Hot to make money with affiliate programs?
There is a lot of affiliate programs on Internet, witch can make you rich if you use the properly programs.How the affiliate programs work?You get paid for every client that you refer to the products of the seller. In most case you will earn some % of the product value and when you hove some minimum profit in your account the seller will send to you a check with this sum.There is many kinds of affiliate programs, and all of them are profitable if you have a lot of visitors on your web site every day, but I prefer the programs of the merchant services companies. If you refer clients to there's services, and they open merchant accounts, you'll earn a % of every sale that they make!One of the best affiliate programs of the merchant accounts is the affiliate progaram from Clickbank.com.Find more info on how to make money with affiliate programs with Skype, American Express and other:
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
Monday, June 4, 2007
You can make money by trading commodities
How to make money
Jayant Manglik
Now that I have your attention with that headline, let me get straight down to business and outline here some simple facts and strategies, which would take us closer to our goal of making money in commodity markets.
Commodity markets are generally assumed to be exotic and while many people are familiar with MCX and NCDEX as exchanges, not many have tried their hand at trading on these. Broadly speaking, there are four main segments - agri, base metals, bullion and energy. Of these, bullion, viz. gold and silver, account for about 70% of the volumes - a clear reflection of our love for these commodities. Bullion trading is liquid with sufficient depth and is value-transparent. A key reason which drives these volumes in bullion is also the international price linkage i.e. bullion prices in India are dictated by international markets where the dominant volumes are traded in gold and silver. In fact, this is the first and one of the simplest strategies utilized by traders. As soon as international markets (read NYMEX/COMEX) open, serious traders get their prices on their screen and quickly make trades in MCX or NCDEX locally based on international price movement.
Since gold is quoted in US$ per troy ounce (The troy ounce remains a traditional fixture of the gold trade and the most important basis for expressing quotations on a majority of the leading gold markets), the effect per 10 grams in rupees translates to about Rs 14 depending on the prevailing exchange and duty structure. Using this as a base, traders follow international markets and in the process make money, besides making our markets more efficient by pushing up prices closer to the price leaders. Bullion also frequently has direct correlation with the price of crude and inverse correlation with the US$ and therefore these two commodities are closely tracked by traders. Spread trading (trading on the amount of price difference between two contracts, e.g., between gold with June expiry and gold with August expiry) is also a popular form of trading and is considered to be a product with lesser risk-reward. Your broker remains the best person to educate you about strategies in trading.
The second group of popular commodities traded are base metals, which mainly consist of copper, zinc, aluminum and nickel. In terms of volumes, copper and zinc are the best to trade in. But, since it is a leveraged market (e.g. zinc prices are displayed on screen in Rs per kilo and the minimum lot size is 5MT i.e. 5,000 kilos), a movement of just Re 1 in Zinc on screen translates to a loss/profit of Rs 5,000 if you hold just one lot. Similarly, a Re 1 movement on screen in copper means a change of Rs 1,000 per lot. It is precisely this kind of movement which attracts smart traders who have a nose for market movements and follow news and charts real time to get good returns. Copper prices follow NYMEX and the rest are usually led by the London Metal Exchange (LME) and to a much lesser extent by the relatively smaller Japanese (TOCOM) and Chinese (Shanghai) exchanges. The movements also affect the prices of equity of companies like Hindustan Zinc, Sterlite, Hindalco and Nalco.
How to make money
Insofar as energy commodities are concerned, currently only crude oil and natural gas are listed, though they are fairly popular and volumes are reasonable. Investors are well aware of crude prices nowadays since this is news that has significant impact on equity markets, too, and is flashed on all business TV channels. Spikes in crude prices dampen enthusiasm on Dalal street and a sharp dip has the opposite effect. In many ways, especially on days of sharp price movement, the opportunities of making money tracking crude are probably better than taking a bet solely on the stock markets.
Domestic to India and with seasonal volumes are the agri-commodities. Trading prices in each are affected by the timing of sowing, harvesting and delivery to local mandis. Because of relatively lower depth and short trading history, it can be said that technicals (research using historical prices and volumes with a view to predict future movement) are not effective so far and therefore, many traders keep fundamentals in mind as well. But, if your broker has enough offices in ‘mandi’ locations, he can gather the required information real-time. Also, one of the best products to ask of your broker is the spot-futures arbitrage. In this, your broker will buy a commodity from the mandi (e.g. chana, jeera etc.) and sell it immediately on the exchange. The difference in the price accrues to you, the client, and the returns after expenses, though difficult to predict (and forbidden to be projected by the regulator), could be termed as attractive.
In conclusion, the commodity markets in India are growing by leaps and bounds and many traders have spotted the opportunity and jumped in. Commodities are not really exotic and are the same as equity as far as the trading systems are concerned - in fact most brokers have the exact same front-end screen for equity and commodities. The rules of trading in leveraged markets are simple - keep strict stop-losses; while in profit, scale your stop-loss upwards; do not over-leverage; and book profits intermittently, just as you should enter in stages at different levels, choose your broker carefully and buy low, sell high! You do that and the headline will not always be a tough act to follow.
How to make money
Jayant Manglik
Now that I have your attention with that headline, let me get straight down to business and outline here some simple facts and strategies, which would take us closer to our goal of making money in commodity markets.
Commodity markets are generally assumed to be exotic and while many people are familiar with MCX and NCDEX as exchanges, not many have tried their hand at trading on these. Broadly speaking, there are four main segments - agri, base metals, bullion and energy. Of these, bullion, viz. gold and silver, account for about 70% of the volumes - a clear reflection of our love for these commodities. Bullion trading is liquid with sufficient depth and is value-transparent. A key reason which drives these volumes in bullion is also the international price linkage i.e. bullion prices in India are dictated by international markets where the dominant volumes are traded in gold and silver. In fact, this is the first and one of the simplest strategies utilized by traders. As soon as international markets (read NYMEX/COMEX) open, serious traders get their prices on their screen and quickly make trades in MCX or NCDEX locally based on international price movement.
Since gold is quoted in US$ per troy ounce (The troy ounce remains a traditional fixture of the gold trade and the most important basis for expressing quotations on a majority of the leading gold markets), the effect per 10 grams in rupees translates to about Rs 14 depending on the prevailing exchange and duty structure. Using this as a base, traders follow international markets and in the process make money, besides making our markets more efficient by pushing up prices closer to the price leaders. Bullion also frequently has direct correlation with the price of crude and inverse correlation with the US$ and therefore these two commodities are closely tracked by traders. Spread trading (trading on the amount of price difference between two contracts, e.g., between gold with June expiry and gold with August expiry) is also a popular form of trading and is considered to be a product with lesser risk-reward. Your broker remains the best person to educate you about strategies in trading.
The second group of popular commodities traded are base metals, which mainly consist of copper, zinc, aluminum and nickel. In terms of volumes, copper and zinc are the best to trade in. But, since it is a leveraged market (e.g. zinc prices are displayed on screen in Rs per kilo and the minimum lot size is 5MT i.e. 5,000 kilos), a movement of just Re 1 in Zinc on screen translates to a loss/profit of Rs 5,000 if you hold just one lot. Similarly, a Re 1 movement on screen in copper means a change of Rs 1,000 per lot. It is precisely this kind of movement which attracts smart traders who have a nose for market movements and follow news and charts real time to get good returns. Copper prices follow NYMEX and the rest are usually led by the London Metal Exchange (LME) and to a much lesser extent by the relatively smaller Japanese (TOCOM) and Chinese (Shanghai) exchanges. The movements also affect the prices of equity of companies like Hindustan Zinc, Sterlite, Hindalco and Nalco.
How to make money
Insofar as energy commodities are concerned, currently only crude oil and natural gas are listed, though they are fairly popular and volumes are reasonable. Investors are well aware of crude prices nowadays since this is news that has significant impact on equity markets, too, and is flashed on all business TV channels. Spikes in crude prices dampen enthusiasm on Dalal street and a sharp dip has the opposite effect. In many ways, especially on days of sharp price movement, the opportunities of making money tracking crude are probably better than taking a bet solely on the stock markets.
Domestic to India and with seasonal volumes are the agri-commodities. Trading prices in each are affected by the timing of sowing, harvesting and delivery to local mandis. Because of relatively lower depth and short trading history, it can be said that technicals (research using historical prices and volumes with a view to predict future movement) are not effective so far and therefore, many traders keep fundamentals in mind as well. But, if your broker has enough offices in ‘mandi’ locations, he can gather the required information real-time. Also, one of the best products to ask of your broker is the spot-futures arbitrage. In this, your broker will buy a commodity from the mandi (e.g. chana, jeera etc.) and sell it immediately on the exchange. The difference in the price accrues to you, the client, and the returns after expenses, though difficult to predict (and forbidden to be projected by the regulator), could be termed as attractive.
In conclusion, the commodity markets in India are growing by leaps and bounds and many traders have spotted the opportunity and jumped in. Commodities are not really exotic and are the same as equity as far as the trading systems are concerned - in fact most brokers have the exact same front-end screen for equity and commodities. The rules of trading in leveraged markets are simple - keep strict stop-losses; while in profit, scale your stop-loss upwards; do not over-leverage; and book profits intermittently, just as you should enter in stages at different levels, choose your broker carefully and buy low, sell high! You do that and the headline will not always be a tough act to follow.
How to make money
Can dot.coms make money from advertising?
How to make money
One of the most high-profile internet names in the world is having trouble getting enough advertisers on its site.
Unlike many of its its dot.com competitors, internet portal Yahoo has managed to turn a profit before.
Yahoo shook the industry when it blamed the difficulty in selling advertisements for its profits shortfall.
Yahoo, with a total global audience of over 150 million, is thought to be the world's most visited website.
If this internet giant can't make money selling advertisements on the internet, then which of its smaller competitors can?
Slowdown
It is always difficult to sell advertisements when the economy is slowing down.
Advertisers are typically more concerned about shifting goods from shop shelves than they are about building a brand name.
This is as true for old media as it is for the internet.
But for the internet, the blow has been made more brutal by the demise of many dot.coms.
Dot.com demise
Saturday marks one year since the Nasdaq reached its all-time record high.
Its fall since then has been steep.
But while there have been many dot.com casualties, analysts have consistently said that quality dot.coms would ultimately thrive, which is what makes Yahoo's profit warning more worrying.
"I was very surprised by the magnitude of Yahoo's shortfall," Derek Brown, an analyst with W.R Hambrecht in San Francisco said. " The new outlook represents a staggering reveral of fortunes...the implications for the online advertising market are dire."
The problem, says Jupiter MMXI analyst Staffan Engdegard, is the dot.coms that drove the growth of online advertising - such as Boo - have either gone out of business or have had to radically cut their costs.
"What everyone is waiting for is the traditional advertisers to come online to take over the fallen mantel of the dot.coms...That will not happen over one day," Jupiter MMXI's Engdegard said.
By this analysis, this current lack of online advertising is only a temporary, albeit painful, gap.
Does it work?
But many traditional advertisers have yet to be convinced of the cost effectiveness of spending their marketing budget on the web.
"There seems to be a lack of a definitive standard for identifying how effective advertising is, particularly banner advertising. That is really the key issue," Joe Lamb, spokesman for the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA), which represents about 40 of the FTSE 100 companies, said.
He said it was up to dot.coms to sell the benefits to potential advertisers.
"The online advertising industry could really have a look at itself and prove the effect of online advertising to major blue chip advertisers," he added.
Jupiter MMXI's Staffan Engdegard agrees that advertisers need to be clearer about what they are getting for their money.
While it is easy enough to find out how many people clicked on an advertisement, it can be tricky to gauge the success of a campaign in terms of increased sales or brand awareness.
Part of Yahoo's problem is also that internet advertisers are moving away from mass purchases of space on the most popular sites such as AOL and Yahoo towards more niche areas.
Enthusiasm
Enthusiasm still exists for web advertising. How to make money
Online advertising can be more robust than advertising for traditional media, providing users with the chance to view ads, request and receive specialised product information and make an instant purchase.
Potential also exists to make money from performance-related advertising, where advertisers can pay-per-click.
How to make money
But, in the meantime, companies like Yahoo need to find other ways of making money.
"We will see continued growth. What it is for Yahoo and other sites, it is really to control their costs and to find ways to take a larger share of not so fast growing market," Jupiter MMXI's Staffan Endegard said, adding that they need "complementary revenue streams...that have the opportunity to grow faster than online advertising."
Many internet media companies - including Yahoo - had already said they hoped to build other sources of income apart from advertising.
The easiest way to make money quickly is to charge consumers for services.
Preferably, these services should be new because, as online file swapping service Napster could soon find out, people are reluctant to pay for something they have thus far been getting for free.
One of the most high-profile internet names in the world is having trouble getting enough advertisers on its site.
Unlike many of its its dot.com competitors, internet portal Yahoo has managed to turn a profit before.
Yahoo shook the industry when it blamed the difficulty in selling advertisements for its profits shortfall.
Yahoo, with a total global audience of over 150 million, is thought to be the world's most visited website.
If this internet giant can't make money selling advertisements on the internet, then which of its smaller competitors can?
Slowdown
It is always difficult to sell advertisements when the economy is slowing down.
Advertisers are typically more concerned about shifting goods from shop shelves than they are about building a brand name.
This is as true for old media as it is for the internet.
But for the internet, the blow has been made more brutal by the demise of many dot.coms.
Dot.com demise
Saturday marks one year since the Nasdaq reached its all-time record high.
Its fall since then has been steep.
But while there have been many dot.com casualties, analysts have consistently said that quality dot.coms would ultimately thrive, which is what makes Yahoo's profit warning more worrying.
"I was very surprised by the magnitude of Yahoo's shortfall," Derek Brown, an analyst with W.R Hambrecht in San Francisco said. " The new outlook represents a staggering reveral of fortunes...the implications for the online advertising market are dire."
The problem, says Jupiter MMXI analyst Staffan Engdegard, is the dot.coms that drove the growth of online advertising - such as Boo - have either gone out of business or have had to radically cut their costs.
"What everyone is waiting for is the traditional advertisers to come online to take over the fallen mantel of the dot.coms...That will not happen over one day," Jupiter MMXI's Engdegard said.
By this analysis, this current lack of online advertising is only a temporary, albeit painful, gap.
Does it work?
But many traditional advertisers have yet to be convinced of the cost effectiveness of spending their marketing budget on the web.
"There seems to be a lack of a definitive standard for identifying how effective advertising is, particularly banner advertising. That is really the key issue," Joe Lamb, spokesman for the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA), which represents about 40 of the FTSE 100 companies, said.
He said it was up to dot.coms to sell the benefits to potential advertisers.
"The online advertising industry could really have a look at itself and prove the effect of online advertising to major blue chip advertisers," he added.
Jupiter MMXI's Staffan Engdegard agrees that advertisers need to be clearer about what they are getting for their money.
While it is easy enough to find out how many people clicked on an advertisement, it can be tricky to gauge the success of a campaign in terms of increased sales or brand awareness.
Part of Yahoo's problem is also that internet advertisers are moving away from mass purchases of space on the most popular sites such as AOL and Yahoo towards more niche areas.
Enthusiasm
Enthusiasm still exists for web advertising. How to make money
Online advertising can be more robust than advertising for traditional media, providing users with the chance to view ads, request and receive specialised product information and make an instant purchase.
Potential also exists to make money from performance-related advertising, where advertisers can pay-per-click.
How to make money
But, in the meantime, companies like Yahoo need to find other ways of making money.
"We will see continued growth. What it is for Yahoo and other sites, it is really to control their costs and to find ways to take a larger share of not so fast growing market," Jupiter MMXI's Staffan Endegard said, adding that they need "complementary revenue streams...that have the opportunity to grow faster than online advertising."
Many internet media companies - including Yahoo - had already said they hoped to build other sources of income apart from advertising.
The easiest way to make money quickly is to charge consumers for services.
Preferably, these services should be new because, as online file swapping service Napster could soon find out, people are reluctant to pay for something they have thus far been getting for free.
Make Money From Home While You ChaCha
You Can Be an Expert Guide for a New Search Engine By TORY JOHNSONOct. 2, 2006
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Chacha.com is a brand-new search engine, similar to Yahoo and Google, but with the added component of allowing users to take advantage of a human guide to assist with their searches -- all for free.
Beyond that, it's also one new way to make money at home via the Internet because all of those guides are home-based contractors who set their own schedules and work as little or as much as they wish.
Editor's Picks
'Take This Book to Work,' by Tory Johnson
Tory Johnson: Get a Job, Work at Home
Work-From-Home Questions Answered
Need Flexibility? Work From Home
adsonar_placementId=1280600;adsonar_pid=59749;adsonar_ps=-1;adsonar_zw=165;adsonar_zh=220;adsonar_jv='ads.adsonar.com';
Based on several conversations with ChaCha co-founder Scott Jones, here's how he explained that ChaCha works:
If you have a computer, broadband (high-speed) Internet access, and a comfort level with searching on the Internet, there's a chance you're ready to become a ChaCha guide.
By comfortable, that means you've Googled or used Yahoo on a regular basis to find what you're looking for online.
You don't have to be a tech genius, but you need to know how to navigate your way around the Internet with ease.
How to make money
Guides also have good basic grammar and spelling, along with a desire to help people quickly.
Guides select categories or keywords, initially three, that represent their interests or expertise.
For example, a mom who's into gardening, antiques and cooking might select those three categories for the focus of her work.
A college kid who loves rock music, baseball and skiing could opt for those topics.
A man who's battled cancer might want to share his expertise in this area.
Using an instant chat feature, guides help people online who are searching for information on a topic that is familiar to them.
That mom who selected gardening, antique and cooking will help visitors to the ChaCha site find information on those topics. She's not going to be asked to help with searches on astronomy, for example, because that's not a subject in which she indicated interest.
Not to worry, guides aren't grilled on what they know.
They find and send links to Web sites on the topics the user is seeking. Guides' knowledge is also aided by a sophisticated technology system that helps them find those key sites.
Test ChaCha for free as a user before applying to be a guide to get a better sense of how it works.
How to make money
All About Flexibility
Unlike many other jobs, serving as a ChaCha guide does not have to be scheduled in advance. It's all about flexibility.
There is no set schedule and no minimum time requirements that you must work.
This type of work can be done at your convenience -- during the day when the baby sleeps, at night when you return from another job, or weekends for fun.
The schedule and hours are up to you.
To get started, visit Chacha.com and select "feedback" from the bottom of the screen.
Complete the form by clicking on "Guide Sign Up" as the reason for your inquiry. Remember to pay careful attention to your message -- proper spelling and grammar, along with a polite demeanor, definitely count.
Once you receive an invitation to become a guide via e-mail, you'll complete an online profile, select your keywords, watch several training videos, and respond to sample search questions posed by ChaCha trainers that simulate real queries that you'll be expected to handle if you choose to become a guide.
This initial phase is at the level of apprentice, which is an unpaid training period. Some guides advance to the next level, which is pro, in as little as 30 minutes or as much as a few days, depending on their comfort level with technology and their ability to accurately respond to the search queries they're given.
Guides won't take on real queries or begin to make any money until they've mastered the basic training. So there's no guarantee of income until you've passed the training phase.
Pros make $5 per search hour. The next level is master, which is also paid at $5 per search hour, plus the added ability to earn commissions for referring friends, if they become guides.
The top level is elite, which earns $10 per search hour.
There are two ways to get paid: One is by debit card where guides are paid on demand, which means as frequently as desired. There's a $2 fee each time payment by this method is selected.
ChaCha sends guides a debit card, and the money is instantly credited to the account so that guides can go out and spend it.
The other method of payment is by direct deposit, where payment is once a month and there are no fees.
Some people aren't comfortable providing their banking information, or they don't have an account, which is why ChaCha says it offers both payment methods.
Editor's Picks
'Take This Book to Work,' by Tory Johnson
Tory Johnson: Get a Job, Work at Home
Work-From-Home Questions Answered
Need Flexibility? Work From Home
adsonar_placementId=1280600;adsonar_pid=59749;adsonar_ps=-1;adsonar_zw=165;adsonar_zh=220;adsonar_jv='ads.adsonar.com';
There is no cost to getting started, and there are no fees, but there is also no payment while guides train.
Of course guides must maintain their own computer and Internet access.
Keep in mind that ChaCha is in an experimental stage right now. There are still kinks to work out, as the system grows from 7,000 guides to an expected 50,000 by year's end.
If you don't mind being part of the growing pains, and you thrive on the challenge of getting involved in a new system and learning the new technology, you can start today.
If, however, you prefer to start when it's a less bumpy road, consider waiting a month or so.
As with any opportunity to make money, only you can decide whether it's right for you.
Tory Johnson is the workplace contributor on "Good Morning America" and the CEO of Women for Hire. Connect with her directly at http://www.womenforhire.com/
Font Size E-mail Print
Chacha.com is a brand-new search engine, similar to Yahoo and Google, but with the added component of allowing users to take advantage of a human guide to assist with their searches -- all for free.
Beyond that, it's also one new way to make money at home via the Internet because all of those guides are home-based contractors who set their own schedules and work as little or as much as they wish.
Editor's Picks
'Take This Book to Work,' by Tory Johnson
Tory Johnson: Get a Job, Work at Home
Work-From-Home Questions Answered
Need Flexibility? Work From Home
adsonar_placementId=1280600;adsonar_pid=59749;adsonar_ps=-1;adsonar_zw=165;adsonar_zh=220;adsonar_jv='ads.adsonar.com';
Based on several conversations with ChaCha co-founder Scott Jones, here's how he explained that ChaCha works:
If you have a computer, broadband (high-speed) Internet access, and a comfort level with searching on the Internet, there's a chance you're ready to become a ChaCha guide.
By comfortable, that means you've Googled or used Yahoo on a regular basis to find what you're looking for online.
You don't have to be a tech genius, but you need to know how to navigate your way around the Internet with ease.
How to make money
Guides also have good basic grammar and spelling, along with a desire to help people quickly.
Guides select categories or keywords, initially three, that represent their interests or expertise.
For example, a mom who's into gardening, antiques and cooking might select those three categories for the focus of her work.
A college kid who loves rock music, baseball and skiing could opt for those topics.
A man who's battled cancer might want to share his expertise in this area.
Using an instant chat feature, guides help people online who are searching for information on a topic that is familiar to them.
That mom who selected gardening, antique and cooking will help visitors to the ChaCha site find information on those topics. She's not going to be asked to help with searches on astronomy, for example, because that's not a subject in which she indicated interest.
Not to worry, guides aren't grilled on what they know.
They find and send links to Web sites on the topics the user is seeking. Guides' knowledge is also aided by a sophisticated technology system that helps them find those key sites.
Test ChaCha for free as a user before applying to be a guide to get a better sense of how it works.
How to make money
All About Flexibility
Unlike many other jobs, serving as a ChaCha guide does not have to be scheduled in advance. It's all about flexibility.
There is no set schedule and no minimum time requirements that you must work.
This type of work can be done at your convenience -- during the day when the baby sleeps, at night when you return from another job, or weekends for fun.
The schedule and hours are up to you.
To get started, visit Chacha.com and select "feedback" from the bottom of the screen.
Complete the form by clicking on "Guide Sign Up" as the reason for your inquiry. Remember to pay careful attention to your message -- proper spelling and grammar, along with a polite demeanor, definitely count.
Once you receive an invitation to become a guide via e-mail, you'll complete an online profile, select your keywords, watch several training videos, and respond to sample search questions posed by ChaCha trainers that simulate real queries that you'll be expected to handle if you choose to become a guide.
This initial phase is at the level of apprentice, which is an unpaid training period. Some guides advance to the next level, which is pro, in as little as 30 minutes or as much as a few days, depending on their comfort level with technology and their ability to accurately respond to the search queries they're given.
Guides won't take on real queries or begin to make any money until they've mastered the basic training. So there's no guarantee of income until you've passed the training phase.
Pros make $5 per search hour. The next level is master, which is also paid at $5 per search hour, plus the added ability to earn commissions for referring friends, if they become guides.
The top level is elite, which earns $10 per search hour.
There are two ways to get paid: One is by debit card where guides are paid on demand, which means as frequently as desired. There's a $2 fee each time payment by this method is selected.
ChaCha sends guides a debit card, and the money is instantly credited to the account so that guides can go out and spend it.
The other method of payment is by direct deposit, where payment is once a month and there are no fees.
Some people aren't comfortable providing their banking information, or they don't have an account, which is why ChaCha says it offers both payment methods.
Editor's Picks
'Take This Book to Work,' by Tory Johnson
Tory Johnson: Get a Job, Work at Home
Work-From-Home Questions Answered
Need Flexibility? Work From Home
adsonar_placementId=1280600;adsonar_pid=59749;adsonar_ps=-1;adsonar_zw=165;adsonar_zh=220;adsonar_jv='ads.adsonar.com';
There is no cost to getting started, and there are no fees, but there is also no payment while guides train.
Of course guides must maintain their own computer and Internet access.
Keep in mind that ChaCha is in an experimental stage right now. There are still kinks to work out, as the system grows from 7,000 guides to an expected 50,000 by year's end.
If you don't mind being part of the growing pains, and you thrive on the challenge of getting involved in a new system and learning the new technology, you can start today.
If, however, you prefer to start when it's a less bumpy road, consider waiting a month or so.
As with any opportunity to make money, only you can decide whether it's right for you.
Tory Johnson is the workplace contributor on "Good Morning America" and the CEO of Women for Hire. Connect with her directly at http://www.womenforhire.com/
Make Money From Home
Monday, December 12, 2005
Dare Obasanjo at Microsoft wrote to say that MSN Spaces has implemented the MetaWeblog API. That's cool! It means we should be able to edit Spaces blogs with the OPML Editor and wordPress.root. I'll test this from New Orleans, or shortly after I get back.
At the dawn of the blogging revolution I wrote two pieces that relate back to the transition from mainframe to personal computers. One, entitled Mainframes Are Computers Too, said goodbye to the centralized limits of Big Iron, and the fears of the well-intentioned people who kept them running for us. Those people are in some sense analogous to the people who run newspapers today. The second piece, Apple Sparked a Revolution, spoke lovingly of the computer that gave us a sense of purpose, before the Mac, before the IBM PC. "The Apple II was a perfect mix of the personalities of the Apple founders. It had the polish and physical elegance that Jobs is famous for (it felt a bit like a typewriter, but with far fewer moving parts and much lighter) and the programmability and open frontiers that Steve Wozniak loves." I recalled these two pieces in a post on Jeff Jarvis's blog where he considers the possibility that today's newspapers are analogous to yesterday's mainframes.
This morning I added code to the OPML community server to ping Weblogs.com, Technorati and Ping-o-matic.
And then I booked a trip to New Orleans, leaving tomorrow and returning Saturday. Ernie the Attorney will be my host. I'll be staying uptown, and will try to see as much of the city as possible. Will bring my camera, of course. Should be pretty interesting.
Weather report for New Orleans.
How to make money
A new blog ranking takes a unique approach, it ranks networks of blogs. Even more interesting is that the Web 2.0 Workgroup, the network this blog is part of, is ranked #4, with only Gawker, Pajamas and Weblogs higher-ranked. That's pretty darned impressive. Watch this story rise through the ranks on Memeorandum; it's sure to be much-talked-about among the blogs that care about these things, which tend to be the A-list blogs, of course.
Jeff Jarvis: "Newspapers have neither a constitutional nor a God-given right to exist."
Should I lead a discussion at Podcastercon?
Okay, for 4 points, why is this so clever?
I've got a press pass for MacWorld Expo on Jan 9.
Kellie Miller: "A little bird told me there was discussion group software hiding in our favorite application."
It's true. Look in mainResponder.discuss.
Lisa Williams continues to kick butt with her OPML news weblog. She's turning into the TechCrunch of the OPML community. Keep on truckin Lisa. Are you coming down for Podcastercon?
A big announcement today from SixApart that Yahoo will be supplying Movable Type as part of its small business service. Every time you turn on the computer there's news of Yahoo doing something smart. I hear from a reliable bird flying around Santa Clara that they will offer WordPress blogs as part of the same service. Now they should do something interesting in the same space as Google Base.
How to make money on the Internet version 3
The way to make money on the Internet is to send them away. Google proved this, in the age of portals that were trying to suck the eyeballs in and not let them go, Google took over by sending you off more efficiently than anyone else. Feeling lucky? As William Shatner says: Brilliant!
Yahoo doubled their share of the online news market by adopting RSS and sending readers away as fast as they can. Who to? Their competitors, of course.
Where do you go to get the latest from CNN and MSNBC? Yahoo. Makes sense.
Now the fundamental law of the Internet seems to be the more you send them away the more they come back. It's why link-filled blogs do better than introverts. It may seem counter-intuitive -- it's the new intuition, the new way of thinking. The Internet kicks your ass until you get it. It's called linking and it works.
People come back to places that send them away. Memorize that one.
This came up in a back-and-forth with Jakob Nielsen in 1999. The duality of the Internet. The dark side sees eyeballs and user-generated content. The light side sends them away, trusting that they'll come back. The beauty of it is that the light side works and the dark side doesn't. This is where the optimism of web people comes from. We called it Web Energy in the early days, and it's still with us today.
As always Scott nails it
I've said it before, I'll say it again. Scott Rosenberg is one smart mofo.
He says: "The old newspaper bundle-of-stuff that supported a thriving industry from the 19th century to the threshold of the 21st is falling apart."
But he says more, and you should go read the piece and then come back.
If I was a snark-filled professional reporter, all you would have gotten is the quote, but you would never know that Scott also said that it's up to his profession to find new bundles of stuff that people will pay information for.
To which I would say, yes but...
That will run out too, because we're in an age of disintermediation. What's under attack is much bigger than newspapers, it's all forms of aggregation.
Aggregation can now be customized, and it can be done by machine.
So the advertisers are running away from newsprint and to online ads, to reach Scott's kids, but I believe that long before his kids come of age (they're in elementary school now), the advertisers will have run on beyond what we can see now. Once we've disintermediated the San Francisco Chronicle and NY Times (unlike Scott, I don't think any news organization is going to escape) the next target is AdSense. No need for a middle-man there either.
So it's the whole notion of value in bundles of information that's going by the wayside. Bundling is not going to be a way to make a living in the future. It's a bad bet.
Snarky isn't trustworthy
Here's a serious thought. Google Base is all about RSS, right? That's cool. I understand RSS, and I like it. And no one owns it, dammit. But everyone's all concerned (rightly so, imho) about turning over our data to Google. How do we know they won't put ads in our stuff without our permission? And without paying us? How do we know they won't change what we say? We've been through this before, and they won't even talk about it with us! How about that for snarky.
So here's an idea, let's start a company, hire some great people to run our database. Instead of being the users in "user-generated content," we'll be the owners. The former sounds like a hamster in a cage, to me. An owner is someone who commands respect. We could wear badges and give ourselves business cards that say Owner. Forget about being a hamster. I want to be an owner!
I've already talked about this idea with friends with huge pipes and big databases who know how to run things reliably, and they find the idea interesting. But so far they haven't said they'll do it.
PS: Elephants never forget.
Beta Not Make Money
Media Hack
When Google launched its news site three years ago, it led to a certain amount of hand-wringing at Yahoo News, MSNBC and CNN. Unlike its competitors, which were forced to budget millions of dollars a year to license up-to-the-minute content and pay reporters and editors, Google had figured out a way to do it on the cheap.
By relying on algorithms, Google News completely automated the news-gathering process. High-speed computers sift through some 7,000 sources of information -- 4,500 of them in English -- and determine which are the most relevant articles. They then grab the headline and first paragraph to post on Google's news page, with the headlines acting as external links.
When users click on the links on Google News pages, they are taken directly to the publisher of the material, as they are when they click on thumbnails of photos. Glitches aside -- like when its computers misfire and Google News runs the wrong photo with an article, or it accidentally ignores an important breaking news story completely -- it's akin to browsing newspaper headlines, lead paragraphs and photos at a newsstand, and choosing which stories you want to read.
With a clean, no-nonsense interface and existing search engine traffic, Google News didn't take long to attract a loyal following and elbow its way into the top-10 news sites, pulling in some 6 million unique visitors a month. Of course, executives at rival online news publishers couldn't help but wonder why they shouldn't just imitate Google's model and pare their budgets to the bone.
How to make money
As it turns out, however, Google has a problem that is nearly as complex as its algorithms. It can't make money from Google News.
So while other online publishers like Yahoo News and MSNBC earn tens of millions of dollars in revenue each year and continue to grow, Google News remains in beta mode -- three years after it launched -- long after most of the bugs have been excised.
The reason: The minute Google News runs paid advertising of any sort it could face a torrent of cease-and-desist letters from the legal departments of newspapers, which would argue that "fair use" doesn't cover lifting headlines and lead paragraphs verbatim from their articles. Other publishers might simply block users originating from Google News, effectively snuffing it out.
What is fair use of a copyright work? According to New York University, where I teach, it covers comment, criticism, news reporting, research, scholarship and teaching, with several factors considered, including how much material is involved as a percentage of the entire work and whether use is of a commercial nature or strictly for nonprofit, educational purposes.
So if you are reviewing the latest Eminem CD and need to lift a few lyrics you're good to go. If you need to summarize a medical article on, say, arthritis, or a new study on the percentage of households with high-speed internet access, you can (within reason). But if you want to run a business of aggregating news content by running headlines and whole paragraphs of copyright work, you might run into trouble.
And it's not only in lawsuit-crazy America that Google's aggregate news model faces an uncertain legal future. Earlier this year, a court in Hamburg, Germany, ruled against Google's German news service when it found that thumbnail images were protected under German copyright law and could not be reproduced without permission. (Google has appealed.) A few weeks ago, half a world away, Chinese publishers Sing Tao electronic news service, Ming Pao newspaper and Radio Television Hong Kong, a government-owned radio station, greeted the launch of Google's Hong Kong news with a spate of letters alleging copyright infringement.
Which prompted Stanford Law School copyright guru Lawrence Lessig to wryly blog: "That'll teach us for teaching the Chinese about the importance of copyright law."
It's hard to feel sorry for Google, though. In April, lawyers for the billion-dollar search engine company that Sergey Brin and Larry Page founded sent their own cease-and-desist letter to Julian Bond, a British programmer who had created customized RSS feeds from Google News.
Ironically, the letter informed Bond that Google does not permit "webmasters to display Google News headlines on their sites."
When Google launched its news site three years ago, it led to a certain amount of hand-wringing at Yahoo News, MSNBC and CNN. Unlike its competitors, which were forced to budget millions of dollars a year to license up-to-the-minute content and pay reporters and editors, Google had figured out a way to do it on the cheap.
By relying on algorithms, Google News completely automated the news-gathering process. High-speed computers sift through some 7,000 sources of information -- 4,500 of them in English -- and determine which are the most relevant articles. They then grab the headline and first paragraph to post on Google's news page, with the headlines acting as external links.
When users click on the links on Google News pages, they are taken directly to the publisher of the material, as they are when they click on thumbnails of photos. Glitches aside -- like when its computers misfire and Google News runs the wrong photo with an article, or it accidentally ignores an important breaking news story completely -- it's akin to browsing newspaper headlines, lead paragraphs and photos at a newsstand, and choosing which stories you want to read.
With a clean, no-nonsense interface and existing search engine traffic, Google News didn't take long to attract a loyal following and elbow its way into the top-10 news sites, pulling in some 6 million unique visitors a month. Of course, executives at rival online news publishers couldn't help but wonder why they shouldn't just imitate Google's model and pare their budgets to the bone.
How to make money
As it turns out, however, Google has a problem that is nearly as complex as its algorithms. It can't make money from Google News.
So while other online publishers like Yahoo News and MSNBC earn tens of millions of dollars in revenue each year and continue to grow, Google News remains in beta mode -- three years after it launched -- long after most of the bugs have been excised.
The reason: The minute Google News runs paid advertising of any sort it could face a torrent of cease-and-desist letters from the legal departments of newspapers, which would argue that "fair use" doesn't cover lifting headlines and lead paragraphs verbatim from their articles. Other publishers might simply block users originating from Google News, effectively snuffing it out.
What is fair use of a copyright work? According to New York University, where I teach, it covers comment, criticism, news reporting, research, scholarship and teaching, with several factors considered, including how much material is involved as a percentage of the entire work and whether use is of a commercial nature or strictly for nonprofit, educational purposes.
So if you are reviewing the latest Eminem CD and need to lift a few lyrics you're good to go. If you need to summarize a medical article on, say, arthritis, or a new study on the percentage of households with high-speed internet access, you can (within reason). But if you want to run a business of aggregating news content by running headlines and whole paragraphs of copyright work, you might run into trouble.
And it's not only in lawsuit-crazy America that Google's aggregate news model faces an uncertain legal future. Earlier this year, a court in Hamburg, Germany, ruled against Google's German news service when it found that thumbnail images were protected under German copyright law and could not be reproduced without permission. (Google has appealed.) A few weeks ago, half a world away, Chinese publishers Sing Tao electronic news service, Ming Pao newspaper and Radio Television Hong Kong, a government-owned radio station, greeted the launch of Google's Hong Kong news with a spate of letters alleging copyright infringement.
Which prompted Stanford Law School copyright guru Lawrence Lessig to wryly blog: "That'll teach us for teaching the Chinese about the importance of copyright law."
It's hard to feel sorry for Google, though. In April, lawyers for the billion-dollar search engine company that Sergey Brin and Larry Page founded sent their own cease-and-desist letter to Julian Bond, a British programmer who had created customized RSS feeds from Google News.
Ironically, the letter informed Bond that Google does not permit "webmasters to display Google News headlines on their sites."
How to make money on your news content website
Forget what you might have heard: Journalists can earn money publishing online. Here are some tips from OJR readers.
Updated: 2007-04-04 at 10:11 AM (MST) by Robert Niles[Printer-friendly page Previous versions]
This article is designed to help journalists learn how to make extra money, or even a full-time wage, by publishing independently online. It is not intended to provide an online revenue model for established news organizations. Heck, they've got business managers. They shouldn't need a wiki to show them what to do.
Content websites typically earn money through one of four ways:
Commissions / Affiliate links
Advertising networks
Selling your own ads
Paid content
Sponsorships/Grants
Once you have ads on your site, you will want to compute the eCPM (effective cost per thousand impressions) of revenue that each ad type is earning for you. You calculate eCPM by taking the total amount generated by an ad (or ad type), diving it by the number of pages on which that ad (or ad type) appears, then multiplying by 1,000. Let eCPM data help you decide which advertising type, layout and position work best for you.
Commissions / Affiliate linksAffiliate programs, such as Amazon.com's Associates Program, provided the first ways for early solo and small Web publishers to make a few bucks on their websites. In these programs, an online retailer will pay you, the publisher, a percentage on sales made after customers click through from your website to the retailer's site. Links can include traditional banner ads, search forms and links to individual products.
Because you only earn money when sales are made, affiliate programs will work best for you if your site's readers are consistently looking to make high-priced purchases -- for example, if you run a product review site. If you're interested in affiliate program, browse through merchant directories like Commission Junction and LinkShare to find retailers that offer products that fit your site's topic and audience.
Once registered with a merchant's program, you can create an ad or product link on your site using a snippet of Web code downloaded from the retailer. Some merchants go further and allow you to create virtual storefronts that match the design of your site, but where the retailer still handles all the inventory and commerce. Be careful setting up such arrangements -- unless you want customers coming to you for return and refund questions instead of to the retailer.
You'll want to note what percentage of a sale the retailer pays back to you, as well as the length of time after a sale that you get credit for the purchase. Some retailers limit credit to sales made on the initial click-through, but others will give credit for any sales made within a day or so. Also, some retailers will pay a commission on purchases you personally make after clicking your own links; others may kick you out of the program for doing that. Check a retailer's affiliate agreement and shop around for what you consider the best deal before putting links on your site.
Many publishers have found that links to individual products return more commissions than banner ads going to a retailer's home page. But the additional money those links earn might not be enough to justify the extra time that selecting and maintaining them requires.
Advertising networksMost news websites earn the bulk of their money through advertising. But you don't need a sales staff to attract advertisers to your site. Ad networks can handle the sale and display of ads on your site. All you need do is drop a few lines of code into your Web pages where you want the ads to appear.
The most popular ad network for independent publishers is Google's AdSense program. AdSense is a "pay per click" (PPC) program, where you earn money each time one of your readers clicks on a Google-served ad. Since you earn money on clicks, rather than completed sales, PPC ad networks can provide a more reliable source of income for sites whose readers are not looking to make a purchase right away. Other notable PPC ad networks include the Yahoo! Publisher Network and Ad Voyager.
Most PPC ads are text, but some PPC networks also sell image and Flash ads. Ads are sold and displayed based on an auction system, where advertisers bid on selected keywords and phrases that appear on network websites. The ad network looks for webpages displaying its ad code, then matches what it determines the content of a webpage to be with the most appropriate keywords and phrases that advertisers have bid upon. The network then automatically weighs several factors in determining which ads to serve on the page, including the value of those bids; advertisers' remaining budgets for those bids; what percentage of readers have clicked on those ads in the past; and, in Google's case, the percentage of those readers who have made a purchase or read a designated number of pages on the advertiser's site.
Google's "Smart Pricing" program will adjust the amount paid to you for each click based on your readers' track record of making a purchase, or viewing a certain number of pages, on that particular advertiser's website. So if your site attracts motivated buyers, you remain in the best position to earn money.
Whatever you do, do not even think about clicking the ads on your site, or encouraging your readers to do the same. All PPC ad networks prohibit click fraud, and will boot from their program any publisher found to be inflating their number of clicks. Even well-intentioned discussion board participants can get a publisher booted from the program by encouraging other readers to click the ads to support the site. Google, for example, has suggested publishers concerned about their readers' conduct add this disclaimer to their site:
"Your postings to this site may not include incentives of any kind for other users to click on ads which are displayed on the site. This includes encouraging other readers to click on the ads or to visit the advertisers' sites, as well as drawing any undue attention to the ads. This activity is strictly prohibited in order to avoid potential inflation of advertiser costs."
If you don't think PPC ad networks will work for you because your site's target audience is defined by demographics, such as geography or a religious or political affiliation -- don't worry. Traditional ad networks such as BlogAds provide an alternative to the PPC networks. BlogAds sells its ads on a more traditional site-targeted model. Advertisers do not bid on keywords or phrases, but instead pay for their ads to be displayed a certain number of times on selected websites or groups of websites. BlogAds has become especially popular on political blogs, where advertisers can buy across a group of liberal or conservative weblogs.
Design to maximize online ad revenue
Since PPC ad networks target their ads primarily by topic, rather than geography or demographics, that makes these networks work better with niche topic websites than with sites that target their readers by geography or other demographics, such as gender, education, income or political affiliation.
For the system to work well for you, the PPC network's spiders must be able to determine a topic for each of your webpages and then must match keywords or phrases that advertisers have bid upon. That means the advantage goes to websites where each page covers a distinct and easily identifiable subject. So if you have a blog that covers a mishmash of topics on a single URL, you won't elicit the targeted ads that lead to high-paying clicks.
If you want to use PPC ad networks, organize your content to limit individual URLs to a specific topic. Break long blogs into individual entries. Archive old posts and stories by subject matter, not just by date and author. Stay active on discussion boards, keeping threads on topic and directing folks to more relevant pages should they stray toward other subjects. Use keywords in headlines, decks and URLs whenever possible. And spell out keywords, phrases and proper names on first reference, rather than using acronyms throughout the piece. (See, old fashioned copy editing rules *can* help you make money!)
Well-organized pages on individual topics also show up better in search engine results, attracting Web surfers curious about a specific keyword, who are more likely to click on a targeted ad. Publishers who create evergreen articles that are likely to attract a high number of links and clicks over time will do best in attracting search engine traffic to their ad-supported webpages. If you publish time-sensitive articles, which are not likely to have a long-enough shelf life to attract significant search engine traffic, consider swapping out or archiving articles on the same topic to a single URL, so that URL can get linked to and picked up in search results.
Where you place ads on a page affects how many of your users see them, and click. According to recent Google research, top performing ad formats include:
Large box ads placed in the middle of your main content column;
Skyscraper ads placed in a left-side column;
Leaderboard ads placed at the top and the bottom of the main content column.Customize the ads' colors to match the background, type and navigational colors of your site, too, to eliminate "banner blindness" and maximize their visibility to your readers.
Then keep an eye on your ads to make sure that they remain relevant to your site. To a reader, ads -- like anything else on your pages -- are part of the content of your website. If an ad network fails to deliver consistently relevant ads, dump it and try something else. Respect your readers by not bombarding them with irrelevant advertising and they will respect you by continuing to read your site.
Think twice before installing pop-up, pop-under and screen "take-over" ads, too. Many readers steer clear of sites that block their access to the content they're looking for with aggressive advertising. Keep your website a safe haven for these ad-weary readers and you can build its audience over time.
How much traffic do you need?
With advertising, the more readers you have and page views you serve, the more money you can make. But how much traffic do you need to make a living from your website?
To make $36,500 a year, you'd need to earn $100 a day on your site (plus whatever expenses you incur). Let's assume your site is attractive to advertisers and earns $10 in ad revenue for every thousand page views. That would mean you'd need to serve 10,000 page views a day to meet this target. (And more if your site earns less than $10 per thousand page views.)
How can you attract that much traffic? If you are writing one article a day on subjects that will be out of date within 24 hours, it's going to be tough. You'll need to attract nearly 10,000 views each day for that's day article, since few people will bother reading your old, out-of-date work. If you write a fair number of "evergreen" features, which keep attracting page views long after they are written, you'll find the task much easier. If your site naturally deals with "perishable" news content, at least publish each day's new news to the same URL, overwriting or pushing down the old content, so that URL can build the in-bound links and search engine traffic that will help you attract new readers you need each day.
Reader-contributed content can also help you meet your page view goals. Well-managed, thoughtfully organized discussion boards and wikis can add dozens of new content pages a day to your site, with much less effort on your part than writing that many original articles.
Selling your own adsIf you don't want to share your ad revenue with a network, or if your site isn't the type to do well with PPC ads, you might consider selling space directly to advertisers.
First, you will need solid information about your site's visitors. Ultimately, what you are selling to advertisers is access to your readers, so you'd better know how many, and who, they are. A traffic tracking service like Google Analytics can provide accurate trafiic data that filters out hon-human traffic like search engine spiders and automated robots (which can account for up to 90 percent of a site's overall traffic). QuantCast also provides reader tracking, along with some crude demographic information about your site's readers.
You should also consider conducting a survey of your readers, to get more detailed information about their demographics and behavior. SurveyMonkey provides easy-to-use tools to set up such surveys.
Once you have advertisers, you will need a system to serve and manage ads, such as OpenAds, as well as system to invoice your advertisers, such as Blinksale or PayPal. (PayPal's invoicing system does not require your advertisers to have a PayPal account, just a credit card.)
Set up a page on your site, linked from the header or footer, that provides data about your site's traffic and visitors, as well as a list of available ad packages. You might also provide a well-designed PDF version of the same data, as decision-makers often prefer "hard copy" versions of this information. (If you need free software to convert Word documents to PDFs, OpenOffice does this with a single mouse click.)
If your advertising page does not generate enough leads to support your site, you'll need to make cold calls to potential advertisers, via e-mail, phone or in person. You'll have the best luck with smaller businesses that do not place ads through agencies, but where the owner makes his or her own ad decisions.
Paid contentGiven the variety and depth of information available on the Web, you have to provide truly unique content of high value to specific readers to get those readers to pay for it. The fact that a paid journalist wrote an article for you does not mean it's worth paying for to a reader. Detail-oriented publications such as Consumer Reports and Cook's Illustrated have had success selling the results of their independent testing online. And, of course, porn sites have been earning big bucks from paid content since the Web's earliest days. But general-interest publications, such as the Los Angeles Times, have found that walling off content to paid subscribers has generated less revenue than the company could have earned by selling advertising on freely available pages.
If you are certain that your content is unique and valuable enough that readers would be willing to pay for it, you'll need to select a way to handle payments from your readers. The system could be as easy as asking readers mail you a check in exchange for your putting them on e-mail content distribution list -- a method which offers the advantage of not requiring any advanced Web server security set-up. Or you could restrict access to certain folders on your website to readers whom you assign log-ins after they buy a subscription. Such restrictions are relatively easy to set up on Apache webservers. Payment can be handled manually via postal mail or phone, or automatically through an e-commerce storefront. (Many Web hosting packages include e-commerce storefronts.)
How to make money
Sponsorships/GrantsSupporting a website through sponsorship or grants requires the least technical skill of these options, but the most interpersonal skills. You'll need to play the role of a salesperson, in addition to journalist and editor, in convincing a individual or organization to give you money to put up your site.
In either case, you'll need to identify individuals, or individuals within organizations, who might be willing to commit their money, or their organization's money, to your site. You'll need to make a written proposal, and often, an in-person pitch, and follow through until you secure your funding. Grants typically require a more structured application process than sponsorships, which can be sold through a formal solicitation or over drinks at the dinner table, depending upon whom you are working with.
The University of Iowa provides some guidance and a collection of links on grant writing in general, including links to many organizations which grant funds to researchers and publishers.
Updated: 2007-04-04 at 10:11 AM (MST) by Robert Niles[Printer-friendly page Previous versions]
This article is designed to help journalists learn how to make extra money, or even a full-time wage, by publishing independently online. It is not intended to provide an online revenue model for established news organizations. Heck, they've got business managers. They shouldn't need a wiki to show them what to do.
Content websites typically earn money through one of four ways:
Commissions / Affiliate links
Advertising networks
Selling your own ads
Paid content
Sponsorships/Grants
Once you have ads on your site, you will want to compute the eCPM (effective cost per thousand impressions) of revenue that each ad type is earning for you. You calculate eCPM by taking the total amount generated by an ad (or ad type), diving it by the number of pages on which that ad (or ad type) appears, then multiplying by 1,000. Let eCPM data help you decide which advertising type, layout and position work best for you.
Commissions / Affiliate linksAffiliate programs, such as Amazon.com's Associates Program, provided the first ways for early solo and small Web publishers to make a few bucks on their websites. In these programs, an online retailer will pay you, the publisher, a percentage on sales made after customers click through from your website to the retailer's site. Links can include traditional banner ads, search forms and links to individual products.
Because you only earn money when sales are made, affiliate programs will work best for you if your site's readers are consistently looking to make high-priced purchases -- for example, if you run a product review site. If you're interested in affiliate program, browse through merchant directories like Commission Junction and LinkShare to find retailers that offer products that fit your site's topic and audience.
Once registered with a merchant's program, you can create an ad or product link on your site using a snippet of Web code downloaded from the retailer. Some merchants go further and allow you to create virtual storefronts that match the design of your site, but where the retailer still handles all the inventory and commerce. Be careful setting up such arrangements -- unless you want customers coming to you for return and refund questions instead of to the retailer.
You'll want to note what percentage of a sale the retailer pays back to you, as well as the length of time after a sale that you get credit for the purchase. Some retailers limit credit to sales made on the initial click-through, but others will give credit for any sales made within a day or so. Also, some retailers will pay a commission on purchases you personally make after clicking your own links; others may kick you out of the program for doing that. Check a retailer's affiliate agreement and shop around for what you consider the best deal before putting links on your site.
Many publishers have found that links to individual products return more commissions than banner ads going to a retailer's home page. But the additional money those links earn might not be enough to justify the extra time that selecting and maintaining them requires.
Advertising networksMost news websites earn the bulk of their money through advertising. But you don't need a sales staff to attract advertisers to your site. Ad networks can handle the sale and display of ads on your site. All you need do is drop a few lines of code into your Web pages where you want the ads to appear.
The most popular ad network for independent publishers is Google's AdSense program. AdSense is a "pay per click" (PPC) program, where you earn money each time one of your readers clicks on a Google-served ad. Since you earn money on clicks, rather than completed sales, PPC ad networks can provide a more reliable source of income for sites whose readers are not looking to make a purchase right away. Other notable PPC ad networks include the Yahoo! Publisher Network and Ad Voyager.
Most PPC ads are text, but some PPC networks also sell image and Flash ads. Ads are sold and displayed based on an auction system, where advertisers bid on selected keywords and phrases that appear on network websites. The ad network looks for webpages displaying its ad code, then matches what it determines the content of a webpage to be with the most appropriate keywords and phrases that advertisers have bid upon. The network then automatically weighs several factors in determining which ads to serve on the page, including the value of those bids; advertisers' remaining budgets for those bids; what percentage of readers have clicked on those ads in the past; and, in Google's case, the percentage of those readers who have made a purchase or read a designated number of pages on the advertiser's site.
Google's "Smart Pricing" program will adjust the amount paid to you for each click based on your readers' track record of making a purchase, or viewing a certain number of pages, on that particular advertiser's website. So if your site attracts motivated buyers, you remain in the best position to earn money.
Whatever you do, do not even think about clicking the ads on your site, or encouraging your readers to do the same. All PPC ad networks prohibit click fraud, and will boot from their program any publisher found to be inflating their number of clicks. Even well-intentioned discussion board participants can get a publisher booted from the program by encouraging other readers to click the ads to support the site. Google, for example, has suggested publishers concerned about their readers' conduct add this disclaimer to their site:
"Your postings to this site may not include incentives of any kind for other users to click on ads which are displayed on the site. This includes encouraging other readers to click on the ads or to visit the advertisers' sites, as well as drawing any undue attention to the ads. This activity is strictly prohibited in order to avoid potential inflation of advertiser costs."
If you don't think PPC ad networks will work for you because your site's target audience is defined by demographics, such as geography or a religious or political affiliation -- don't worry. Traditional ad networks such as BlogAds provide an alternative to the PPC networks. BlogAds sells its ads on a more traditional site-targeted model. Advertisers do not bid on keywords or phrases, but instead pay for their ads to be displayed a certain number of times on selected websites or groups of websites. BlogAds has become especially popular on political blogs, where advertisers can buy across a group of liberal or conservative weblogs.
Design to maximize online ad revenue
Since PPC ad networks target their ads primarily by topic, rather than geography or demographics, that makes these networks work better with niche topic websites than with sites that target their readers by geography or other demographics, such as gender, education, income or political affiliation.
For the system to work well for you, the PPC network's spiders must be able to determine a topic for each of your webpages and then must match keywords or phrases that advertisers have bid upon. That means the advantage goes to websites where each page covers a distinct and easily identifiable subject. So if you have a blog that covers a mishmash of topics on a single URL, you won't elicit the targeted ads that lead to high-paying clicks.
If you want to use PPC ad networks, organize your content to limit individual URLs to a specific topic. Break long blogs into individual entries. Archive old posts and stories by subject matter, not just by date and author. Stay active on discussion boards, keeping threads on topic and directing folks to more relevant pages should they stray toward other subjects. Use keywords in headlines, decks and URLs whenever possible. And spell out keywords, phrases and proper names on first reference, rather than using acronyms throughout the piece. (See, old fashioned copy editing rules *can* help you make money!)
Well-organized pages on individual topics also show up better in search engine results, attracting Web surfers curious about a specific keyword, who are more likely to click on a targeted ad. Publishers who create evergreen articles that are likely to attract a high number of links and clicks over time will do best in attracting search engine traffic to their ad-supported webpages. If you publish time-sensitive articles, which are not likely to have a long-enough shelf life to attract significant search engine traffic, consider swapping out or archiving articles on the same topic to a single URL, so that URL can get linked to and picked up in search results.
Where you place ads on a page affects how many of your users see them, and click. According to recent Google research, top performing ad formats include:
Large box ads placed in the middle of your main content column;
Skyscraper ads placed in a left-side column;
Leaderboard ads placed at the top and the bottom of the main content column.Customize the ads' colors to match the background, type and navigational colors of your site, too, to eliminate "banner blindness" and maximize their visibility to your readers.
Then keep an eye on your ads to make sure that they remain relevant to your site. To a reader, ads -- like anything else on your pages -- are part of the content of your website. If an ad network fails to deliver consistently relevant ads, dump it and try something else. Respect your readers by not bombarding them with irrelevant advertising and they will respect you by continuing to read your site.
Think twice before installing pop-up, pop-under and screen "take-over" ads, too. Many readers steer clear of sites that block their access to the content they're looking for with aggressive advertising. Keep your website a safe haven for these ad-weary readers and you can build its audience over time.
How much traffic do you need?
With advertising, the more readers you have and page views you serve, the more money you can make. But how much traffic do you need to make a living from your website?
To make $36,500 a year, you'd need to earn $100 a day on your site (plus whatever expenses you incur). Let's assume your site is attractive to advertisers and earns $10 in ad revenue for every thousand page views. That would mean you'd need to serve 10,000 page views a day to meet this target. (And more if your site earns less than $10 per thousand page views.)
How can you attract that much traffic? If you are writing one article a day on subjects that will be out of date within 24 hours, it's going to be tough. You'll need to attract nearly 10,000 views each day for that's day article, since few people will bother reading your old, out-of-date work. If you write a fair number of "evergreen" features, which keep attracting page views long after they are written, you'll find the task much easier. If your site naturally deals with "perishable" news content, at least publish each day's new news to the same URL, overwriting or pushing down the old content, so that URL can build the in-bound links and search engine traffic that will help you attract new readers you need each day.
Reader-contributed content can also help you meet your page view goals. Well-managed, thoughtfully organized discussion boards and wikis can add dozens of new content pages a day to your site, with much less effort on your part than writing that many original articles.
Selling your own adsIf you don't want to share your ad revenue with a network, or if your site isn't the type to do well with PPC ads, you might consider selling space directly to advertisers.
First, you will need solid information about your site's visitors. Ultimately, what you are selling to advertisers is access to your readers, so you'd better know how many, and who, they are. A traffic tracking service like Google Analytics can provide accurate trafiic data that filters out hon-human traffic like search engine spiders and automated robots (which can account for up to 90 percent of a site's overall traffic). QuantCast also provides reader tracking, along with some crude demographic information about your site's readers.
You should also consider conducting a survey of your readers, to get more detailed information about their demographics and behavior. SurveyMonkey provides easy-to-use tools to set up such surveys.
Once you have advertisers, you will need a system to serve and manage ads, such as OpenAds, as well as system to invoice your advertisers, such as Blinksale or PayPal. (PayPal's invoicing system does not require your advertisers to have a PayPal account, just a credit card.)
Set up a page on your site, linked from the header or footer, that provides data about your site's traffic and visitors, as well as a list of available ad packages. You might also provide a well-designed PDF version of the same data, as decision-makers often prefer "hard copy" versions of this information. (If you need free software to convert Word documents to PDFs, OpenOffice does this with a single mouse click.)
If your advertising page does not generate enough leads to support your site, you'll need to make cold calls to potential advertisers, via e-mail, phone or in person. You'll have the best luck with smaller businesses that do not place ads through agencies, but where the owner makes his or her own ad decisions.
Paid contentGiven the variety and depth of information available on the Web, you have to provide truly unique content of high value to specific readers to get those readers to pay for it. The fact that a paid journalist wrote an article for you does not mean it's worth paying for to a reader. Detail-oriented publications such as Consumer Reports and Cook's Illustrated have had success selling the results of their independent testing online. And, of course, porn sites have been earning big bucks from paid content since the Web's earliest days. But general-interest publications, such as the Los Angeles Times, have found that walling off content to paid subscribers has generated less revenue than the company could have earned by selling advertising on freely available pages.
If you are certain that your content is unique and valuable enough that readers would be willing to pay for it, you'll need to select a way to handle payments from your readers. The system could be as easy as asking readers mail you a check in exchange for your putting them on e-mail content distribution list -- a method which offers the advantage of not requiring any advanced Web server security set-up. Or you could restrict access to certain folders on your website to readers whom you assign log-ins after they buy a subscription. Such restrictions are relatively easy to set up on Apache webservers. Payment can be handled manually via postal mail or phone, or automatically through an e-commerce storefront. (Many Web hosting packages include e-commerce storefronts.)
How to make money
Sponsorships/GrantsSupporting a website through sponsorship or grants requires the least technical skill of these options, but the most interpersonal skills. You'll need to play the role of a salesperson, in addition to journalist and editor, in convincing a individual or organization to give you money to put up your site.
In either case, you'll need to identify individuals, or individuals within organizations, who might be willing to commit their money, or their organization's money, to your site. You'll need to make a written proposal, and often, an in-person pitch, and follow through until you secure your funding. Grants typically require a more structured application process than sponsorships, which can be sold through a formal solicitation or over drinks at the dinner table, depending upon whom you are working with.
The University of Iowa provides some guidance and a collection of links on grant writing in general, including links to many organizations which grant funds to researchers and publishers.
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