Consider this:

You are making $1000/month from selling an eBook on your blog.

To make $3000/month, you could release two new eBooks.

But is that the best way to spend your time? Will that give you the best ROI? There is no doubt more products will mean more money, but in most people’s cases, you can make more money quicker, if you focus on what’s already making your money.

Improving our checkout page doubled our sales.

Adding a popup opt-in doubled the amount of people that signed up for our list. Our sales come from emails, so again, this doubled how much we were making.

When we significantly increased our page speed, our search engine traffic went up, people spent more time on our site and conversions went up too. All we had to do was spend 5 minutes hiring a page speed expert.

There are opportunities all around us. If you’re not satisfied with where you are right now, perhaps you should ask yourself, what isn’t working as well as it could.

Start here:

Our 9 Favorite Tips To Increase Sales and Conversions

#1. Increase Sales By Adding Upsells to Current Products

Most decent online marketers make as much money on the back end as they do on the front end.

By that I mean, if they sell a $97 product, when a customer goes through the checkout process, they spend at least another $97 on other products before they complete their purchase.

When I first heard about this, I thought it was an unbelievable statistic. Surely you can’t increase sales by 100% by doing something so simple.

We couldn’t ignore something that sounded so promising.

The first upsell we ever created was for PopUp Domination. Customers would buy our software, then during the checkout process, get offered purchasing options for multi-site licenses and additional popup designs. Incredibly, over night we were able to increase sales by 2x!

It makes perfect sense. The customer is already in buy-mode, they have already got their credit card out and ready to buy something. It’s impulse. They see something else they like that’s related and all they have to do is click one extra button.

Our good friend Yanik Silver had a rule of thumb I like to quote:

“60% of people should take your first upsell if it is priced at 60% of the front-end product price.”

That would be a good place to start for most people.

So for example; if your front end product sells at $49, an upsell priced at $27 should convert well.

The only problem we have ever had with creating upsells is the technical side of things. The first time we did it, we had to ask customers to re-enter their credit card details for every upsell they wanted to buy.

No doubt this had a negative effect on conversion. Although we were still able to achieve that industry standard of making just as much from our upsells as the front end offer.

We are not tech guys and even asking a programmer to set something up like this can be a pain because it’s just not something people have much experience with.

However things have moved along quite a lot since we first played with setting up upsells.

Our current checkout software SamCart, allows you to create upsells in seconds. All you have to do is insert the sales video code, set the price and it’s done.

Customers go from purchasing a product, to upsell page 1, upsell page 2 and finally the download page.

Here’s how we setup our upsells:

1. Click upsells on the left hand side of your SamCart dashboard and then select funnels from the drop down menu.
2. Click “new funnel”, add your funnel name and a short description, then click “create funnel”.
3. Select how many upsell offers you’d like to add from your product list and then select “enabled.” You’ll have the option to add up to 5 upsells and 5 downsells.

#2. Double Sales By Improving Your Checkout Page

The checkout page is a huge part of the sales funnel process, and is often forgotten or brushed off.

I remember 6 years ago reading a forum thread about the beta stage of Clickbank checkout page design. They allowed premier users (top earners) to customize the design of their checkout page from the default 1 style design. Users saw as much as 3x higher conversions by simply matching the header and background color to the one used on their sales page.

Checkout pages should have the following characteristics:

• Sales copy reminding customers of exactly what they’re getting.
• Branding that matches your main site.
  
• Product image.
• Clear instructions.
• Satisfaction Guarantee.

Another top tip to increase sales is to remove any checkout fields that are not 100% required. The easier it is to sign up and pay, the higher your conversions will be.

Our checkout pages are hosted and setup with SamCart, which makes the process incredibly easy.

#3. Add a PopUp Opt-in Box

If you make money from email marketing, then I would be surprised if you didn’t at least see a significant increase in sales by adding a PopUp to your websites.

Within the first 24 hours of promoting our free giveaway on our site using a popup, our subscriber rate increased by 524%

After seeing just how powerful it was at increasing sales and conversions, we developed it into the first WordPress plugin of it’s kind. When we released it, a lot of the top bloggers and gurus did not like it and even spoke publicly about not liking the plugin. In 2017, all of them have popups on their sites.

Here are 10 different ways we use PopUps on IncomeDiary.

#4. Launch an Affiliate Program

Having an affiliate program has allowed us to do $x,xxx,xxx in sales with zero advertising budget.

Affiliate programs give you the ability to track and pay people on commission for selling your products. Take PopUp Domination as an example. We let customers promote our sales page with a special tracking link. If they convince someone to click the link and they end up buying from us, we give that person a cut of the money for bringing us the business. This is all handled effortlessly by our merchant.

This is a great, low risk way to drive traffic to your sales pages. You only have to pay for the traffic that converts.

Affiliate programs are among the best ways to incorporate passive income streams into your business. Once your sales page is setup and you have affiliates promoting your products, you don’t have to do anything to drive traffic and make sales.

#5. Setup Autoresponders

One of the best ways to increase sales (and passive income), is to have an autoresponder.

An autoresponder automatically sends emails to subscribers that you have setup before hand. We use them for all of our mailing lists. When you subscribe to our list, you will automatically receive an email from us. Then again the next day and again two days later and so on, until all 30 emails have been sent. This means you can write a sales email today, then in the weeks to come when someone subscribes, they’ll get that email automatically, read it and hopefully buy whatever you are selling.

As far as we are concerned, the more autoresponder emails the better. We regularly look back over past emails we’ve sent to our lists, copy our most successful ones and add them to our autoresponder.

Autoresponders have been one of the most powerful passive income streams we have ever used. Everyone should have a mailing list and everyone should be sending emails. It doesn’t matter if you are a blogger, software owner, if you sell eBooks or want more clients.

To get started, we recommend and use Aweber for our email marketing! They currently have a $1 trial.

#6. Increase Sales By Increasing Page Speed

Speeding up your website is a guaranteed way to get more traffic and increase sales.

Google openly states that page speed is part of their search algorithm. Which makes sense because they want to connect their users with the best match. The best match is not a slow loading website that infuriates you.

We do a combination of things to increase our page speed. You can read more about it here.

The most important being:

1. Perfect code. Be careful which WordPress theme you are using.

2. Minimize page load by not having things slow the site down. One thing a lot of people do is have far to many WordPress plugins.

3. Pick the right host.

4. Use caching software. We use MaxCDN to significantly speed up our site & decrease server load. MaxCDN duplicates your website content across several servers globally, which presents your visitors with website content from whichever server is closest to their location. This increased proximity decreases page load time.

#7. Make Your Site Mobile Responsive

One in every three minutes spent online, is via a mobile device. If your website isn’t responsive, you’re losing money. Our websites are made with Genesis framework and all of our sales pages are created with OptimizePress. Both platforms are 100% mobile responsive!

Check out 15 best practices for responsible responsive web design.

#8. Increase Sales Page Conversions With Split Testing

Split testing is crucial for making money online and is something all successful marketers do on a regular basis. Most have tests continually running.

A split test is when you split your web traffic between multiple pages to see which one converts higher. For example, think of any sales page, now duplicate it, so you have two exact same versions of this page. Change one of the pages so that the buy button is a different colour. Now send 50% of your traffic to each of these two pages. After 100 sales, see which one made the most money.

There is a lot you can test. And you would be surprised how much small things can add up. Here is a list of things to start testing:

• Headlines text, colour, font, size
• Background colours
• Images
• Videos
• Videos Vs Images
• Video Vs Text
• Short Vs Long
• Price
• Scarcity
• What you are offering
• Name of your product
• Testimonials
• Guarantee

I could go on for quite some time… you can test EVERYTHING!

Both SamCart and OptimizePress allow us to split test our checkout pages as well as sales pages to ensure the highest possible conversions regardless of the product.

#9. Don’t Keep All Your Eggs In One Basket.

There are quite a few reasons why this saying is true for online business.

Firstly, if you only have one income stream, then you are screwed if for whatever reason it disappears. And don’t think that’s impossible because it’s happened thousands of times, to people far smarter then you or I. Let me give you an example:

Say you are a blogger and have 5 different income streams for your blog. You are making a lot of money. You should feel safe right?

NOPE.

Not if all your traffic comes from one source. Often I’ve heard horror stories of top bloggers being slapped by Google and losing all their traffic, therefor losing all their income.

You can’t set and forget about a business if it has a foundation like this. Diversify and make sure you have multiple traffic sources such as Search Engines, Social Media, Podcasting, Email Marketing and so on.

Ok, let’s put traffic aside and focus on blog monetization techniques.

Say your site is getting great traffic and it’s all good, but you only make money from Google Adsense.

Well Google can come along and ban you for 1 of a million terms violations. Again you are screwed.

Ok, it’s 2017, not many people do that. How about you sell an eBook online and all your income comes from that. You are doing great, in fact this month is your best month ever, you made $30,000!

Perfect, no troubles, right?

WRONG!

Your merchant shuts you down or puts you on hold because it’s worried you may be doing something fraudulent. Countless times I’ve heard online marketers moan about how their PayPal accounts have been put on hold for months and they can’t withdraw money. Why? Because PayPal would rather be safe than sorry. Although in most cases, PayPal eventually took these people off hold, how would you deal with not being able to access your money for months on end?

Another reason not to keep all your eggs in one basket is it just isn’t a smart business decision.

Take IncomeDiary for example. Say you are coming to the site today and the only adverts we have up are for our PopUp Domination software. If you already have a copy of it, then you can’t buy anything. These adverts are irrelevant. People love choice and you need to be able to show them multiple things they can buy to have the best chance of making a sale.

Like life, variety is key to business.

You must diversify.

There is so much you can do.

So many opportunities you are not taking advantage of yet.

I hope today’s post has shown you that.

There you have it, our 9 top ways to improve your website, to increase sales and conversions. Enjoy.

Read more: ‘14 Ways To Actually Make Money From a Website!’

The post 9 ‘Set and Forget’ Ways To Increase Sales On Your Website 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.

No need to purchase a domain name, set up hosting, create a Clickbank account, upload videos to Amazon S3 or do any of the myriad tasks usually associated with starting an online business.

Of course many experienced Internet Marketers are re-purposing some of their content for sites like Udemy, but in this post, Greg Jeffries reveals his own ‘lazy strategy’ and how he eventually made money online.

Over to Greg…

How I Banked Over $30,061 in 12 Months using “Content Stretching” and Online Course Marketplaces.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you just knew that ONE thing you could do for just a few hours per day or per week, that was pretty simple and produced predictable passive income?

That’s kind of the dream, right? Either that or having someone just dump a BIG pile of cash into your bank account overnight that you didn’t have to work for at all

But the reality is you generally have to hustle and grind and fail A LOT before you ever find those magical unicorn income streams…if they even exist.

Well, I’ve been online now for about 10 years and I’ve got the typical story you’ve heard over and over. I struggled a lot…but I did eventually find something very simple that worked for me.

And the great thing about it, is it is one of those rare gems of income streams that doesn’t require a ton of time, a ton of money to get started, you don’t already have to be an “expert” in your niche…AND you don’t have to be a master at copywriting, marketing or recruiting affiliates.

It’s a simple strategy that I like to call “content stretching”.

Now, I appreciate that for some of you $30,061 is not a lot of money – but it is real!

Sure, some of those Guru’s are earning millions but the point of this article is to share how I eventually made money online. Hopefully if you are still struggling to make your first dollars online this will help.

The really good news is that my results are extremely average or perhaps even low average compared to other brand new instructors, so I want to emphasize that this is something you can absolutely do…and I truly believe if you do, you will have success.

So What The Heck Is “Content Stretching”?

Content Stretching is essentially taking one piece of content and leveraging it as much as you can by spreading it out to as many different marketplaces and media as possible.

In the results above I chose online course marketplaces such as Udemy and Skillshare.

How To Make Money Using Udemy and Online Course Marketplaces

What Do You Need To Get Started?

All you need to get started are these few items…

1) Computer/Laptop – I use a Macbook Pro (I know they’re not cheap but they’re definitely worth the investment)

2) A decent microphone – you don’t have to be some super master sound engineer and go overboard here. The mic I use is a Blue Yeti USB microphone that you can pick up on Amazon for about $100. I also recommend picking up an inexpensive pop filter to block out additional noise. I purchased a black Whisperteknik foam windscreen which you can also find on Amazon.

3) Screen recording software – I have a Mac and highly recommend ScreenFlow, but if you are using a PC, I recommend Camtasia. Both of these softwares are extremely simple and intuitive to use. Don’t worry, you don’t need a Masters degree in video editing and motion graphics to whip out high quality videos with these tools.

In any case Udemy has plenty of inexpensive online courses
if you want to take your Video Production up a level.

In addition to the above, I recommend recording in a quiet place so you don’t get much noise or feedback. Good audio is a high priority to many of the course marketplaces.

TIP #1: Like I mentioned, you DO NOT already have to be an “expert” or what you consider to be the absolute top authority in your niche to be good at this or to have success. The majority of courses I published were just my spin on content of courses that I had just bought and consumed. You probably already know a lot about more about a certain topic than most people, but if you’re absolutely drawing a blank when coming up with ideas for content to teach, just get a subscription to Lynda.com – it’s only like $25/mo. Go through a couple courses that interest you, and teach those things you just learned. I guarantee if you do this you’ll absolutely make at back least the cost of your subscription within your first 30 days or less IF you take action.

TIP #2: Also, if you’re worried about being on camera or you don’t like your voice – you gotta just push past that fear and get over it. When I started out I sucked too, but I got better and improved over time. However, even to this day I still cut out all my ahhhs and umms – I almost never record it perfect on the first try.

TIP #3: If you’re concerned about not being “expert enough” for people to buy from you, do not let this stop you from taking action. If you have some awesome credentials, great, you can use them in places like your profile or biography for these platforms. But if not, that’s fine too, just be honest. But also be creative with it and try and squeeze out as many strengths and accomplishments that you’ve achieved in your life, because your profile is really your opportunity to brag about all the things you’ve done and shine…kind of like the cover letter of a resume. The most important thing is that people want to buy from others they like, trust and that are just real and genuine and know what they’re talking about. And even though you may not consider yourself the tippy top “expert” in your entire niche yet, for the person who knows absolutely nothing about what you’re creating a course around, you’re a little more expert than they are. So, again, don’t let that fear stop you.

The Step-By-Step System to Creating Online Courses That Produce Passive Income

The “content stretching” system for online course marketplaces is extremely simple and it’s basically: Learn. Do. Teach.

– Go learn something

– Do it, so that you know what you’re talking about and can speak from experience when you’re teaching

– And then teach what you just learned to others

It’s really that simple.

Create A Course Outline

Now, in order to make things flow as fast as possible, I like to plan out a simple outline for the courses I create.

To do this think of what you want to teach, and then figure out how you can break that down into simple steps. Each step will be a separate lecture or video.

I typically try and make most courses about an hour or so. Now, that may seem like a long time. But to make it really easy for myself, I break each step into short videos.

If you were to teach something that included 12 steps and you needed to have one hour of content, that would mean only talking for 5 minutes about each step, which anyone can do.

Then, when you’re done, you just assemble all the pieces, and now you have a full hour long course.

How To Scale The System

So, each and every course platform is slightly different but also has several things in common.

This is how I like to structure and plan out my content so that when I’m done with my course I can scale it in the easiest, laziest way possible.

I create one full course, usually about an hour in total length, made up of multiple smaller lectures usually 3-10 minutes each.

I also create an image to represent the course and what I’m teaching. Make the image 1280 x 720 (it can be smaller, but keep those same proportions).

This structure is going to make it easiest to scale once you’re all done.

Some platforms want you to have full courses, some are fine with just mini lessons, some like to bundle your courses, etc.

So, setting up your courses this way, the most you’ll ever have to do when adding to different marketplaces is maybe add/remove a few lectures, create a different intro video, or add a text description to individual lessons.

What Are Some Of The Most Popular Course Platforms?

Udemy
– this is basically the Google of the online course marketplaces. It’s the largest and most popular.

Skillshare – my recommended place to start out because they let you upload individual lessons. Each lecture only has to be a minimum of at least 10 minutes. This platform will be the easiest and fastest to scale since there’s no course approval process, and will put some quick money in your pocket.

StackSkills – this is another large platform that has a wide reach and can promote your courses out to their massive audience for exposure. They do like to promote courses as bundles, so you’ll need to have a few courses complete and put together before you reach out to them.

ULearning – this is a newer platform. It’s very similar to Udemy and makes it easy to upload and publish content, but I’m not 100% on how well this one will do, since at the time of me writing this they just recently launched.

Amazing – this is also a newer platform launched by Matt Clark, one of the people behind the massively successful Amazing Selling Machine. This is a unique platform and kind of a hybrid between Skillshare and Udemy. Worth checking out because I believe there will be greater chance to earn more revenue on this platform than other marketplaces, but it might be helpful to get your feet wet at somewhere like Skillshare or Udemy first.

Common Questions about Online Course Marketplaces

Do you do any offsite selling?

I actually don’t. The whole reason why I leverage these online marketplaces is because they already have traffic and an audience and they’re doing their own paid marketing and SEO to build up their members. That’s why I love this system and think it’s so great for beginners. You will literally make sales just from being in these marketplaces. I don’t care if you have a course about underwater basketweaving, you will eventually make sales just by showing up. It’s that simple. Of course if you wish, you could promote yourself, for example on your Facebook profile, via your blog and Twitter.

How do I get good reviews for my courses?

On many of these platforms you do have the opportunity for students to leave reviews. We all know the power of reviews due to sites like Amazon. Reviews are extremely powerful and provide social proof that helps in driving more sales and profits. But to get good reviews don’t overthink things. Number one, focus on creating the highest quality and valuable content that you can on your topic. Then next you can prompt students at various points throughout the course to take action and leave a positive review or rating if they have enjoyed the content inside, to help encourage others to enroll. You can also incentivize them in some way in exchange for a review, like sending them a content upgrade or free report, video or interview. That’s really all I’ve ever done. Keep it simple.

When do I get paid?

Each of the platforms are different in how you get paid, when you get paid and what you get paid for. But most typically pay out a full calendar month after the current month. For instance, if you earned $1000 in August, you would typically be paid out during the first week of October. But some pay on the 1st and 15th or later in the month. The most important thing for beginners is to just get started. Once you start getting results then you can begin planning out your months in order to reach your financial goals. Like if you wanted to reach a certain income goal by March, well you really need to be hustling hard in January because March is going to be the payout month of January’s efforts and activity.

How much of a cut (%) does the online course marketplace take?

This varies, depending on the company. But lets look at Udemy as an example. There is a good number of options available depending on how the customer found the course. (via an Affiliate, via Udemy or directly via the Instructors promotion)

For example if a student purchases your course using an Instructor Coupon code, either from promotions to your own audience (e.g., your email list or YouTube subscribers) you can make 97% revenue share. Alternatively if the course is sold via an Affiliate, the split is 50% affiliate, 25% Instructor and 25% Udemy. If the sale comes directly via the Udemy website (not an affiliate or an instructor promotion) the split is 50% Udemy, 50% Instructor.

You can make a lot of money with Udemy but like everything in life – the more effort, the more rewards!

97% is very generous – but you have to find the customer. I have been happy for Udemy to do the selling, marketing and driving traffic – which in most instances means 50% revenue share.

A simple, scalable, and sustainable passive income system

So, there you have it.

A simple, scalable, and sustainable passive income system that is completely newbie friendly, that doesn’t require a lot of resources to get started, and that you can still have massive success with…even if you suck at selling or driving traffic.

I encourage you to take action and implement this system. It’s so hard not to succeed with this system that I pretty much guarantee if you just take action you will see some results. And once you do, I think you’ll be amazed and get hooked. Look, if a somewhat Lazy Introvert like me can make money with Udemy and online course marketplaces, it should work for most people!

If you’re interested in a more in-depth video lesson explanation of this system or curious about other simple, scalable and sustainable passive income streams I use and recommend, I invite you to check out IMSource Academy where I share all my best tools, resources and systems along with my personal support and help.

Additional Make Money With Udemy Resources

=> How to Create Your Udemy Course – 1.5 hours of training – The official guide to creating your own Udemy course, from start to finish. (Free)

=> Wistia Course Creation Compilation – A collection of videos about video lessons for the content creator – 1 hour of training. (Free)

=> A SlideShare presentation – 16 Tips on How To Make Money on Udemy. Well worth a flick trough for some additional ideas and suggestions on how to make Udemy work.

=> How 10 Instructors Earned $1.6 Million on Udemy in One Year. For those of you with aspirations to make a lot more than $30000 PA – plus a bit more background of Udemy and the opportunity.

The post How To Make Money With Udemy and Online Course Marketplaces appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

Craig Ballantyne – 12 Rules For Life

Today we have a video interview and some wisdom from one of our favorite entrepreneurs here at IncomeDiary.com – Craig Ballantyne of http://www.turbulencetraining.com and Early to Rise at earlytorise.com

We are not normally into hyping anyone up – but lets just say that Craig’s attitude, personal discipline and writing style commands a huge following. Craig has a remarkable goal that we here at IncomeDiary hugely admire: To help 10 Million men and women transform their lives.

Surround yourself with positive people. Get rid of the toxic ones in your life. You become whom you associate with.

Those who know Craig will know how disciplined he is and the rules by which he lives his life. Indeed his 12 Rules are one of the most shared pages at EarlyToRise.com

Wisdom and Life Hacks From A Favorite Entrepreneur

1. I do not engage in confrontations with anyone, in-person or online. This is a waste of time and energy. If I have caused harm, I apologize and fix the situation. And then I take a deep breath, relax, breathe out, and re-focus my efforts back on my work and goals

2. I am guided by these two phrases:
a) “Nothing matters.” – I can only work towards the major, massive goals and my vision of helping others, while the opinions of others do not matter to my goals.
b) “It will all be over soon.”

3. Everything that happens to me – good and bad – is my personal responsibility. I blame no one but myself. These are the choices I’ve made – this is the life I’m living. I will accept the consequences of my actions.

To read more about Craig’s 12 Rules visit here.

If Craig is not already someone who is on your reading list – do yourself a big favour and follow him

Early in August Barry Dunlop and Craig caught up with each other in St Petersburg Russia – the video below records part of their exchange and discussions about Passive Income and how you achieve it amongst other things:

Video Transcript (Edited – Not verbatim)

Barry Dunlop: I read an article from you recently on Passive Income – I call it the “myth of passive income.” Can you elaborate on your multiple streams of passive income Craig and what it really means…

Craig Ballantyne: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve worked so hard to put in place all of those things that are making me money when I’m not there. Some of them are products that I had created 7, 8, 10 years ago even. Some of them are businesses that I’ve built with partners, who are doing the work and I invest the capital. Some are affiliate relationships.

While I am traveling / on vacation emails will be sent out to our various lists. But these emails were set up last month, even though they will go out today and make me money while I’m here on vacation. But none of that stuff is really passive.

It was years of work. You can cut that into months of work now because of what we know, but I learned things the hard way. I put that all in place and it’s paying off today. So, yes, I do make money while I sleep. I do make money while I’m on vacation – the shopping cart is always working and my posts are being viewed but it’s not passive income.

The more you build that foundation wider, the higher the pyramid goes, the more success you’re going to have, the more people you’re going to help. It can almost feel like passive income some days, but it is the result of a heck of a lot of work earlier

Barry: So you’re not promising an El Dorado, or a get rich-quick-type of scenario.

Craig: No. Not that you can’t get rich quick…

You can.

…which is fine and good if you help a lot of people the right way. I know a lot of people that have become very rich very quickly. If you take a look at history, Mark Zuckerberg got rich quickly compared to someone like Aristotle Onassis who built his fortune up over decades.

Barry: That’s an extremely good point. Another question – Let’s say somebody is starting an online business for the first time. What would be the chief skills you’d recommend that they would learn?

Craig: I would learn how to sell. In fact, I think you did a great thing when you were a young man. You joined Amway, you learned how to sell.

Craig: You learned to sell nose to nose, toes to toes, face to face. I wish I would have done that when I was younger. But I did learn how to do copywriting. At the end of the day, if you’re going to make money in anything, you have to learn how to sell. Even if you just want to be an employee, you have to learn how to sell the employer on hiring you.

But as an Internet-business owner, as opposed to an Internet marketer which has the stigma — as a business owner, we need to learn how to sell. We need to learn how to sell, whether it’s face to face or whether during presentations from the stage or whether it’s copywriting and email writing. So pick your best way of selling.

Focus on that. Study everybody that you can. Really study the marketplace and really study your competitors who will become your cooperators. Then also pick one way, one bullet that is going to be your source of traffic. One that aligns with your natural skills and your interests.

If you can’t imagine yourself sitting in front of a computer for two hours to write an article, the good news is you don’t have to do that these days with Instagram and YouTube etc. Pick something you have a natural talent for. For example become a YouTube star – I.e put all put all your energy into YouTube if that is the medium you prefer to communicate in.

Rather than trying to dominate Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube or affiliate marketing just pick one and really, really focus on it and just blow it out of the water and really dominate that. So that’s the two things, the skills of selling and the skills of getting people to know about you. Figure out what works best for your personality and natural skill set.

Barry: You and I had an interesting conversation the other evening about the education of traveling. You and I both travel a fair amount and I think your next stop is Lithuania? Is that correct?

Craig: Yeah, Lithuania for the Blacksmith Liberty & Entrepreneurship Camp. We do that every year for young entrepreneurs. So check that out and apply if you’re a young person. It’s a free camp and we teach you everything we know.

Barry: One final thing, Craig, which I think is very important, as well. Where can people find out more about you and what you do? I know, for instance, you work a lot with my friend Bedros. Do you want to give him a shout-out or anything like that? People will want to find out about where they can connect with you.

Craig: Yeah. Bedros is the big brother I never had and I just told him that today. He is my business partner in a mastermind group we run. We do these one-day events all over North America. We haven’t yet come over into the Russian Federation, yet, although he is Armenian and we should get over here someday. But we do them and we would love to see you there. You can find out more and watch a video from Bedros, (who’s high energy) at bedroslive.com.

Then you can read more of my articles at two websites, earlytorise.com, which is business building and wisdom.

Special Note:
=> Craig Ballantyne is the creator of The Perfect Day Formula – the one Self Help book and training anyone serious about success should own.

=> Barry Dunlop is a lifelong entrepreneur who launched his first Internet Business in 1998. He invests in renewable energy technology, Domain Names plus buying and selling websites for profit. You can follow / message Barry on Twitter

The post Craig Ballantyne Interview – Passive Income and Hard Work! appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

Today I decided to research how much my favorite blog’s are earning every month and I wasn’t surprised to see some of them make over $100,000 per month.

These are blogs and success stories that have inspired me to become a blogger. These Superstar bloggers continue to inspire me to this day – and they have kept me motivated to not give up whenever it got tough, especially in the early days.

I hope this inspires you. If you think it’s time to start your own successful blog, then you absolutely must check out my post on how I create websites.

Special Notes:

1) To give you some idea of the potential available – top blogging network, Weblogs, Inc. is believed to earn about $30 million a month revenue from 13 million unique visitors.

2) And it is not just about making money monthly it is also about building a BUSINESS that can be sold, such as 22 year old Johns Wu did when he sold his blog for $15 Million.

Disclaimer:

Some of the website’s featured in this top list are only estimates and are not all 100% correct just a indication of how well they are doing regarding making money from their blog. If you would like to be featured in this list or know of any blogger’s that should, please comment below!

Check out the TOP EARNING BLOGS list below. I have already interviewed a number of these Superstar bloggers but hope to interview a lot more of them over the coming months – so watch out for that.

30 Blog’s That Make A Lot Of Money Online

How They Make Money From Blogging

There are over a dozen methods these top blogger’s are using to monetize their blog, different techniques for each niche. Some niche’s are easier to promote products to, some have high paying keywords and some are easy to drive millions of visitors every month! Below is a run down on some of the techniques used.

Advertising Banners

By far the most popular advertising method so far in 2017. Website owners love this because they know they are guaranteed the money, other techniques such as affiliate marketing can go up and down a lot depending on what you promote.

CPM Advertising

This method is really popular for the website’s that receive a huge amount of traffic, advertisers pay you for impressions rather than sales or clicks! As long as you can predict your impressions which is usually east to do, you know how much you will earn.

Affiliate Sales

Selling on commission depending on your niche can be a huge earner and is by far my biggest earner. You promote great products and then get great commissions.

Pay Per Click

By far the easiest way to earn money online from a website or blog is from Google Adsense and being paid per click. Can be very lucrative if done right!

How We Make Money Blogging

We have spoken a lot about how we monetize our blogs and make money online.

On IncomeSup, we don’t sell any advertising or have any advertising banners. I feel like it limits how much you can make.

Say you sold an advert for $1000. You now know you are guaranteed to make $1000 this month, but, you also know you are going to only make $1000 from this advertising space.

When it comes to making money from blogging, we focus on two techniques.

Technique 1: Affiliate Marketing

Selling other peoples products and get a commission every time we make a sale.

Technique 2: Selling Our Own Products

Creating and selling our own eBooks and software. For example, we sell an eBook on getting more traffic and we have a software product that lets you create high converting popups.

We go into a lot more detail about these two monetization methods in this post about monetizing your blog.

The Longer You’re Not Taking Action, The More Money You’re Losing

The biggest difference between people who create successful websites and people who fail, is those who make it, didn’t give up.

If you want to get more traffic to your website, click here!

To Your Blogging Success,

Michael Dunlop

The post Top Earning Blogs – Make Money Online Blogging appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

I realized, if I ever wanted to sell my online business, it couldn’t require ‘me’. Michael wasn’t for sale, just the business.

That’s something a lot of top bloggers get wrong. They work on building their brand, they make it all about themselves and then when they lose interest, they aren’t able to do anything with their blog.

I didn’t do this just so it would be easier to sell. I also didn’t want to have to work on my websites, day after day.

I decided I wanted my business to run on autopilot. Basically, It had to grow month after month, with no work required from myself. Here is what I decided I wanted:

• I didn’t want to have to write posts
• I didn’t want to manage blog post schedules
• I didn’t want to have to work with advertisers and continually monetize my site
• I wanted to continue to get lots of traffic
• I didn’t want to have to draft emails to subscribers, do my social media etc.

So how was I able to do this?

IncomeDiary’s Guide To Website Management

1. Getting People To Write For Your Website

I didn’t want to deliver content that was less valuable than what I have published before. That wasn’t something I was prepared to do.

The first thing I tried was to recruit guest bloggers. They would write content and in exchange, they would get a link at the bottom of the post going back to their site.

I quickly discovered this wasn’t going to be good enough. The majority of guest posts were way of being high enough quality for the site. Often they had low word count, bad spelling and just in general, not helpful.

Even when I got guest posts that were good, I didn’t want to accept them because I wasn’t a fan of the idea of linking to their site. I want readers to go to the next page on my site after they read a post, not to a guest bloggers site.

After this, I decided to try paying people to write.

This has worked well. I pay between $100 and $200 an article and I can tell you, at that price, I get great quality, a lot of long term traffic and I make my money back quickly. Some posts have made me $1000’s. Paying for content also meant I didn’t have to give a link at the bottom of the post to the authors website.

2. Publishing Your New Blog Posts

When a writer has finished their article, they schedule their post to be published at a agreed upon time and day. So for example, we often publish content 3 days a week at 2pm GMT, Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

WordPress has a scheduling system built in which lets you set the time and date a post needs to be published. Often, writers may finish a post a week earlier then it’s needed and will set it up to be published the following week, when they know it needs to go live.

This works well for us. Not only is it good for me running the site, that I don’t have to manage the writer, but I also think they enjoy it because they don’t get managed.

3. Marketing Your New Blog Posts

The majority of my regular readers subscribe via email for updates from the blog. Every time I published a post, I had to draft it up and send the email via Aweber.

Aweber rocks and does what I want it to, however, It was taking me 20 or so minutes each time to get the email out.

I decided I would be better of using their blog broadcast function. This feature automatically emails your list every time a new post is published. I was able to make it look like I had written the email myself. Not only that, I got my web designer to create a custom email template for it as well.

Once I set this up, every time I published a new post, all my subscribers get an email automatically, letting them know to come to the site and read it.

This is the majority of the marketing I do for a post. The idea is, create amazing content, get people to read it, they share it, they link to it and through that, I rank high in Google.

4. Monetization & Passive Income

The next thing I had to figure out, was how to make money from my site without having to do anything.

When I first started making money online, I would sell advertising.

If you have advertisers, you have to firstly find them, negotiate, work with them to get the deal and then they may change their mind, so you have to constantly, add/edit/delete the adverts and sometimes, more often then not, have to start over again with the next person.

One thing I noticed when I use to sell advertising, is a lot of people buy ads to promote affiliate products.

Affiliate marketing is when you promote someone elses product and if someone buys, you get a commission.

The great thing about it, is you don’t have to do anything once you add the link to your site. Here is a good post about how we make money from affiliate marketing.

Another way I make money on autopilot is selling my own eBooks and software. Now this option may not require me to do any work once it’s setup, but it does require paying someone to manage support.

5. Conclusion and Moving Forward

I hope these quick tips helped. Month after month I grow my business yet I’m not around doing the work.

My main focus now is to get more writers and more blogs online. Writers are a large cost but for me it’s worth it. At least long term.

Nick Tart wrote on his blog about how every new post is worth 1320 new visitors a year. For me it’s a lot more. Every time I publish a post, thousands of people rush to my site to read it. Out of all those people, I only need 3 to buy an affiliate product and I’ve made a profit on the post. The importance of me telling you this is, you may not make your money back in the first day or even the first month but over a year, buying an article pays for its self, at least it does for me.

INVESTMENT is king. People often think spending so much on all the blog posts I have bought is a waste of money. But looking back, if I didn’t do it, I wouldn’t be where I am today.

One of the most important things I have done for building successful websites quickly, is investing in them.

Read more: ‘How To Write a Blog Post That Gets Lots of Traffic’

The post How To Autopilot Your Blog – Managing a Website With Zero Hours a Week appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

Setting Up

The first thing you’ll want to do is set up your AdSense so that you can study it in more detail, in Analytics. To do this, when you’re viewing your report overview, just click the link to integrate Adsense with your Analytics account. It’s just one click and then a small amount of information on your Analytics account. You have to be an admin on your Analytics account, otherwise it won’t let you make the changes necessary, but if you’re the only person running the website, this shouldn’t be a problem. NOTE: Because you’re adding new information, GA will not transfer over details from the past, you will only see new results from when your join the two together.

Now that you’re set up, it’s best to have a run down of what all the terms mean, so that you can understand your results better.

AdSense Revenue is the amount of money you’ve made in your selected time period (2 weeks for me).

/ 1000 visits, is how much money you’ve made for every 1000 visits to your site.

Ads clicked, is the amount of ads clicked by viewers.

Ads clicked / visit, is the total number of visits, divided by the number of ads clicked.

CTR stands for Click Through Rate and this is the percentage of clicks you get for each ad impression.

eCPM stands for effective Cost Per 1000 impressions (M being a roman numeral). It’s the total earnings per 1000 impressions.

AdSense Ads Viewed is the total number of ads seen, from all multiple ads on all the pageviews.

AdSense Unit Impressions / Visit is the number of ads that are viewed by visitors, per visit.

AdSense Page Impressions is the amount of pages viewed that have AdSense ads on them.

AdSense Page Impressions / Visit is similar to pages viewed per visit, only it’s pages with ads viewed, per visit.

Tip #1 – Appeal To Your Top Referrers

By far, my favourite thing about using Analytics to look at your AdSense, is that you can then find out which of your referrers are worth the most in terms of AdSense revenue. My results were rather shocking for me. For quite a while now, I’ve been featured on the homepage of a photography forum with about 7000 active members, but that’s grown a lot more over the last month or so. I don’t get a massive amount of traffic from them, as I currently only have 1 link on their homepage, but when I do, it’s worth a lot to me.

Let me show you an example of what happened. When you go into the new GA, click on Content, then AdSense, then AdSense Referrers, this will bring up a list of all the websites that sent visitors who have clicked on an ad, as well as a timeline of your earnings. The results below are for a complete month, and unfortunately, due to Google’s rules and regulations, I’m not allowed to show you them, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. The most important part of the results isn’t the ads clicks, viewed, or even the revenue; it’s the Click Through Rate (CTR) and eCPM (effective Cost Per 1000 impressions).

As we discovered earlier, the CTR is the percentage of ads that are clicked, per impression, so you want that to be as high as possible. The reason the CTR is much higher than some of the other referrers is because of the quality of visitor that I’m receiving from that referrer. StumbleUpon has a particularly poor CTR, because the people who use it aren’t looking for anything in particular so it’s hard to get their attention, which may result in them clicking on an ad. UglyHedgehog on the other hand is a forum for photographers, so the people on that site are actively looking for content in my niche.

The eCPM is also substantially higher than the other referrers, which tells me that if I can increase the number of impressions that I’m getting from them, then I will earn a lot more money. The quality of Twitter user is usually pretty poor, as they don’t typically spend too much time on the site (00:01:47), and even though a link a lot to my website around 10 times a day through Twitter, I still get less traffic from them than Facebook. Facebook on the other hand has a better quality of visitor, with people looking at more pages and staying for longer (00:02:29, but their eCPM is actually lower than that of Twitter.

From these findings I can conclude that very high quality traffic, such as forums in your niche (uglyhedgehog.com has an average time on site of 00:04:09 and 2.19 pages per visit), will make you much more money, just so long as you can get the traffic you’re after. People are less likely to click on ads when they’ve come from websites such as Facebook, as they’re more interested in the content that you’ve written. They provide a good quality of visitor, but their time on site is almost half that of the forum in my niche, so it’s important to find a good balance of visitor quality. Twitter users seem to behave differently to other users, as they’re in a browsing mode, and are clicking on content that they see in their feed before it disappears. It would appear that they treat the websites they visit in a similar way, by clicking on more ads. I actually get more traffic from Facebook, but my earnings from Twitter far outweigh those of Facebook, which is good really, because it’s much more acceptable to post multiple links on Twitter.

Tip #2 – Write Content That Links Within Your Site

This step produced shockingly good results for my earnings. If you look have a look at my graph below, you’ll see that on the 6th of November, there was a massive increase in earnings. The first thing I did was look back to that day to see which post I had published, and I found a post titled ‘A Beginner’s Guide To Photography’, and this was simply a collection of my tutorials. This meant that anyone who had viewed the page would have to click on another if they wanted to learn anything. This forced them to increase their pages per visit, which produces more ad impressions.

When I break down my earnings so that I’m only receiving information from the 6th of November, I can start to see which referrer is earning me the most money. T.co is the URL shortener that Twitter uses, so I can see clearly that a small number of page impressions has yielded very strong earnings. With a large number of clicks from 76 page impressions, I have an unusually high CTR. From this response, I can see that to earn money, this is the sort of content that I need to be promoting, though as many sources as I can. I’m currently combining this content, with the forum mentioned in the tip above, so that I can drive top quality traffic, to the content that earns me the most money. After just 2 days of doing this, I’m already starting to notice a massive improvement.

Tip #3 – Text and Image Ads

Enabling your ad units to display both text and image/rich media ad types, increases the number of ads competing to appear on your site. More advertisers in the ad auction drives higher bids and more revenue for you. On average, publishers see a 59% increase in eCPM earnings when they make these recommended changes. If you’re not already using both, then it’s as simple as going into the ‘My ads’ tab, and clicking on ‘Edit ad type’, next to the ad in the list. This will increase the cost per click, so even if you’re not improving the number of clicks that your website is getting, you’ll still make more money.

Tip #4 – Increase Ad Size

Advertisers prefer wider ad units for their premium inventory, resulting in higher bids for your ad placements. Though all sites are different, publishers typically see 0.35 eCPMs when using the wider ad size. You can start by simply changing single ads on popular pages to see how well they work, and if it’s not too intrusive, then you can start rolling it out across your whole website. I didn’t do this in my sidebar because I was aware that the whole width of the sidebar would have to change, and that would not only take a lot of time, but mess up the spacing that I had laid out for posts. Instead, I added a wider ad at the end of each post, that differs to all the other ads on my website, and this saw a good improvement in ad sales.

Tip #5 – Ad Placement

Where you choose to place the ad on your site will make a big difference to the amount of clicks that you get, because the more obvious the ad, the more likely someone will be to see it. It’s hard to judge on your own website because we look at our sites differently to how other people view them, so the best way to start seeing results, is to experiment with ad placement. When I first started, I had two ads on my website, one at the top of the sidebar, and one at the bottom. Since then, we’ve added another ad to the side bar, and reloated the bottom one to under the subscribe button, added an ad to the bottom of each post, and put a small text ad just below our header.

The small text ad below our header made the biggest difference to our results because it stands out the most to new visitors, and could even be possibly mistaken for a link within our own website. It’s a very simple ad, and less appealing than a flash one, but it’s much less intrusive, and in a better position. Overall, I don’t like to add too many ads because I don’t want to put off visitors or make my website look bad. I always find it odd when people choose to include an ad block in their header, because that makes me find their website much less appealing.

The post Increase Your Google AdSense Earnings appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

My goal today is to show you how ten big companies make money online in weird, outside-the-box ways.

Groupon

Leaping from $30.5 million in year one to $713.4 million in year two, Groupon is the fastest growing company in the history of the world.

How does Groupon Make Money?

Groupon features local daily deals around the world. Companies choose to set up a group coupon that Groupon sells for a day and keeps a percentage of the price of the coupon (usually around 50%).

The reason it works so well is because the deals are 50-95% off, they only last a day, and nobody gets their coupon if they don’t sell a predetermined number of coupons. So when people buy the coupon, they tell their friends to get it too. If they refer three people, they get the Groupon for free.

Airbnb

Started as “Air Mattress, Bed, and Breakfast,” Airbnb is an online service that matches people who want to rent out a room with vacationers who are looking for short-term rentals outside of the traditional hotel.

How does Airbnb Make Money?

Airbnb has been labeled as “among the next generation of multibillion dollar startups” by the New York Times. They charge travelers a 6-12% service fee and require hosts to pay a 3% fee for every booking through their site.

With this business model, Airbnb was valued at $1 billion in July 2011.

Zynga

Zynga is the company behind many of the world’s top social networking games including FarmVille, CityVille, and Mafia Wars. They’re reportedly valued at $15-20 billion.

How does Zynga Make Money?

Zynga makes money through people purchasing credits within their games and through partnership agreements with large companies.

Using FarmVille as an example, players use real money to purchase “Farm Cash” so they can progress in the game. FarmVille also conducted an ad campaign with McDonald’s where people could, for one day only, visit the McDonald’s farm, grow tomato and mustard seed crops, and earn McCafe Consumables so their farms would grow faster.

In March 2010, Zynga also started selling prepaid cards for virtual currency at more than 12,000 stores across the US. I remember seeing FarmVille gift cards at a 7-Eleven in downtown Denver and thinking, “there’s no way anyone would buy that…would they?” I was wrong.

Activision Blizzard

World of Warcraft, more affectionately known as WoW, is an online role-playing game owned by Blizzard Entertainment (now Activision Blizzard) with the world’s largest online gaming userbase: 11.1 million subscribers as of June 2011.

How does World of Warcraft Make Money?

Activision Blizzard makes money with WoW by charging $15 per month to play the game. They also sell physical discs and expansion packs. It’s the bloggers equivalent to a membership site with upgradable accounts.

A neat factor about their game, however, is that people can play the game, collect virtual gold, and sell their gold for real money.

People and companies, yes companies, make a full-time income doing just that. Then they sell their high-ranking profiles to people who want to skip the grunt work of running through the first portion of the game.

Edit: Thanks to Joey’s comment, I found that selling gold and profiles is strictly against WoW’s terms of use. We don’t endorse this practice but it’s interesting how it works.

Dropbox

Dropbox is a Web-based file hosting service that lets people save their documents, photos, etc. to the cloud so they can access them from any internet-connected device. It was started in 2007 by a pair of MIT graduates through the Y Combinator.

How does Dropbox Make Money?

Dropbox operates under a freemium business model where people can get started for free, but pay for more space as they want to host more files.

Dropbox is expected to reach $100 million in revenue by the end of 2011.

99designs

99designs hosts graphic design contests where graphic designers compete to create logos for clients. As a result of these competitions, clients get to choose from an average of over 90 logos and only the winning designer gets paid.

How does 99designs Make Money?

Clients post logo and other design projects and pay upfront. Then designers submit their logos to the client. The client selects his favorite and the designer gets paid, minus a small fee that goes to 99designs.

UserTesting.com

UserTesting.com offers low cost usability testing experiments where you can hire their army of independent usability testers to look at your website and give you a detailed report on what they think.

How does UserTesting.com Make Money?

They typically charge $39 per usability test and they pay their testers $10 per test. So they keep $29 per test for setting up the systems and processes that make this previously daunting task simpler.

The beauty of this company is that they can hire anyone – in fact the less savvy the better – to perform these usability tests.

Woot!

Woot pioneered the one-deal-a-day online business model where they feature one incredible deal every day.

How does Woot Make Money?

Much like Groupon, they use creative copywriting and limited-time offers to sell other company’s products on their homepage. Since they drop-ship these products, they don’t have to offer customer support or manage overhead like traditional companies. As you probably guessed, they get a cut of every sale.

In June 2010, Woot was acquired by Amazon for an undisclosed amount.

QuiBids

QuiBids offers a radical take on the long-established internet auctioning industry. People have reported receiving up to 95% off things like $3.52 Apple iPads and $1.07 Nike putters. The catch is that it costs you $0.60 to place a bid and you have no guarantee of winning the auction.

How does Quibids Make Money?

Some products receive upwards of 1500 bids which means QuiBids is taking home $900 in revenue just from people making the bids. But QuiBids claims that they maintain a 5-10% profit margin as a company because they end up losing money on 50% of the things they sell.

Any Lucky Day

Any Lucky Day is a smaller company that’s run by a young entrepreneur named Giancarlo Massaro. Similar to Woot, they profile a company-of-the-day. But instead of selling the company’s product, they hold a contest where they give the product away.

How does Any Lucky Day Make Money?

It costs a base price of $150 for a company to be featured on Any Lucky Day. They also offer a few upgraded options including publishing rights and a small listing for an extra $50 apiece.

Compared to traditional advertising like magazines and billboards, $150 is an incredible deal with seemingly more engagement because you have to visit the company’s website before you can enter the contest.

The Wrap-Up

The point of this post was to get you to start thinking outside the box on how you make money with the internet. You can continue to place sidebar ads and promote affiliate products, but the internet is your oyster when it comes to all the options you have for monetizing your website.

Remember, making money from a blog is bizarre to most people. So you’re on the right track.

Do you know of any other companies with weird, outside-the-box monetization strategies?

The post 10 Weird Ways Big Companies Make Money Online appeared first on How To Make Money Online.