or in my case, a friend connected me with his published and told me I should write a book. Someone in your industry who blogs, will also have published a book, help them and they will help you.

Benefits:

• Authority.
• Long term earnings.
• Increase your charge for consulting.
• Paid to speak at events.

Drawbacks:

• Timely or expensive if you have a ghostwriter.
• Doesn’t make you a lot of money on it’s own.

13. Offer Live Training and Workshops

Just like selling consulting and services, you could also use your blog to sell live training, workshops and seminars.

People read your blog but I wouldn’t be surprised if over 80% don’t act on what you say. Having a workshop means they learn from you and implement with you, this is a very attractive offer to some people and they are willing to pay high prices to do it.

You don’t just make money from the price of the ticket but you can also make money from selling follow up workshops and masterminds. If you bring in speakers, then you also collect 50% of everything they make if they sell from stage at the end. Another thing to consider is recording the event and then selling that as a product on your blog.

Putting on an event is a daunting thing, however it really isn’t to hard. Ring up a hotel, book a conference room, now you have a date, write a blog post and send everyone on your mailing list to that page.

Mention your event every where and keep hustling! Apart from that, all you NEED to do is create your slides and turn up. Some of my friends even hire people to run everything for them so they don’t have to worry about the event side of things themselves.

Benefits:

• Can make you a lot of money.
• Can be made into a product.
• People will invite you to speak at their events so that you can sell yours.
• Makes you an authority.

Drawbacks:

• Time consuming.
• Selling can sometimes be hard.
• Stressful for first timers and often the pros.

14. Sell Your Website

Definitely my favorite of all the above and also the one that pays the most.

Selling your website can make you very wealthy, or it could be just a nice retirement fund. Whatever it is, it can be a great way to get a large lump sum of cash.

Typically, websites sell for 12 – 24 months revenue, however if your site is old, has something unique about it or is the authority in your industry then you can expect any figure you want. I have seen some blogs go for over 200 years revenue and it didn’t even make $100,000 a year.

Work hard and it will pay off.

It is important to remember if you sold your site for 2 years revenue and it made $5000 a month, you would get $120,000. To earn that amount of money it could take you 6 or 7 years because of expenses and taxes. You also have to factor in how long it took you to build your business. If it took you two years and you sell for $120,000 – then it would be like earning an extra $60,000 a year.

If you are already at the stage where selling your website is an option, read this post on selling your website.

Benefits:

• Large amount of cash.
• Can be sold within a month.
• Enough money not to have to work for years.

Drawbacks:

• You lose an asset.
• You lose an income stream.

That’s it. Our top 14 ways to make money from a website.

Here is a quick recap of what I recommend you do:

• Get Aweber.
• Get PopUp Domination.
• Get Optimizepress.
• Create a free report or eCourse to give away as an incentive for signing up for your list.
• Create your own online training to sell to your subscribers.
• Find highly rated products to promote as an affiliate to your list.
• Reinvest earnings to make even more.
• Get Samcart to increase checkout and upsell page conversions.
• Use Samcart to release your own affiliate program to get other bloggers and competitors to promote your stuff.
• Expand, expand, expand!

And here are some more posts on monetization that I recommend you read:

• The Best Ways To Grow Your Email List
• 9 ‘Set and Forget’ Ways To Increase Sales On Your Website
• 10 Ways SamCart Will Increase Your Checkout Page Conversions
• How I Get Over 100,000 Visitors a Month With Top List Articles

Good luck.

The post 14 Ways To Actually Make Money From a Website! appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

Monetizing any website, is a journey. It’s unrealistic to expect that you can make one change to your website and it’s going to provide you with the best possible results. The best way to approach monetizing a blog, is to focus on helping people.

As an example, let’s use a Photography blog. People visit the blog because they want to become better photographers. To get someone to visit this blog, you need to provide them with lessons, motivation, inspiration and so on. Now, the same applies to when you monetize a website. A reader wants even better ways to improve their photography, whether that is with better equipment or with even more training, either way, there is an opportunity to make money.

If the readers want better cameras or better equipment, you can promote other companies products and receive a commission.

If the reader wants better training, or more advanced training, again, you can promote other bloggers products, or you can create and sell your own.

I often think, the best websites are the ones that you can’t even see how they make money. And by that, I mean, you can see no visible advertising. Monetization doesn’t have to be obvious, in fact, I find it converts best when no one knows it’s there at all.

Real quickly, I will tell you why we don’t sell advertising:

• Constantly adding/editing/deleting advertisers
• Ads are often ugly and take away from user experience
• They can reduce your search engine rankings and increase bounce rate
• Most importantly… it makes us less money!

Selling advertising, for us, isn’t worth it.

Over the years, we have tried over a dozen ways to make money and from our experience, making money from a blog, falls into two categories.

Making money from affiliate marketing

and…

Making money from selling our own products.

Below, I will give you a break down of both techniques, with details on how we use them here on IncomeDiary.

How to Monetize a Blog With Affiliate Marketing

Finding Affiliate Products To Promote

Keeping with the theme of Photography, finding physical products to promote such as cameras and equipment is easy. Nearly every photography related product can be found on Amazon, and Amazon have their own affiliate network called Amazon Associates. This means Amazon let’s you sell their products and you receive a commission for doing so.

When it comes to any other product you want to promote as an affiliate, I usually start by visiting their website and scrolling to the bottom to see if I can find a link for an affiliate page. If I don’t see one, I will then Google their website name + affiliate. If nothing comes up, which at least, in my experience is quite rare, I will simply move on and find something else.

To find inspiration for products to promote, you could look at either a competitors website to see what products they are promoting or you can try an affiliate marketplace such as Commission Junction which has 1000’s of different companies integrated with their service.

Promoting Affiliate Products On Your Blog

This is where a lot of people go wrong, they simply add a couple affiliate offers to their blog and cross their fingers, hoping someone will buy from them. There is a lot, a lot more to it than that!

To start with, if you already have traffic I would recommend that you check to see if any of the links on your website could be updated with affiliate links.

What we did, was we tracked our outgoing links with Google Analytics and then we could see which links were getting the most clicks and prioritize from there. This one change increased our earnings by about $50,000 a year.

Promoting Products You Use

This works because people can actively see you using the service or product. For example with IncomeSup, I recommend my hosting company, domain registrar and the blog theme we use. Using the photography niche as an example again, you could recommend the camera you use, the lens, the camera bag, memory cards and so on.

Often you go to a blog and you learn something from the author. It’s only natural that you would want to copy their success by doing what they do.

“I use this, so, so should you”.

Promoting Recommended eBooks

I have found that two things convert really well for us – the first being the ‘Offer Box’ below.

In the past I have used banners provided by affiliate managers and also had some really snazzy boxes designed however this clean, simple box with a green stop sign converts the highest.

Perhaps because it looks more like content, then an advert.

I like to promote two offers in the box, one low priced and one high price. Fortunately for my higher priced offer above, I was able to secure a $1 trial and that has seen conversions go even higher. (Top Tip: If you are promoting a higher priced offer – try and get a special rate or introductory offer to get people interested in taking action.)

The second thing that converts really well is adding a text advert at the top of my list posts, such as on our Top Earning Bloggers post. I added a link saying, “Want to follow in their footsteps? Check out this product”. This works because as they read the post the reader is highly motivated and inspired and wants to see themselves on this list one day.

Comparison and Resources Page

These pages are usually used to reinforce a recommendation I have already made. People like the element of choice but in reality, usually, one product is better than the rest.

When you put this product up against competing products, it only shows how far better it is and should give your reader the confidence to go ahead and purchase. If they don’t go with your recommendation and choose a different product, well, that’s an affiliate link as well, so you will stay make money.

You can see an example of this on our Creating a Website page.

Special Note: It is also OK to put in some comparisons that will not earn you any commissions – if you are being authentic and creating trust, which you should be, then your visitors, especially your more ‘internet marketing aware’ visitors will appreciate your ‘impartial’ approach.

Publishing content that mentions affiliate products

This has started to make me more and more money as I test different affiliate offers. There are 3 main types of blog posts that make me money. They are Interviews, Guides and Reviews.

I shall point out the advantages of each below:

Making Money From Interviews:

One of the best ways to make money promoting products with interviews is to prepare the interview to go out as the product is launched. Why? Well, if the product has just been released, no one has bought it and so you increase your odds at making sales.

Not only this, but anyone interested in the product, will look for more information on Google and social media and if your post is coming up, then they will come to your site and hopefully by from you.

I recommend you do the interview over the phone (I use Skype) and record the call and get it transcribed. You then add the call to your site as an MP3 / Podcast and add the transcription for those who prefer to read rather than listen. (The transcription also gives you lots of valuable search engine content). When conducting interviews you can also review the interviewee’s products, ask them questions about it – and then at the end of the interview you can add if you wish your own mini-review of the product and the reasons why visitors should buy it.

Typically your interview will only touch generally on the strategies the interviewee uses but done correctly your listener / reader will be left wanting more. This is when you promote the Interviewee’s product as a way for your followers to learn more. Depending on the interviewee and the product, you can easily walk away with dozens of sales and continuous future sales depending on how often future readers find the interview.

Making Money From Publishing Guides

Another tactic I use is, producing ‘How to’ or Guide Posts – just like this one.

You give away great content that really helps your readers and at the same time you promote affiliate products. Visitors can see you using the products so they can decide if it’s for them or not and those who do notice you are promoting an affiliate product don’t mind because you are helping them out for free.

Very Important: This is very important – do take the time to produce good content / how to posts. Despite what some gurus try to imply — there is no such thing as Free Money – you need to work at providing real value to your readers — do that and the money will follow via affiliate sales. So often I see bloggers making ‘half efforts’ at producing guides – frankly you may as well not bother if that is what you are going to do. Readers can tell if you know what you are talking about and if you are passionate about it, or not.

Making Money From Review Posts

Just about every post you do can be a partial review post if you are doing it correctly. This is the essential bit here — no one is really going to pay any attention to your review posts unless they respect you, believe in you, have rapport with you. In other words they feel you can be trusted. As mentioned in previous posts this is why pages such as the ABOUT PAGE and the MY STORY PAGE are so essential.

To start building that trust and rapport you must first provide good content, valuable content. So often readers tell me they cannot believe how much good content I give away for free – if you start to get comments like that then you are doing it right. Build rapport and anything your recommend will stand a far better chance of being sold.

Using Email Marketing To Drive Traffic To Increase Affiliate Sales

Email marketing is often thought of as a monetization technique. But really, it’s a traffic source. It allows you to send traffic anywhere you like. And it’s good at it.

Getting people to subscribe to your email list, is perhaps the most profitable thing you can do with your blog – especially if you then followup with quality emails, that further help your readers.

If you ask any big internet marketer, one of the main things they would tell you is that they wished they had started to build their list earlier. Done right (which means first delivering quality information — not loads of spammy offers) than email marketing to a Strong List of followers is about as close as it gets online to printing money.

Let me run you through how my email marketing funnel works:

1. Opt-in boxes are displayed through out our website – for this we offer a special free gift to entice people into signing up. We also add a well designed eCover to give even more value to this FREE product.

63.9% of IncomeDiary’s email subscribers come from our popup. The second best way we get subscribers is via our opt-in box at the bottom of our blog posts, but this converts far lower than our popup.

You would be best of focusing on these two techniques first. Here’s a good post on how we get email subscribers.

2. Visitors sign up to your email list.

3. When we have a new blog post or we find good quality offers related to our niche, we email subscribers. Sometimes we can earn thousands of dollars from just one mailing by doing this.

When it comes down to email marketing and autoresponder software, we use and recommend AWeber. If you order today you can get your first month for only $1. Apart from AWeber, you may want to consider iContact. (see, this is me, giving you a choice, I will earn either way).

Extra email marketing monetization tips:

When someone subscribes to you list, usually you offer them some sort of incentive, such as a free ebook or some kind of training. This should be monetized with affiliates products and/or it should leave them wanting even better training from you that you sell.

You should save every email that converts well for you and add it to your autoresponder list, so that new subscribers, automatically get your highest converting offers.

Increasing Your Conversions

Although the following may seem like small things, the increase in conversions can be as much as 1000% in some cases, so do pay attention.

Ask For a Coupon Code

Most companies will have the ability to create custom coupon codes, all you have to do is ask for them. These are great for increasing conversions as the coupon can make a huge difference such as making it a trial offer or get something free. People love to think they are getting a good deal.

Ask For a Special Offer

Some of my best converting affiliate links convert so well because of the special offers I am able to offer my readers. For example a $1 Trial or a Bonus offer only available to my readers.

Ask For a Higher Commission Rate

If you are doing a good job at promoting a product, it’s quite possible that you can get an even better commission rate. If it’s a digital product that you are promoting, then the cost of each customer to the seller is very low, so it’s nearly 100% profit. So they can and often are prepared to offer more than 50% commissions, because whatever they earn, is often a result of doing very little.

Some product owners are even prepared to give 100% commission rates because money is not just earned with the first sale, but future sales and let’s not forget the ability to email them promotions.

How to Monetize a Blog By Creating and Selling Your Own Digital Product

Brainstorming Products To Create

Often, coming up with a product to create is an easy task. If you’re doing a good job, your readers should be telling you what they want.

If you are stuck for ideas, take a look at your most popular posts and ask yourself, can you make a product around one of these articles? Not only has the subject proven to you to be popular but you already have a very targeted traffic source to sell too.

Here is a list of different types of products I’ve seen bloggers create:

• eBooks (Traffic Domination)
• Checklists (110 Blog Post Headlines Proven To Get The Most Traffic)
• Services (Done for you blogging service)
• Consulting (Talk about how you can improve your blog)
• Membership Websites (8 Week Training Course for Launching Your First Product)
• Software (PopUp Domination)

Creating Your Product

Well, let’s assume you are creating a digital product, teaching something. And you want to deliver it as an eBook or membership website. To start with, I recommend you create an outline of everything you want to teach.

Now either decide if you want to offer it in text or video, or both.

If you decide you want to offer it as text, that’s simple enough, just get it converted to a PDF and give the customer the download link once they purchase.

If you want to do a membership site, you need to get some membership website software and install it on your blog. Now this can be quite simple, but you may have to hire a developer, depending on your ability level. If you are offering your training in video form, just upload it to AmazonS3 and insert the videos into your site.

Just in case it’s crossed your mind, if it’s a software product you plan to make. You need to find a great developer and make sure you have a budget to see the project through. If you don’t properly plan out your product, it can end up costing you a lot more than you expected!

Selling Your Own Product

You should plan to do this in two main ways, via your own website/mailing list and via affiliates.

Let’s begin with what you will do on your own website:

Firstly, you need to make your readers aware of what’s coming. You want them excited. You want them to buy the second it’s for sale.

We once launched a product and before we even announced it was on sale, two people had found the sales page and bought it. The next 98 customers signed up in under 100 minutes.

This is because we pre-sold our audience. Not only this but we added scarcity. We told everyone that, for the first day, we only were going to offer 100 accounts for sale. So they had to be quick!

To get started selling, you need three things:

1. A landing page. (Page dedicated to selling your product).
2. Merchant account. (We use Stripe and PayPal).
3. Checkout page software.

Readers visit landing page, they click the buy button, they go through the checkout page process and then pay via your merchant account.

Then once they pay, they either end up on the download page or they receive an email with a link to download the product there.

Getting Affiliates To Promote Your Product

You will earn a lot more money from affiliates promoting your product than you will earn selling it yourself.

Once you start working at this, your focus with your blog will become a lot more than a blog but rather a business. You will have assets, multiple income streams and more.

Often people think, well, if all the money is be made from creating products, then why even bother creating a blog. A blog gives you credibility, authority. Without the blog, you would find it a lot harder to sell your product and also to understand the industry you are in. At least, that’s our experience.

Take Action Today

There you have it, that’s our top two strategies for monetizing any blog or website.

If you could only take 3 things away from this post, I hope they are:

1. Using a Lightbox optin I was able to significantly increase my daily email opt-in rate (304% +). I wish I had started using it sooner.

2. Test promoting different products, one product I promote, out sells all others by at least 20 to 1 and I wouldn’t have know that if I had not switched around promotions on my site.

3. ASK! My conversions and sales continual increase because I’m always asking my affiliate managers for more, a free trial, coupon codes, different landing pages – if it’s going to make you more sales, it’s going to make them more money and so they should at least make an effort to help you.

Good luck!

Read more: ‘14 Ways to Make More Money From Email Marketing’

The post How to Monetize a Blog: The Two Main Ways We Make Money Online appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

I am often asked: ‘If you had to start over online, from scratch – what would you do to promote your blog and build up your traffic again as quickly as possible’

A very good question and one I have been giving quite a bit of thought to recently.

I think most people over-complicate traffic. They’re reading too much into all these techniques and spending all their time making sure their blog looks good.

There’s nothing wrong with having a great blog design or doing SEO the right way. But it is a problem when you’re spending so much time on the technical stuff that you forget your site’s purpose: to provide immense value for your visitors.

Extraordinary content is the key to extraordinary traffic.

So assuming you are starting from scratch or your funds are limited here is my Kick Start Strategy For Bloggers:

How To Get 1000 Visitors To You Blog Every Day

Step 1) Create Great Content For Your Blog

The number 1 thing you should focus on to get traffic is, great content. Why? because that’s what attracts people to your website.

When I’m writing an article, I have two things in mind. Firstly, I want to make it as simple for someone to understand as possible. Secondly, I want to make it as beneficial to the reader as possible.

So, with that in mind, how much great content do you need to get 1000 visitors a day.

10 articles getting 100 visitors a day.

20 articles getting 50 visitors a day.

100 articles getting 10 visitors a day.

Looking at these numbers, I would say you were best of focusing on less articles, that bring more traffic.

So how do you go about creating content so good that you can get 1000 visitors a day? Here is step by step what I would do:

Brainstorm and research high traffic keywords.

Great content gets linked to a lot, on both social media and blogs, but only if people can find it in the first place.

Links help you rank high in Google.

But none of this matters if you don’t target your blog post for something people are actually searching for in Google.

That’s where keyword research comes in.

Keyword research is all about finding keywords that get the most searches in Google.

To do this, we use Ahrefs. This has to be my favorite tool that I have found this year. It’s far better and more user friendly than any other tool similar to it.

Once you signup for an account (they have a free trial), go to their Keywords Explorer tool and type in the topic you want to write a blog post about. You want to find keywords that have a lot of searches but are not so competitive that you can’t rank for them.

Ahrefs will tell you how much traffic a search term is getting and how many backlinks you are likely to need to rank for this search term. It will also tell you who is already ranking for it, how much traffic they are getting and what other keywords they rank for on that page.

This is an important point to remember. Your blog posts won’t just rank for 1 keyword, but perhaps 100’s and in some cases, 1000’s of different keywords.

Write a headline to sell people on your article.

A headline is what attracts people to your blog post.

When we write headlines for our posts, we try to include what they will learn, the benefit from learning it and also why they should learn it from us.

A good example of this is: 10 Headlines Examples That Got Us 10 Million Readers

They will learn the best headlines, to get lots of traffic and they should listen to us because we have been successful at it.

Another example could be: 18 Website Optimization Tips For More Traffic and Higher Conversions

They learn website optimization tips, the benefit being more traffic and higher conversions.

Create a top list article around keywords.

Our readers seem to prefer top list articles much more than any other type of post. I think this is because you know exactly what you are going to get.

Not only do you know what you are going to get but you also know how the content is going to be laid out.

I think this is key to their success because people want to skim content. They don’t want to invest time into reading long posts if they don’t know it’s going to be worth it.

One recommendation I would make is, link out to other websites in your blog posts. When we write articles such as 50 Most Influential People In Blogging, we link to each blogger. When they see the post, they often share it and link to it somewhere on their blog.

As mentioned earlier in this post, the more links a website has pointing to it, the higher it ranks in Google.

Make Sure Your Blog Post Looks Amazing

Optimize readability and proof read your blog posts.

We like to write content in a way that people can come to our site and quickly skim an article and figure out if it’s an article they want to read. I think this is a big part of why so many people read our posts.

Think about it this way, if you go to one of our blog posts and it’s just 2000 words, no paragraphs, no headlines, no images, are you going to invest your time reading it? It’s unlikely you would.

When we create a blog post, we make sure we use images, not just to promote our posts, but to split up the content.

Here is an outline of how we display our blog posts on IncomeDiary:

Main Headline
Introduction
Headline 2 (h2 tag)
Headline 3 (h3 tag)
Text
Image
Headline 4 (h3 tag)
Text
Image

And so on…

Sometimes we include sub-headlines for sub-headlines. It’s important to break up content to make it easy to read.

Step 2) Search Engine Optimization

Now that you have found a good keyword and written a blog post, you need to optimize your post for that keyword.

Optimizing Your Blog Post For a Keyword

Go and download a free WordPress plugin called Yoast SEO. This plugin will ask you what search term you want your blog post to rank for. Then it will tell you everything you need to do to best rank for it.

Such as:

• Including keyword in headline
• Including keyword is meta description
• Including keyword in first paragraph of post
• Including internal and external links
• Including an image with the name of your keyword
• Add alt attributes with the focus keyword to your images
• Mentioning the keyword enough times

Once you have done this, you should be ready to publish your post.

Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines

A big part of how Google decides on where your blog post will rank in it’s search engine is based on how much it likes your website.

Google wants to link to websites that are up to date, user friendly, trustworthy and popular.

Here is a list of ways to achieve this:

• Have a contact page with address and phone number
• Get HTTPS in your website URL
• Add a sitemap to your website
• Always fix broken links
• Improve your page speed
• Make sure you have no duplicated content

Remember, you can optimize your blog posts as much as you like, but if the content isn’t amazing, it’s not going to get linked to, which means it’s not going to rank well in Google.

Step 3) Optimize Your Blog Marketing

Now that your blog post is published and it’s optimized for Google, the next important thing I recommend you do, is to make it easy for people to find your content.

You want as many people as possible, all coming to your website at the same time to view your new post. Not just because you want lot’s of traffic but because it gives you a better chance of getting even more traffic.

Think about it this way, if someone sees one person share your article, they often won’t look at it. But if they see 10 people sharing your article, they start to think, WOW, this must be good.

If you’re creating great content, you’re bound to eventually get some big spikes in traffic.

The only problem with spikes in traffic is that they can be gone as quickly as they come. The spike of a successful article goes down after two or three days.

But a good website is designed to turn one-time traffic into recurring traffic. After jumping from 400 visitors a day to 4,000 visitors a day, it goes back down to 600 or 700. That’s a big increase from where it was before.

We turn traffic spikes into long-term traffic by asking people to subscribe to our email list. You’ll notice we have a popup and an opt-in box in the footer of this web page which offer exclusive content for people who subscribe by email. Email is the most direct way to let people know that you’ve published a great new article.

Another way to get first-time visitors to come back to your site is through social media. These communities bring a consistent social buzz to each new post.

Here are my top tips for getting lots of traffic to a brand new blog post:

Email Your Subscribers

Like I just mentioned, one of the best way to instantly get a lot of people to visit your website is to email subscribers.

Every time we email our list about a new post, 1000’s of people visit our site. Some of them share it on social media, some link to it on their blog.

This gets us backlinks to our blog post and gives our search engine optimization a good boost.

This is an important part to the success of any post.

But how do you get email subscribers if your blog is new? Read this post about 10 ways to get email subscribers.

Mention It On Social Media

Similar to having an email list, you can Tweet/Facebook your article and a whole load of people will visit it. If the article is amazing, people will share it.

We don’t put a lot of effort into building our social media accounts because we know if we write great posts, our readers will do the sharing for us. Having said this, social media has been one of our best traffic sources. One of the reasons for our success with social media is we signed up and started using it way earlier then the majority of other people.

When I launched IncomeSup, something that was going really well right then was Twitter. Twitter was the in-thing. Everyone was jumping on board.

Since Twitter was new, the make money online niche wasn’t yet saturated.

I was getting huge amounts of traffic — literally 100,000 visitors in a month from Twitter. And I could take advantage of it so easily by just following thousands of Twitter users a day. Thousands of people would come to my profile to see who has followed them and follow me back, click my profile link, my updates, and so on.

Then when Pinterest launched, we were able to do the same thing.

We have found that often in business, we are able to achieve huge amounts of success by acting quickly and not waiting to see how things work out. Some bloggers may of looked at Twitter and thought it won’t last and decided not to join until a lot later.

Getting People On Your Blog To Read Your New Posts

This is also an important step in your blog promotion. One of the easiest way to keep website traffic high, is to keep people visiting page after page and coming back to your website. A few ways you can do this:

• Add a link to your top navigation bar. If people enjoy your content, they will want to look for more.
• Add a link to the top of your sidebar.
• Make sure the post is featured on the home and category pages.
• Make sure the post is featured in related/popular posts.

Ask Friends to Comment and Share (read why)

When I first started blogging, I would often ask friends in the industry to comment and share my posts. Most of them didn’t have any traffic, but that wasn’t important.

What was important, was if I was getting lots of comments and shares, other people coming to the site would be a lot more likely to comment and share.

Remember, it’s about momentum.

The Last Word:

Traffic is a Marathon, Not a Sprint.

Even if you’re doing everything right, it’s unrealistic to expect to have a ton of traffic and income right away. These things need time.

My brother didn’t make any money with Expert Photography the first few months. But he kept at it because he’d seen exactly how long it had taken me to grow my websites in the past. Eventually, he was making $100 per month, then $1000 per month, now he makes $1000’s a day.

Read more: ‘10 Best WordPress Plugins For Getting More Traffic To Your Website’

The post How To Promote Your Blog – The Fastest Way To 1000 Visitors Per Day appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

There have been significant changes since then. AirBnB founded in 2008 did not make the original list but are here today. Myspace no longer features!

Please Note: Despite their significant size, some companies are intentionally left out because they are primarily retail based that does web based revenue, but ultimately the service or product offered does not necessarily depend on the internet to generate the majority of its revenue and certain companies have been left out because they have since been acquired by other companies. We have also excluded from the list any business that is primarily App Based.

Use this table as motivation. It is easy to think that the numbers below are impossible but at a certain point the founders of the companies listed felt the same way. Also please see our various notes at the end of this list.

Last time we updated Google was the top earning website and Amazon was No 2 – this time they have swooped positions around. Amazon is that Juggernaut of a Money Earning Machine and they continue to innovate and grow.

In 2009 the top earning website was making $691 per second, today it is making $3392 per second!

Enjoy!

30 Top Earning Websites That Make A Lot Of Money Online

Click To Share on Facebook | Click to Tweet

How Did We Calculate The Earnings

To obtain the turnover of the companies in this list we first analyzed SEC 10-K reports that are submitted by publicly traded companies within 60 days of the company’s fiscal year end.

For private companies, reputable sites such as BusinessInsider, Forbes, and Bloomberg were utilized and cross referenced to identify revenue amounts for each companies most recent completed fiscal year. In cases of multiple sites showcased varying numbers, the lowest was used.

Top Earning Websites Notes:

=> Yandex is a Russian Internet company which operates the largest search engine in the Russian Federation with about 60% market share in the country.

=> NetEase, Inc. is a leading China-based Internet technology company founded in 1997 that pioneered the development of applications, services and other technologies for the Internet in China.

=> AirBnB Revenue – How Much Does It Make?

=> Dropbox was one of the most difficult websites to track down revenue for, with varying revenue figures quoted – but there are plenty of references to its large valuation.

=> Myspace featured in our original list – whatever happened to them?

How Can I Make Money Online?

Every great website, starts with an idea. If it’s a good one, traffic comes naturally and money is a bi-product of your success. If you want to learn more about creating a website, check out our FREE eCourse. If you have not already done so – also check out Traffic Domination – where I share how this website has got over 10,000,000 visitors.

Read more: ‘Top Earning Blogs – Make Money Online Blogging’

The post Top Earning Websites – How Much The Worlds Largest Internet Business Make appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

Over the years, we have had 100,000’s of people sign up for our mailing list, so today I thought it would be a good idea to share with you what works best when trying to get email subscribers.

You ask any top marketer, what is their most important marketing tool, they will tell you it’s email.

Why?

Because nothing is as consistent as email marketing.

With the click of a button, you can instantly send an email to a group of people with your offer. You don’t have to wait for them to come to you. They have already shown interest and want you to email them.

Take a look over the last 10 years.

Google Adsense was the go to way to make money from a website. You could earn over a $1 a click. Some people made as much as $25 a click. It was brilliant. People coming to your website didn’t even know what the ads looked like and would click them all day long.

As time went on, more websites used it, with more people offering clicks, the earnings per click went down. Web users learned what ads looked like and stopped clicking them as much. Google’s terms got more strict. Eventually website owners started looking for something new to make them money.

Then came Text-Link-Ads.

Website owners used this site to sell text links on their site.

A large part of Google’s ranking algorithm is based on how many quality links you have pointing to your website. This meant big companies were happy to pay a premium to get links, to push up their search engine rankings, getting them more traffic and making them more money.

You could add 10 links to your sidebar and make $1000/month.

Even sites with low traffic could charge a lot for links because people weren’t buying links based on traffic, but how much Google liked their site.

Google hated this.

Google wants to show users the best possible match for their search. Not those who cheat the system.

As time went on, Google started punishing sites who bought and sold links. Quickly the price of links dropped and everyone was left looking for a new way to make money.

When Twitter came along, website owners could sell promotional Tweets to their followers. Over time, quite quickly in fact, Twitter became to busy, there was to many people competing for attention, Tweets started to perform less and thus, people stopped buying Tweets.

There are dozens of examples of monetization techniques making people rich, but over time… stopped working.

Email marketing has remained consistent. That’s why top marketers focus on their list above all else.

Even if email dies one day… marketers will still focus on their lists. Before email, marketers would send letters in the post. After email, who knows how they will contact their list, but there will be a way and it will continue to perform.

That’s why you should focus on your list.

What Works Best To Get Email Subscribers From a Blog

Over the last 11 years, we have tried and tested dozens of different techniques to build our list.

We wanted to know what are the best ways and in what order do they perform.

So over the last two weeks, we tested the 5 most popular ways to show signup forms on a website.

They are:

• The top of the homepage
• Bottom of posts
• Sidebar
• Squeeze page’s
• PopUp’s

Below is a breakdown of how well they did.

Before you continue, take a minute to think, in what order do you think they came?

The Results

Total new subscribers: 4382

1. PopUp Domination brought in 2,803 new subscribers – 63.9%
2. Footer Signup brought in 774 new subscribers – 17.6%
3. Homepage Signup brought in 309 new subscribers – 7%
4. Squeeze Page brought in 296 new subscribers – 6.7%
5. Sidebar Signup brought in 200 new subscribers – 4.5%

All 5 techniques were active at the same time, competing against each other.

It’s worth mentioning that all of our traffic for this test is from free traffic sources, interested in a wide range of subjects. (which explains our low conversion rate)

Continue below to see a breakdown of why they performed the way they did.

Getting Email Subscribers From a Homepage Header Box

We first added an opt-in box to our homepage back in 2007.

In 2009 we decided to try something bigger, we added a full width opt-in box right under our header.

Overnight we saw a huge increase in new subscribers.

At the time, hardly anyone was displaying opt-in boxes like this. Now you see them everywhere and for good reason.

Most people who visit your homepage will come from other pages on your website. They come to your homepage because they have seen something that has made them interested enough in you that they wanted to stay and look around. Because of this, your homepage is one of the highest converting pages on your website.

Getting Email Subscribers With Below Blog Post Opt-in Boxes

Having a subscription box below blog posts is a good idea because visitors have just read your post. Your post has just sold them on who you are and the value you can deliver.

Placement is everything. The difference between putting this box at the bottom of the page and the bottom of a post can be as much as 500%.

Getting Email Subscribers From Sidebar Signup Forms

The sidebar is probably the most common place you will see an opt-in box.

It’s also the lowest converting signup form on our site.

Why is this?

Could it be because you have less space to promote your offer?

Is it because people are use to seeing it and switch off?

Or perhaps it’s because all the other techniques grab their attention first.

It performed so badly for us that we have decided to delete our sidebar signup. It isn’t worth it. It takes up a lot of space that could be better used to direct people to more content. The more content users see, the more opt-ins we get and the more sales we make.

Getting Email Subscribers From Squeeze Pages

Every website needs a squeeze page.

It’s a page that’s soul purpose is to promote your email list.

You can link to it in posts, emails, adverts. Subscribers can use this link to tell their friends how good your emails are and to go here to sign up.

Often, I will be writing something and want to reference my mailing list. It’s a lot easier to link to your squeeze page then to tell a reader the location on a page to go to and sign up.

Use Optimizepress to create high converting squeeze pages effortlessly.

Getting Email Subscribers From PopUps

The almighty popup. Just 7 years ago it was rare to see one. In 2017, they are used by the majority of websites.

I’m sorry.

A big reason for that is because of us.

Five years ago, I was having a conversation with a guy at an event about how his site was using them to get email subscribers. It was by far the most powerful tool he was using to skyrocket his mailing list.

I wanted in.

I searched for an easy way to add a popup opt-in box to my website. The best I could find was a simple white box which would only allow me to edit the text.

But I wanted a popup that looked and converted great!

So as soon as I got back from the marketing event I spoke with my designer and asked him to make me one.

Overnight our email subscribers jumped by over 507%.

OVERNIGHT.

Never have I seen something blow up so quickly.

I was now getting as many new subscribers as the big guys in my industry but with a fraction of the traffic.

On a call the next day, I told my designer about the results. I dropped the suggestion that it could be a good idea to go into business together and build a WordPress plugin so that other websites could easily add a popup to their site. He would supply his web development team and I would bring my marketing skills.

I did for a brief moment think to myself, perhaps it’s not a good idea to release this because it works so well. Perhaps I should keep this to myself, my secret edge. But I knew it would be big and if I didn’t do it eventually someone else would.

We worked round the clock for 11 days to build the first version. A time frame we gave ourselves because we were concerned that another marketer was working on a similar project. In the end, they were working on something else.

In our first week, we sold over 500 copies.

At the time, a lot of top bloggers spoke publicly about how they didn’t like it and were against us. Now they all have popups on their sites.

Over the years that followed we have invested 1000’s of hours on development.

Today, over 60,000 websites are actively using our software.

What you need to know about PopUps

It’s the No. 1 way to build your list, by far!

Why?

Because it’s kinda hard to miss.

You see it before any other signup form.

So how can you get your own and what’s important?

Go to PopUpDomination.com and signup for our FREE 14 day trial.

As for tips for getting the most out of your popup:

Test everything.

Try different popup designs, colours, copy and promotional images. Split test something new every week to increase conversions.

Display different popups based on category. If you have one popup, not every reader will be interested in what you have to offer. Setup different offers for each category to put your email marketing on steroids.

Display settings matter. Work out how often to display your popups and after how many pageviews/seconds on page.

That’s it.

If you can only use one email marketing technique to get email subscribers, you should be using PopUp Domination.

The post 5 Different Ways To Get Email Subscribers – What Converted Best? appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

All these businesses and ‘partnerships’ brought me new lessons and today’s post reflects on the Big Lessons these business journeys have provided.

But first some distinctions:
Partnership: A business owned and run by two or more partners.
Joint venture: It is temporary in nature and is terminated as soon as the venture is completed.
Shareholders: An owner of shares in a company – usually a limited company and shareholdings need not be equal.

Selecting a Business Partner Wisely

Business Partnerships are not unlike marriages – the separation (the divorce) can be very painful. So just like choosing a life partner, choose your business partners carefully.

I am regularly amazed at just how casually people end up in business together.

Most people would not marry someone without some serious getting to know them time. Yet, I find people who have barely met going into business with each other – especially in today’s digital marketplace.

Is your potential partner a positive happy person? How do they react under pressure? Are they the kind of person who is vengeful and vindictive? Beware of anyone who boasts about getting ‘one over’ in a previous business dealing – because chances are one day it will be you that they will want to get ‘one over’.

OK they may have a skill or money that the business needs but if you can’t get on or respect each other it is going to be challenging for both of you.

Before reading this list I should say this is not Legal Advice – it is some key lessons from a personal perspective – hire and pay a professional for advice.

Additionally one thing I see a lot of is individuals referring to each other as partners – when no legal partnership agreement exists. Beware of this term – in some parts of the world if a true partnership exists you could be responsible for the debts of your partner.

OK, on to the main points:

1) 50% of something big, is better than 100% of nothing

You could argue that none of the businesses I created with partners would have ever happened, if I didn’t give up some ownership share and control.

2) It’s less stressful when you share responsibility.

This is especially good if say one of you is the writer / creative type and the other is say more technical.

3) Most people will choose what they want to do, not what is best.

This is a BIG one – all growing businesses have challenges – the road to the top is not a straight up arrow and there will be things that don’t go as planned. It is in those times that people often retreat into their comfort zone and do the things they like doing rather than the things that need doing. They fail to prioritize and if you don’t watch out the business will fail.

As Drew Houston (the founder of Dropbox) says:

“It’s OK to have growing pains, as long as you’re prioritizing correctly and working to address them. Every company looks messy from the inside,”

4) Greed at some point usually takes over.

Strangely the more successful the business is the more reluctant some partners can be to share. This is why it is essential everyone knows their roles / responsibilities. For example in some ‘deals’ one individual may have the idea and put up the cash and thereafter have very little ‘work’ involvement while the other partner would on the surface appear to be working harder and sooner or later may forget it was the other partner who put up the cash / had the idea. As I say. it is essential to have an agreement on different roles clear and out in the open from the start.

5) Sometimes you have to admit defeat.

Give it your best shot – know in your heart you did your best but if for whatever reason it is not working out sometimes it best to cut your loses and move on.

6) Don’t rush to make any decisions.

But on the other hand don’t take days and weeks over something – but in my experience ‘sleeping on it’ (taking 24hrs) over a major decision can often be the wisest choice. Whatever you do – don’t make big decisions when feeling angry.

7. Everything needs to be in writing

All the important stuff needs to be in writing – make it a habit to record all major discussions and outcomes of discussions. Should there be a misunderstanding later – you can always refer back.

8) Open communication is paramount.

I can’t help my business partners solve problems if they don’t tell me about them. I can forgive people messing up, what is not acceptable, is hiding from it. Tell your business partner everything.

As Marcus Lemonis, – the “business turnaround king” and star of CNBC’s prime time reality series The Profit is quoted:

“If you guys can’t communicate as business partners, you can’t be in business together. If you can’t tell him what’s wrong, then you shouldn’t be in business together”

9) Take responsibility

I am responsible. Sure… other people may cause problems, but I was the one who put myself in that situation.

10) Communicate on the phone and in person.

I hardly ever get anything achieved over email. You often end up playing email tag, resolving things slowly, waiting for replies. (But of course once something has been decided – confirm in writing / email)

One person I use to be in business with, would often ‘forget’ what he agreed to. Every time he ended up owing me money, he would make it a point that I had to prove that we ever had an agreement. Everything we ever did was done on a handshake, which admittedly was a silly thing to do, but I get excited about my ideas and just want to push forward with them quickly. Hopefully I’m done making this mistake.

What amused me about this example is, everything was in my name, the domain, hosting, merchant and so on. He only ever had a problem with our verbal agreements when he had any control over what we were doing. See number 4.

I never had a problem with anyone when business is conducted face to face. It’s when you allow them to hide away, they see the opportunity to be dishonest.

11. Crazy people can be hard to spot.

People will tell you what they think you want to hear. They will paint the picture that they are happy, smart, sane and willing to work there ass off. Never go into business with mean people. Never go into business with people who must always be right!

In conclusion – it is important to be realistic in all business relationships. Of course with good due diligence you minimize the chances of failure – but sometimes it just doesn’t work out.

Our ability to handle failure and move on / start again is ultimately one of the most important success traits for an Entrepreneur.

I should also say Thank You to all my business partnerships – even the ones that didn’t work out. We are always learning..

And finally a great quote from John D. Rockefeller:

A friendship founded on business is a good deal better than a business founded on friendship.

Read more: ‘24 Rules I Follow When Creating Successful Websites’

The post 11 Essential Lessons From Going Into Business With People appeared first on How To Make Money Online.