Episode 003 – Making Money With Your Information. Tips for Adsense, Affiliate Marketing, and eBooks
November 14, 2006 6 Comments
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Contextual Advertising – Rules of thumb for Adsense and YPN
- You install these ads onto your website and receive money by people clicking on the ads displayed on your website.
- All web pages and keywords are not created equal. A page about Frisbees will not give you the same earnings per click that a financial webpage will give you.
Rules of Thumb with Contextual Advertising
- Don’t use contextual ads on a website that is selling things. You will lose valuable traffic and sacrifice sales to your competition.
- Make your ads blend in to your website. Use the same colors to help the ads look like the page they are on.
- Use pictures carefully. Make sure you have a clear line between pictures and your contextual ads.
- Don’t over do it with ads. Place them tactfully.
- Find bid results with Overture’s Bid Tool and make sure you are placing ads that will have high payouts.
Affiliate Marketing
- Send traffic to an advertiser’s website and make a commission every time you help generate a sale or lead. These commissions can be anywhere from 0.50 to 100 dollars on average per successful action.
- You find the companies that will work best with your website and business offerings. Once you sign up you choose the type of banners or text links you’d like to use.
- Commission Junction is the most popular and has the most advertisers in their network.
Selling a Product or Subscription
- Use your expertise and skill to write an eBook. An ebook is delivered via email and requires no order fulfillment on your half. A truly passive way to make money.
- eBooks can be anywhere from 10 to 100 pages. You don’t need a 400 page novel to start selling it.
- Subscriptions are the Holy Grail of information based business models.
Episode Three Steps:
- Use Overture’s Bid Tool to test some of your keywords from your business idea list you made in Episode 1. Get an idea of what ideas can be used with contextual advertising.
- Sign up for Google Adsense
- If you have a website sign up for Commision
Junction to get approved. - If you plan on writing an eBook outline the chapters and table of contents.
Hi Matthew
I am enjoying the podcasts and find them very informative.
I am more than half way through writing an ebook on photo restoration. I am interested to know if it is better to market it myself or to find a more expert company to do it for me?
Also if you could expand on your comments about subscriptions. Subscriptions to what?
Harvey
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Hi Harvey,
To answer your question: “it is better to market it myself or to find a more expert company to do it for me?”
I would suggest marketing it yourself, online. This website http://www.clickbank.com/index.html helps people sell thousands of ebooks each year.
You might consider setting up a PPC (pay per click )campaign through Google Adsense and sending people to a great landing page.
When I say subscriptions I mean subscriptions to your blog, email newsletter, or advanced information on your site. If you build up a loyal following of subscribers you can get a steady stream of income.
Thank you for leaving a comment. I appreciate it.
Matt
Matt:
I was wondering if you have noticed that the overture bid tool does not seem to be available anymore?
Please advise if you know of any changes or perhaps I am missing something…
Best,
Charissa
Great shows I have learned alot but I have one question. I am about ready to buy a copy of Dreamweaver and higher a Web Developer to build my site along with me until I heard you talk about joomla. I tried to play with it but keep getting stuck well my question is can you create a comments section in Joomla and due you have a link to their templates.
Jay,
The Joomla has an extention area that has specific applications for comments. You can find a list of them here http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,listcats/cat_id,1764/Itemid,35/
I’ve bought templates from Joomla Shack
But you can also find a lot of free templates by searching for “Joomla Template” on Google
I would suggest using newer templates that are 100% CSS. Avoid table based templates because search engines have a harder time spidering tables.
Good Luck!
Do you have any opinions (thumbs up or thumbs down) on AdsenseTracker.com? You have recommended against automated software. Does this hold true for AdsenseTracker.com?