*This may or may not be based on a true story*

Late 2006

Person: What’s that? *pointing at my computer monitor*
Me: Another web site I just made. It’s called a blog.
Person: *blank face*
Me: Just another online site for me to rant my stuff. And I finally got a domain name!
Person: *blank + don’t care face*
Me: I had to spend a little, though, for that and my hosting.
Person: *you’ve gotta be kidding face*

Early 2007

Me: You know, I’ve just found out a way how I can make money out of my blog.
Person: What? (as in what’s a blog again?)
Me: Yeah, they call it paid to blog. I just post some stuff, put links in it and then they pay me.
Person: How much?
Me: 5 bucks a post.
Person: Hrmph.
Me: US dollars.
Person: *blank + don’t care face*
Me: And it’s not like those HYIP, E-gold stuff you’re doing. There’s basically no risk involved.
Person: *you do what you want to do because I don’t care face*

Late 2007

Me: Hey, I got 30 bucks in my PayPal!
Person: *wow that’s a lot…not… face*
Me: Wow, and that’s just one program per month. If I do a few of these programs, I might just get a hundred bucks a month!
(a few days later)
Me: That PayPal money just went into my credit card account. RM100 plus. Not bad, huh?
Person: (quiet)
Me: Were you able to take out your money from your E-gold and HYIPs?
Person: (quiet)
Me: Scams again, huh?
Person: (quiet)

Early 2008

Person: Are you still making money from your blog?
Me: Yep.
Person: How much?
Me: Almost a thousand Ringgit a month now.
Person: Oh.
Me: I’m thinking of doing a few more blogs. They call it niche sites. Looks like a good way to make money, as long as I have the time to blog.

Mid 2008

Person: I wanna make a site about making money.
Me: You should try blogging. I can set it up for you.
Person: Sure.
(a month later)
Me: Why aren’t you updating your site?
Person: I’ll get around to it. I’ll do a whole bunch of updates at one go.
Me: OK.
(another month later)
Me: Are you sure you want to do this blog thing?
Person: I dunno. Looks hard.
Me: *rolls eyes* … You haven’t even started.

Late 2008

Me: Oh, my God! Check out my AdSense! USD100 finally! And that’s just from one blog! Plus my paid postings… yes!
Person: Great! How do you take that money out?

2009 – recently

Me: Where did you go?
Person: I’ve been hanging out with my friends. We went shopping for some gadgets and stuff. They say they’re spending all those with their money they get from their blogs.
Me: *keeps eyes on netbook and blog* Good for them.
Person: I wanna have a blog.
Me: *keeps eyes on netbook and blog + you’ve gotta be kidding face*
Person: I just don’t know what to blog about.
Me: *keeps eyes on netbook and blog* Just blog about anything. Like they do. Like I do. I’ll help you set yours up, and buy you your own domain while we’re at it… just make sure you update, OK?
Person: *excited* … I’m getting the digicam you wanted.
Me: *snorts sarcastically* Yeah, sure.

Much more recently

Me: You haven’t started your blog.
Person: I’ll get around to it. I’ll do a whole bunch of updates at one go.
Me: *snorts sarcastically* Yeah, sure.

——————-

Before I go further, I’d just like to show off to you a pathetic snapshot of my first ever AdSense cheque which I’ve received earlier this month (and a wonderful New Year’s surprise it was!).

I was in a rush preparing for my son’s first day of school for the year, and only managed to take this picture while I was driving to the bank to cash it out. It takes a month for that US$124.15  cheque to clear. Why not use Western Union? That is a story for another day. Anyway, I’ll be getting another cheque at the end of February just from that one arts and crafts site I mentioned and yet to reveal.

Apart from paid posts and playing forex, making money online takes hard work, action, and patience. I’ve bought e-books and implemented the advice of  many Internet guru programs, both locally (in Malaysia) and internationally, that promise you to make money online, and I ended up getting frustrated each time. As many have claimed, they are mostly crap. More annoying is the fact that, at one point, I bought some e-book on profit blogger from one of those Malaysian Internet marketing “experts”, only to find out that I actually knew all the techniques he pointed out during my first month of blogging. What a bunch of bull.

Luckily, my early days of blogging introduced me to RT at Untwisted Vortex (who also happens to be one of the first people to comment on my blog), who, through his many posts, introduced me to two most invaluable web sites on making money online. Best of all, they’re totally free!

I based my niche site development through the advice I get from Court Tuttle’s Internet Marketing School and his new site called The Keyword Academy (co-run by Mark Butler). Due to their advice, I was able to increase search engine visitors to my web sites triple-fold. I started using Court’s techniques since late August 2008, and my traffic at that time was 900 unique visits a month. By end of November that year, traffic surged to around 3,000 uniques a month, and as of January 2009 is now close to 6,000. More importantly, my visit-to-clicks conversion for my ads are steadily improving. I realize I was in a low-paying niche, but it doesn’t stop me from getting that $1.50/day AdSense earning (and it continues to increase — imagine if I had 20 of those sites…). You need to subscribe to Court’s two sites right now, as he and Mark are currently releasing a series of very critical posts on how to improve keyword content on your sites. One of his recent posts featured a demo web site which you can follow exactly to the dot for your next niche site.

The other site I refer to for specific AdSense advice is Grizzly’s How To Make Money Online For Beginners. Don’t let the blog title and fugly design fool you — no matter how seasoned you are in AdSense, you’ll always benefit from Grizzly’s insights on making money with AdSense and other programs and methods. He continually convinced me that we should be chasing organic (a.k.a. search engine) traffic instead of social traffic if we’re seriously into the making money online business. One of his recent eye-opening advices is that you may make more money by not posting. It makes sense, and this seems to be true for my case. My subscribers have jumped more than triple in the last couple of months, mostly obtained through organic traffic, and 80% subscribed via e-mail (the rest are RSS aggregators and search engine updaters). I only spend one hour a week updating my niche site, posting 3 original content at the most per update. Yet, by doing so, I still get more search engine visits every day. The nice thing about it is that even during my month-long hiatus in December, traffic is constantly increasing without me updating the site. Chasing organic traffic also helped me increase my ads earning from Chitika, AdBrite, and shockingly, Amazon.com! I’m not eligible for eBay affiliate for some reason, but I’ll keep trying to apply until I get it. I’d hazard a guess that revenue from eBay could burst through the roof In any case, enjoy Grizz’s long and valuable posts, and for those who’d like to get started making money online, he has a set of tutorials for you to refer to. Just scroll down the navigation bar on the right until you see the sections called “Make Money Blogging” and “AdSense Lessons”.

I’m checking out another program to see its effectiveness, but I’m taking my time on this fella. I’m going to work full-time starting next week, so I’m sure there’s a lot of things going on for me soon.

Besides, I’m starting two more blogs. Yeah, can you believe it? As if I’m not busy enough with my 30 other blogs! WebGrrrl.net (this site) will focus more on technology, the Internet and WordPress. Blogging Fu is going to be my space for exposing my techniques on how I actually update my 30+ blogs, as well as tutorials on how to start a blog. Lastly, Looking For Niches is a site that tells you how I go about researching and making money from my niche sites, as well as the tools I used to do my research. Both Blogging Fu and Looking For Niches will be launched as early as mid-Feb, so stay tuned!

I know, I know. I swore off using AdSense last year. So why is it back in WebGrrrl.net?

Frequent visitors to my site may have noticed that posts in this site has been sporadic these past months. The reason is because I’ve only started to create niche sites that not only am I passionate about, but plan to monetize on. Lots of it failed, but I managed to flip them and get a few extra buck out of them. Still, I’ve finally hit the jackpot with one of my site that focuses on a pretty small arts and crafts niche, which is earning me about $6 in September, and has jumped to $27 in October.

Back to the matter of putting AdSense. The thing about WebGrrrl.net’s traffic stats is that this site gets around 3,000 unique visits a month, with about 70 feed subscribers, and an 80% bounce rate. A bounce rate that low, for those of you who are not familiar with the term, means that out of 10 people who visit my site, 8 will never return. That’s pretty bad. Page views are about 1 to 2 pages per visit.

My stats on the new niche site of mine (note the word site, not blog) only recently gets around 3,000 unique visits a month, up from just about 60 uniques in July. It currently has 30 subscribers, half of it via e-mail, and a fantastic 35% bounce rate. Page views per person is at least 10 to 15 pages per visit. Isn’t that great?

However, due to the nature of that niche site, its earnings are pretty low. This WebGrrrl.net blog, on the other hand, tends to get higher CTR even though page impressions are less than 50 (only my games-related posts have AdSense). Plus, being an IT / computer / technology blog of sorts means that there tends to be more high-paying advertisers in the market.

So I’m putting up ads back in WebGrrrl.net to see exactly how AdSense earnings are influenced by this blog’s niche (which is a bit too broad for my liking) as well as the influence that the site’s stats has on the ads earning. After 6 months, I’ll be switching off the ads again, and make a comparison with my niche site to see what I can conclude from them. Please bear with the interruption as I research my way into this. (more…)

Other than affiliate programs, I find that paid-to-blog programs to be an excellent online money-making venture. You benefit more when your site is generic (not a niche) and when you have a Google PageRank (PR), which most paid blogging use to value your site; the higher the site’s PR, the more assignment choice you have and the higher pay you get for each post.

With that comes a small problem that I face every single time — which post should I accept first? And believe me, a lot of time I do find it hard to decide. Here’s my three simple guidelines for selecting the assignments that have saved me a lot of time, effort and headache.

1. Do posts with the shortest minimum words. This is my favourite tactic, due to the fact that it takes me the least amount of effort to come up with ideas on what to talk about. I blog this way a lot for my PayPerPost and Payu2blog assignments. I usually finish up my Blogsvertise assignments sooner too, because of its low 75-word minimum limit which is a piece of cake.

2. Do posts that pay the soonest. Smorty and Payu2blog seem to be the fastest and most consistent when it comes to payment, therefore when opting for posts to get the most buck the soonest, I would finish up assignments by both this programs. Also, it’s always nice to see money credited into my PayPal account ever so frequently.

3. Do posts that pay the most. To be honest, I don’t often put this guideline to use, because most higher-paying assignments would require a higher minimum of at least 200 words and the topics are sometimes just not worth it. However, it would be such a waste as some of the effort per post in LoudLaunch and PayPerPost can be payable for as much as $15 to $20 per post, equalling four times the effort to do Payu2blog assignments. I finish up my LoudLaunch assignment specifically for the high payment.

I’m sure you go through some selection method with your paid blogging too. How do you do it? Let me know!

I know I must be one of the last persons on Earth to find out about this newest addition to the pay-per-play monetizing scheme. I have just signed up for NetAudioAds (affiliate) after reading one of the e-mails from one favourite affiliate program of mine. Its founding company, V2P Communications, was even featured in a Wall Street Journal article on NetAudioAds as well as other ad programs by Google and Amazon.com.

I’m intrigued as to how pay-per-play would perform on my blog, although I expect its monetizing performance would almost match pay-per-click programs. I have only around 2,000 unique visits a month, and from what I’ve experienced with pay-per-clicks and its cousin programs, I shouldn’t be expecting too much moolah coming in with that kind of traffic, regardless of what my Google PageRank is. If you are like me, chances are you may not care much for annoying text ads, let alone a talking one. My biggest worry is that my blog’s loading time increases as more multimedia-based ads are shown. Doesn’t hurt to check it out for a few months, though; passive incomes are always worth the try.

Here’s the sales pitch page of the NetAudioAds program which should answer some of the general questions we may have. If you haven’t signed up, you may want to do so now (normal link here or affiliate link here) before its launch date on February 1.