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Friday, April 6, 2012

Earn Money with Hits4Pay.com

Hits4Pay is one of the oldest sponsored email reading networks online since 1998. Here you get a signing bonus of $5 and they pay you 2 cents for every email you read. Sometimes the emails pay you 5 cents but those are rare.
If you refer people and they sign up, you get 2 cents for every email read by the referral.
The payout is $25, credited to your account through PayPal.

Earn Money with She Told Me

Earn Money with She Told Me

While researching for this list, I came across She Told Me. Apparently, it is the biggest AdSense sharing revenue network these days.
In this, you get to write your own chosen articles and get paid. I don’t know whether they pay upfront for the articles but they surely pay for the AdSense revenues.
Here the AdSense is divided into 3 blocks – one block is for the writer (yours), the second block is for She Told Me and the third block is for the referrer (if any) who recommended the website.
The best thing – if you already have a Chitika advertisement account, you can insert your own Chitika ads and earn 100% revenue from them.
Signing up is free.

Thursday, April 5, 2012

Making Money With Twitter

Popularly described as the “SMS of the Internet,” Twitter is among the “Top 10” most visited sites in the world, according to Alexa web traffic analysis. Current estimates suggest that Twitter has roughly 190 million users and these users create around 65 million tweets per day. Like Facebook, Twitter is also a social networking or a micro-blogging platform where users post ‘tweets’ limited to 140 characters per tweet. Making Money With TwitterSince its launch in July 2006 within the public domain, Twitter quickly became one of the preferred social platforms to stay connected personally and professionally as well. For those not using Twitter as a money making source, it is a platform to stay connected with friends, catch up on news or ‘follow’ their favorite film stars. Internet marketers believe that Twitter is a good resource for business promotion and in the process, yet another stream of revenue. Whether Twitter can help to earn direct or indirect income is the purpose of today’s discussion. A Brief Twitter History The foundation of Twitter was the result of a brain storming session by employees at the ODEO – a podcasting company. The initial idea was to develop a prototype through which internal members of the company could communicate and remain abreast of current developments within a company through the short messaging system. The first Twitter prototype installed for ODEO was on July 15, 2006. Within 3 months, Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone and others acquired ODEO and Twitter from its investors and shareholders; Twitter was separated and established as a singular company in April 2007. Twitter Demographics Industry experts like the comScore or the Sysomos have found out important demographical markings for Twitter. If you are in the Internet marketing business, keep note of these facts and figures because it will influence your marketing strategy. 
1. Only 11% of Twitter users are between 12-17 years of age (comScore)
 2. Older adults use Twitter more than anyone else (comScore) 
3. Only 47% men use Twitter as compares to 53% women, without considering which country they belong to (Sysomos) 
 4. Large percentage of Twitter users are based in New York, USA (Sysomos) 
5. On an average, 63% Twitter users are less than 35 years old; 16% are African American, 11% are Hispanic and 60% are Caucasian (Quancast) 
 6. An average of $60,000 is the total household income of 58% Twitter users. 
In terms of Twitter content, the Peer Analytics Company found the following after examining 2000 tweets in August 2009. 
 1. 40% of social grooming tweets (also described as “pointless babble”) 
 2. 38% of conversational tweets 
3. 9% of “pass along” tweets 
4. 6% of self promotion tweets 
5. 4% of spam tweets 
6. 4% of news tweets Moreover, only half or even less of tweets are posted through the twitter.com website because users mostly use third party applications like Salesforce.com, twitterfeed.com, HootSuite.com and TweetDeck.com to post tweets, says a 500 million Twitter analysis by Sysomos. There is also a Twitter service through which URLs can be shortened and then promoted. However, this is available only to that content published in Twitter. Now that we have a broad idea of twitter functions and its use with the global audience, let’s look at its money making potential. Note this: 
THE BEST WAY TO EARN MONEY FROM TWITTER IS THROUGH ADVERTISEMENT. 
 You can use Direct Advertisement as a means to promote advertiser’s products on Twitter. Since tweets can only be 140 characters long, there is no space for long reviews or article content publishing. You have just 140 characters which is barely a long sentence, and don’t forget you have to fit in the URL (the site address where you want the twitter visitor to be directed) as well. Be-A-Magpie.com, Twittad.com, HootSuite.com and RevTwt.com are some websites where advertisers gather to find Internet marketers with big Twitter followers so they can help them market or promote their business. How does it typically work? You are the Internet marketer and you create an account in, let’s say, HootSuite.com. There you collaborate with advertisers looking for promotion. Try to find a product you will be interested in promoting. There are no shortages of options. Advertisers from multiple arenas go there to search for promoters. Since this is paid advertising, you have to negotiate a budget and therefore, you have to keep in mind your competition. For instance, there is another Internet marketer who is offering 150 tweets for $50 which includes promotion content creation too and you are offering 150 tweets for $60 which also includes promotion content development but obviously, the advertiser is going to choose the first Internet marketer. Therefore, you have to create a good package for twitter advertisers. Suppose for the same $60, you give an advertiser 180 tweets + tweet writing package + tracking option + updating tweets regularly – this is a package that will motivate any advertiser to give a long thought to your services. Remember that making money with Twitter through direct advertising is very difficult. There are marketplaces where advertisers are hiring twitter product promoters for less than $5 and they are giving advertisers tweeting service for up to a year for that measly $5. Yes, tweeting is not a hard task but come on; a five dollar package for 365 days is not worth the work!!! Now similar to this option is another alternative to earn money from Twitter – Affiliate Marketing. For affiliate marketers, this is a good platform to promote your affiliate products. Suppose you are selling fairness cream product, what you do is tweet about it from your own account or, in this case, hiring other Internet promoters to do the same works as well. You could tweet – “Best Fairness Beauty Product with Aloe Vera Extract – URL”. You could use variations of the same. There are two main aspects here – don’t forget to keep the content interesting and don’t forget to paste your affiliate link in the URL; otherwise, you won’t get any credit for sales made. Persistent Effort With Twitter Internet marketing promotions, you have to be constantly on the edge because this is not something you can do once in a while. If you wish to seriously make any money from Twitter, continue to give it 100 percent. You have to practically be online 24×7 on Twitter.

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Blogging and Earn Money

Among many ‘firsts’, the first rule of business is to check out who you’re competing against to establish your business. My question – what is your chance, if any, of making money blogging when there are more than 133 million bloggers (February 2010 data) there already, out of which at least 50% of them are earning money online from blogging? Seems scary, right? How to make money bloggingWhere do you rank? Search any keyword and Google shows thousands of search engine results of meaningful blogs, which have been optimized with money making models but only a handful of them ever succeed. Often, people fail to make money from blogging because they ignore the primary rule of business – you need to offer something worthwhile for the customer to purchase. Everything boils down to basic economics – there is demand, you fill the demand and you earn!!! When you want to earn substantially from blogging, it ceases to be a platform where you can go on ranting about your feelings and personal life…however, you do want your readers to know who you are. This definition of blogging was still relevant, maybe 5 years ago, but not anymore. Like other businesses conducted online, blogging has become yet another way to make money for the long term. Nevertheless, our question was – can you really make money blogging? The answer is both Yes and No. AdSense and Blogging: Both were like Siamese twins but not anymore! In the early years of blogging, people earned much by activating Google AdSense on their site. It was the latest fad. If you are aware, the concept of Google Cash Cow was quite popular with new bloggers and some of them claim to have earned thousands, but does it still hold true now? Let’s see. The problem with AdSense and Blogging these days is three – dimensional: lack of unique niches, flawed search engine optimization and less amount of traffic. You will agree with me that competition in niches like blogging for earning money has enormously increased in the last few years. Therefore, we have reached a point of stagnancy because bloggers need to give their readers something new and fresh. Yes, there are people who like to create blogs based on Google’s “high paying keyword” search but that too fails to materialize because the high paying keywords are not constant, they change according to user’s search criteria and interest. Secondly, even with so much technological advancements around us, bloggers are still clueless about how to monetize their site or how to place advertisements. A point to note here is that advertisement no longer falls under a preferred alternative for site monetization because visitors show the least amount of interest. If a thousand visitors come to your site, perhaps 100-150 will click on those ads and there is no guarantee if anyone is actually going to purchase anything from those advertisements; therefore, if you are trying to promote affiliate products through blogging, there is a slim chance of you making actual commissions. Blogging advertisement has become redundant. It is more redundant because the blogs are not able to provide any actual benefit to the reader. Ask yourself – would you prefer visiting a site that actually helps you in some way, let’s say, to help you solve problems or would you prefer visiting a site just for 10 minutes of entertainment daily? Thirdly, due to the first two factors – lack of niche and flawed search engine optimization – a blog will rarely have any visitors. Even if they do, they will hardly translate into any earning if the blog is solely dependent on AdSense. For many, you can make about $200-$250 monthly… So, what other alternative do you have? Well, the idea is to use blogging as a “supporting” platform for your main website. This means that you cannot earn from blogging directly but you can get lots of traffic to your main website, which provides products or services to the buyers. Suppose you are a designer and you want to provide art copyrighter services to global clients; your website is: artcopyrighter.com, which you create like any other business website highlighting your services and pricing. Now, as a “supportive” platform, you create: blog.artcopyrighter.com, which you will use to blog about your art, your experiences and other things. Now, in both the cases, you have to do search engine optimization for promotion but essentially, you are not expecting to “earn” from your blogging but using it as a way to capture the traffic and direct them to the main business website. The purpose of your blog is to give the visitors a reason to return again and again, implying that your blog content should be interactive enough to catch the reader’s interest. And by blog content, one usually means the writing, but one cannot ignore other factors like presentation, format, images, and easy navigation. If you follow this alternative, you automatically lessen your competition because then your competition will not be measured by the blog itself but by the number of people actively involved in art copyrighting!!! Hence, your competition reduces, you are able to provide something of value to the consumer by marketing your service to a select market niche geographically and you are able to make your business grow. A Final Thought: You need to think twice before creating a blog solely for the purpose of turning into an income source individually. Of course, if you are happy with $200-$250 per month, we don’t have anything to say but what we suggest is to do blogging as a supportive fraction of your main business site. If you are planning on earning money online, best is to go the professional way. Show your talent to the world or if you have a great product that you know people will be eager to shell out $$$, then its best to create a business website and use blogging as an additional Internet marketing strategy to draw visitors to your site by perfectly optimizing the blog pages and promoting it.

Long Term Income Opportunity in Forex trading

Forex, FX or Foreign Exchange trading is nothing but making money by trading foreign currencies. The history of Forex trading runs parallel with the history of money. Before the Internet revolution, Forex trading was limited to multinationals, financial institutions and corporate companies who carried out currency exchange on a large scale. Small – medium businesses and individual investors could not think of getting involved in Forex but the Internet changed everything! Understanding Forex TradingForex does not follow a regulated exchange process, which makes it different from stock trading and futures trading. There are no clearing houses or central governing body exercising control over the Forex market. Presently, Forex is the largest liquid and fluid market in the whole world. Trading is open 24 hours a day from EST 5pm Sunday to EST 4pm Friday and the daily transaction inflow and outflow is 2 trillion USD. There are no minimum or maximum investment barriers. You need not be a rocket scientist to understand how the Forex market works. All you need is a refresher course to understand the basics and a demo Forex trading account for few weeks to practice trading daily. Consider the information given below as your basic Forex training session. All the information is up to date and relevant globally. How Does Forex Trading Work? As a Forex trading investor, you need to team up with a Forex broker whose job is to carry out the currency exchange on your behalf. In online Forex trading, you use certain software systems to carry out the exchange automatically. Of course, the first step then is to seek out a reputable and popular Forex brokerage company. These days most of the brokerage companies offer demo accounts, especially to those who are new in this field of making money online. After weeks of practice with the demo account, you step into the real platform with real currency. With the help of Forex trading platform, you buy and sell currency – the profit earned in between is added to your account and can be withdrawn anytime. In return for providing you the platform, you pay the brokerage company a predetermined percentage as commission. Let’s do a recap of what you need:
  1. An account with a verified brokerage company.
  2. A valid bank account linked with a Forex account
  3. A valid email account
  4. Amount to fund the investment
  5. Money to pay the brokerage commission.

Tips for Selecting Brokers

  • You are not going to handover hundreds of dollars to a broker without doing a background check. You need to find out whether the broker will provide optimum security to your funds. Fortunately, there are ways to check broker credibility with the help of regulatory bodies in every major country. USA has National Futures Association and Commodity Futures Trading Association; United Kingdom has Financial Services Authority; Australia has Australian Securities and Investment Commission; Germany has Bundesanstalt für Finanzdienstleistungsaufsicht; France has Autorité des Marchés Financiers and Switzerland has Swiss Federal Banking Commission.
  • The online trading platform of the broker should be easily accessible and hassle free. Genuine brokers will ensure that their trading platform is user friendly and provide updated technological facilities like live news feed and charting tools to make trading easier. Moreover, the broker should be competent enough to carry out transactions on your behalf. The broker should not lose your funds in losses.
  • You can judge the competence level of a broker by evaluating the customer service provided. Most of the brokers online have a nightmarish “after sale” (after account opening) support system.
  • While you are checking the broker’s credibility, you need to check the withdrawal system provided by the brokering service. The withdrawal system should be hassle free and instantly process withdrawal requests. A broker has no reason to hold up your funds.

How Do You Trade Currencies?

There are four major currency trading pairs accepted globally:
  1. GBP / USD (British Pound and US Dollars)
  2. EUR / USD (Euro and US Dollars)
  3. USD / JPY (US Dollars and Japanese Yen)
  4. USD / CHF (US Dollars and Swiss Frank)
Other less common or not frequent currency exchange pairs are:
  1. AUD / USD (Australian Dollar and US Dollar)
  2. USD / CAD (US Dollar and Canadian Dollar)
  3. NZD / USD (New Zealand Dollar and US Dollar)
  4. EUR / JPY (Euro and Japanese Yen)
  5. GBP / JPY (Great Britain Pond and Japanese Yen)
  6. EUR / GBP (Euro and Great Britain Pound)
Notice the currency pairs – the first currency is always counted as commodity and the second one is counted as money. In other words, in the EUR / USD pair, you buy Euro against US Dollars and if you wish to sell, you sell Euro against US Dollars.
The best thing about working with Forex trading software is that everything is taken care of automatically. You don’t have to worry about transaction rates or exchange prices.
Now you must be asking – where does the money come in? Or, in finance terms, how to estimate the time to trade? When is the market ‘high’ to make a profit?
Let’s take the EUR / USD pair again. Either you buy EUR when the price is low and sell it when USD is high or sell EUR at high price and buy USD at low price. For instance, you buy EUR when 1 EUR = 1.41138 USD and you sell EUR when 1 EUR = 2.41138 USD. You make a profit in this transaction… it’s easy, right?
Now how would you know when to buy and when to sell? There are two basic techniques:
  1. Fundamental Analysis – This method looks into the current political and economic conditions of major countries and then predicts how the market is going to turn out in the next few days. For instance, if the present US market is showing economic growth then Forex traders will buy USD because the price of USD will rise. Similarly, if there is economic slump then Forex traders will want to sell USD even if they have to suffer some loss. Waiting to sell currency of a country when the country’s economic and political situation is going downward will only result in loss. Therefore, traders try to minimize the loss and sell while they still can.
  2. Technical Analysis – This method uses Indicators and Price Chart Analysis to analyze the direction of currency market in the next few days. If you wish to become a Forex trader, especially intraday trader, you need to learn Technical Analysis to make informed decisions about your investment. Give yourself a few months to learn all about Technical Analysis. There are lots of free resources online for help.
Experienced Forex traders believe in following both the techniques closely before buying and selling currencies. In Forex you do not actually sell or buy anything in the traditional sense of the term. All the transactions are electronically carried out in specific currency pairs. The reason why Forex exists is to facilitate currency exchange in order to pump in funds to multinational companies, corporate and financial institutions.


Making a Living with Forex Trading

There are people who have turned Forex trading into their permanent source of income online. After all, Forex trading is one financial industry that is recession proof. People who earn from Forex permanently have spent years mastering this trade so don’t expect you can do the same in a matter of months.
Until you know the pros and cons of the trade, you cannot take a leap of faith; leave your full time job and sit at home working online 24 hours a day trading currencies. If you are serious about trading Forex for a living, know this:
  1. Earning money from Forex is not a get – rich – quick scheme. You cannot become a millionaire in a day.
  2. There is no software in the market that will earn you profits instantly. If it had been, that software would have sold for thousands of dollars! What there software does is support you and reduce technicalities that would have been otherwise difficult to deal with personally.
  3. You should be ready to invest anywhere between 6 months to 2 years to learn the trade completely. Don’t give up your job yet. First spend 3-4 months with a demo account, another 3-4 months to learn the Forex trade and then the next 10 – 12 months doing real trades. Start with a small investment and increase your investment amount as you learn more about Forex.
  4. You need to be good with money management. Don’t be impulsive and whimsical while trading. You need to think like a finance expert would in your place and then get involved in FX trading.

Advantages with Forex Trading

  1. A Forex investor can trade anytime. The markets are open 5 days a week from Sunday to Friday. This 24 hour trading facility makes it easy to trade from anywhere around the world and takes care of the global time differences.
  2. If there are million Forex investors, each one of them has equal opportunity to earn profits. There is no competition or bidding process. Moreover, Forex trading is also known as ‘over the counter’ trading, that is, you buy currency and you sell currency – the balance is maintained and you earn profits in real time.
  3. Forex market offers 100% liquidity. There are no cash bonds or waiting period to get your profit. Little slippage, price stability and narrow spreads gives Forex currencies high liquidity level.
  4. Every dollar or any currency invested can be leveraged to its full potential. It means that investors can make huge amounts of profit by investing little. Again, don’t mistake this as a get rich quick scheme. As mentioned earlier, this trade needs patience and devotion for you to learn the ropes first.
  5. Regular investors dealing with Forex markets daily need not pay any commission. These are called “free of commission” trading.

Disadvantages with Forex Trading

  1. The 24 hour 5 day a week market has its share of disadvantages as well. For traders, it is difficult to keep track of the market movement 24 hours a day. This way you can lose profits. This is the reason why it is advisable to hire Forex brokers. The brokers will give you minute by minute details of market fluctuations and also guide you with buying and selling currency.
  2. If you are dealing in large amounts of money, there is risk of loss in a high leverage market. You can lose buying and selling opportunities in a matter of seconds, and you are left with marginal profits only. This is another reason why efficient and clever money management is needed.

Final Thoughts

Learning to Forex is like any other trade where you have to spend time learning its basics and then put the learning to practice.
Again we repeat – Forex trading is not a shortcut method of getting rich quickly. You need perseverance, patience and dedication to turn Forex trading into a long term income source. In the meantime, search for free resources online and get yourself acquainted with trading Forex online.

Earning Money With Google AdSense

When Randy Brown of grownupgeek.com began his informative website to help people deal with their computer security, all he wished was enough money to cover his web hosting expenses, which amounted to $7.77 per month. He enrolled in the Google AdSense free application program with the sole purpose of recovering his web hosting costs. Earning Money From Google AdSenseImplementing AdSense was easier, earning revenues from advertisements was easier, reveals Brown. He says, “The income I started earning blew me away.” Visibly inspired and motivated, he researched further and came to know about the AdSense Referral program that enabled him to earn money by recommending visitors to new products and services. Today his site receives more than 6000 unique visitors daily and his AdSense earnings contributes towards 50-75 percent of his monthly revenue. In his words, it is the “most effective tool for generating income.” Take another case study by Google – With more than 14 percent of the US population consisting of Hispanics, it was a challenge for Univision.com to provide contextual ads and earn revenues from them. An interactive division of Univision Communications Inc, the Univision Online is one of the biggest and premier Spanish language media companies located in the US. From its early online presence, the chief purpose of Univision was to maximize revenue from online resources. By 2004, they were receiving 840,000 visits every month and Univision was quick and clever to maximize this incoming traffic. They began to deliver contextual ads and concentrated more on ad quality and click through rate. In other words, these were ads that were in context with the website content. Within a year, their AdSense revenues were ‘up’ by 160 percent. “We’ve had significantly better results since switching to Google. Google helps us monetize our site better. Google is an important strategic partner. Not are we pleased with the relationship but we believe both users and marketers on our site are benefiting as well,” says Univision Online President, Javier Saralegui. The Common Verdict – From the two case studies or success stories, we can assume one thing – for both small and medium/large scale website owners, Google AdSense has not only been a great source of income but a sustained source of income as well. Established Google AdSense earners can vouch for this! Since we have devoted this site to help small scale entrepreneurs with online earnings, let’s reveal Google AdSense step-by-step and how it can help you. Google AdSense – Basic Definition Google Inc. runs AdSense application wherein web publishers are given a unique ID and Google serves contextual advertisements on the web publishers’ site. The advertisements are text-based, image-based and video-based. Web publishers earn revenue on two fronts: Per-Click Advertisement – In ‘Per Click’ advertisement, you as the web publisher will be paid when unique visitors coming to your site clicks on the ads published. Of course, Google doesn’t allow you to click on your own website ads. If you do so, your account will be banned. Also make sure that the computer you are using to log in to your website should not be used by other people to view your website and click on ads. Google will count this as a violation because when you sign up as publisher, Google saves your computer IP number, so any advertisement clicking attempts made from the same computer is reason enough to be banned. Per-Impression Advertisement – Per Impression or Cost per Impression (CPI) advertisement is a popular strategy used in online marketing and advertisement. This strategy is used with text links, web banners, opt-in e-mail advertising and email. Whenever an advertisement loads on the visitors screen, it is counted as an “impression” and a certain percentage from Google is paid to the publisher… (you). If you want to use Per-Impression Advertisement, be familiar with few terms like RPM (Revenue per Thousand) and CPT (Cost per Thousand). Impression advertisements are calculated on a “per thousand’ basis. In 2008, Google had introduced “Cost-Per Action” category as well but it was discontinued soon after.

Few Advantages of AdSense

  1. Signing up with Google AdSense is free of cost. Anyone from any corner of the world can become a member and use this application.
  2. There is no shortage of space. There are hundreds of domains that get registered daily and what better exposure can this be for online advertisers! New websites mean much more space and increased opportunity for web publishers to earn revenues.
  3. There is a steady stream of advertisement. Google’s search engine analytics has made it possible to provide contextual ads for any kind of content you can think of. The advertisers are divided on the basis of their geographical location and the kind of product or service they are advertising. Segregating the ads thus helps both the website publisher and local advertisement opportunities to flourish.
  4. Whenever you use the Google AdSense application, Google automatically allows you to place a Google search box on your website. This way you increase your earning potential because there is an increased chance of people using that search box to look for information. The Google search box technology is a tool to encourage visitors to linger on your website longer.
  5. You are given the option to optimize the ads according to your wish. For instance, you can choose the kind of ads you want to display. If your site is about “financial tools and strategies,” you can choose to display only those ads that are relevant with the financial industry. Similarly, you can change the colors, advertisement size and change the layout as well.


Few Disadvantages of AdSense

Even though AdSense is immensely popular, a kind of ‘saturation’ point has begun to set in with website publishers and website visitors. Why?
  1. There is too much competition. Suppose you want to create a website on “internet marketing tools” and there are 100 more websites with the same intent, how can you be sure that you can compete with 100 other websites and ensure visitors come to you only for information? The chances are 1:100 and therefore, people are finding AdSense unreliable.
  2. The earning percentage is less. If your website is starting up and getting only 30-40 visitors, you cannot make even a dollar daily. Moreover, your earnings depend on the kind of advertisement you display and the worst thing is Google does not inform web publishers about the revenue distribution system. Google says that if your content website is high in demand, you can earn $15-$30 per click but how much it happens in reality is the question.
  3. An AdSense website looks more like DIY websites these days. There are web publishers who create one page or ten page websites, uses SEO extensively and promotes them for favorable Google rankings. These website are too dependent on ‘keywords.’ For instance, if there are two keywords like “children bedding” and “bedding for children,” website developers will create two – one-page websites for separate keywords, activate AdSense and promote them. While this is a good earning source for many, maintenance costs and time to operate individual websites take a lot of time. If one cannot justify maintenance costs, there is no purpose to host such sites.
  4. There is no guarantee that website users actually click on the displayed ads. Truly, you cannot control user’s response. The best you can do is keep your website content updated and display fresh ads. Google AdSense is highly competitive and you have to rise above the competition to make AdSense a reliable source of income.
Beware!
Never pay anyone to click on your website/s.  There are people whom you can hire and ask them to click on your website ads. In return, you pay them a share out of the revenues – believe me, this is really a bad idea! Try to get more natural traffic and don’t invest in paid advertisements.
An acquaintance I knew got involved in this and before he knew it, Google had closed down and banned all his websites. Apparently, he had contracted a team of 5 people to click on his website ads from different IP addresses.
The initial first months were fine. I don’t know how Google got wind of it but the first step Google took was to shut down all his sites. Do you want the same to happen to you?

Google AdSense – Criticism

To protect your own investment in terms of time and money, you should be aware of certain criticisms about AdSense. This Google program has come under severe criticism because of complaints made by webmasters that their accounts were closed all of a sudden and all their earnings forfeited.
Complaints suggested that their accounts were closed just before they were supposed to receive their first paycheck. Webmasters also criticized that Google AdSense does not reimburse payments until the amount reaches $100. However, if you wish to close your account and not disable it, you will get all earned revenues if the amount is more than $10.
Another criticism is about the fact that AdSense displays ads that itself condemns. Sometime back, AdSense came under fire after it displayed sexually explicit material with its own ads.
If you were to do the same thing, your account would have been banned. Moreover, Google may ask you to pay them some percentage if you wish to display advertisements from other advertisers not affiliated with Google.
The reason Google gives for closing account is “click fraud” or “forbidden content.” After closing the account, an automated email is sent by Google intimidating of the same but not giving any reasons.
They also send a link to file an appeal if you choose to and the most common outcome of such cases is that the revenues are blocked and the complaint deferred.
Before signing up with AdSense, read their FAQ and TOC carefully.
In Conclusion – Earning money with Google AdSense is a tricky business. You need great content, good amount of traffic and relevant ads to interest visitors into clicking on them.
Of course, you cannot forget competition. That is why Google stresses the fact that your website should have unique content.
Finally, be careful to not get involved in any fraudulent activities like paying people to click on ads or do not display banned content on your website besides Google ads.

Make Money Uploading Files Online

Making money uploading files online is a new concept for me that I stumbled upon while researching another issue to write about here. Make Money Uploading FilesWhile we know about all the bigger ways to earn money online, uploading files falls under the lesser category that can give you a few hundred dollars per month if you can market the files well. What exactly is file uploading? Let’s suppose you have a document about “Tips to lose weight in 14 days.” You want to earn from it. How can you? You can make use of file sharing services where you upload files and earn money whenever anyone downloads the document. You can also promote your files with blog readers, in forum discussions, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon and other social networking platforms. Where do I find file sharing services to make money by uploading files? For my readers I have researched and listed here file sharing sites which I found to be credible. However, the list is not a recommendation. Please visit the site and join after you are fully satisfied with its authenticity. 
1. Uploading (uploading.com) – You earn $20 per 1000 downloads.
 2. File Factory (filefactory.com) – You earn $15 per 1000 downloads and 20% commission when you sell their membership. You also earn 20% for referrals. 
3. Easy-Share (easy-share.com) – You earn $20 per 1000 downloads and 20% commissions when you sell their membership. 
4. BizHat (bizhat.com) – You earn $1 as signup bonus, $0.1 for referrals and $0.001 for each download. 
 5. Share Cash (sharecash.org) – I think this site pays more than other file sharing sites. You can earn between $200 and $600 per 1000 downloads. 
 6. File Sonic (filesonic.com) – Except for Hong Kong, the services are available worldwide. You earn $1 to $35 per 1000 downloads. This file sharing service site is ideal for aspiring artists. 
7. Hot File (hotfile.com) – You earn $2 to $15 per 1000 downloads and payments are automated, that is, you don’t have to withdraw manually. 
 8. Upload Station (uploadstation.com) – You earn anywhere between $0.80 to $32 per 1000 downloads and the minimum payout is $20. 
9. File Serve (fileserve.com) – A reputable site for media file downloads. They pay up to $25 per 1000 downloads. T
he file sharing sites work worldwide. However, if you are from remote areas, please check the list of countries before signing up. PayPal, MoneyBookers, and bank transfers are the preferred modes of sending money. The payments are dispersed weekly, bi-weekly or monthly. Are the file sharing sites free to join? Yes, most are free to join. Check out the individual sites for details. Do I need to join all of them? Yes, join as many file sharing sites as you want. It will maximize your income potential. Moreover, if you depend on one file sharing site to host all your documents, the server can overload and create problems while downloading. Are there copyright issues? The sites are uploading your files so there are no copyright issues. You can upload the same file in as many file sharing sites as you want. As far as I could research, the sites do not have any rules stating that a user cannot use the same file on other file sharing websites. BUT, make sure all the files you use are original. You cannot upload files containing movies, songs and other videos as your own. Whatever file you want to earn money from should be created by you only or you should have full copyrights to use it any way you want. Tip – If you want to increase file sharing downloads; use the service while creating an email list. As a blogger, you want to create an email list for business. Right? Therefore, as an incentive for visitors to sign up, upload a free eBook through the file sharing networks and use that link for visitors to download the free eBook and leave their email id in return. The major plus point… You do not need a website to earn money. You use the file sharing platform and your promotional tools, that’s it! Are there any specific places to promote? Like you have file sharing sites, you also have file sharing forums. You can drop the file links on the forms given by these forums or sign up with the forum and leave the links as you go on posting… I found a listing of trustworthy forums for promotion. Some of them were: Hongfire.com, Warez-bb.org, forumw.org, animea.net, filestube.com, nattawat.org, forums.linkbucks.com, amaderforum.com, projectw.org, downarchive.com and others. 

3 Tips How To Make Money Uploading Files  
1. Check the visitor location – Most of the file sharing sites pays high when the downloader is from the UK,USA and Europe. Before signing up, try to search the visitors profile and/or find the rate for 1000 downloads in your country. 
2. Use popular sites – Use popular forums, discussion boards, and social networking sites to market the file links. Before sharing on forums and discussion boards, read the TOS. Sometimes forums may ban user accounts if the user posts too many links. 
3. Save uploading time – Use FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and remote upload tools to download and upload files quickly. 
The FTP is the standard method of uploading files on the net while the remote upload tool transfers data from a remote location to another. In remote transfer, you don’t have to download files from one particular site and then upload it to another; and it does use up the bandwidth as well. While sharing files will not make you a ton of money, it can help you to earn a bit and pay off small expenses like website hosting, membership accounts, Internet charges and others. File sharing is a good option as a side source of income. In fact, if you can write well, you can create eBooks on buzzing topics at the moment and give them away for free. If you are an Internet marketer, you should consider sharing files as a great method of list building and free product/service promotion

Earn Money With YouTube

Founded by three young entrepreneurs – Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim – YouTube was started in 2006. Within a year, the company was taken over by Google Inc for 1.65 billion USD.
How to Earn Money With YouTubeSince the first day, YouTube has been growing steadily and fast becoming a preferred medium for Internet marketers to promote and market their products and services.
YouTube has so much content that one needs 600 years to watch each and every video!
As you are reading this piece and thinking about how to earn money with YouTube, you are getting increased access to around 200,000 videos every minute and every minute of YouTube video uploaded is worth 13 hours of visual time!
Amazing, isn’t it?
Of all the countries able to watch YouTube, USA has the largest number of audiences, followed by United Kingdom and Philippines.
From a marketing perspective, you have better sales traction when you use YouTube for marketing and advertisement. Of all the various categories of content published, music videos score the highest and films score the lowest.
The best thing is you don’t have to be a professional videographer to create and upload videos on YouTube – 80% of videos on YouTube are made by amateurs.
So, from this brief introduction from a marketing perspective, what did you learn?
  • YouTube gives you global exposure
  • YouTube gives you a wider market to sell goods and services
  • YouTube is easily accessible and does not need any investment, per se
  • YouTube means unlimited amounts of traffic – remember, millions of people visit YouTube daily.
Now, what did we miss?
Of course, our money making agenda!!! As you have understood by now, YouTube does not have any commission or referral programs like Amazon or ClickBank; therefore, what can an Internet marketer do to optimize on the immense amount of traffic freely flowing and be clever enough to capitalize on it?
Join the YouTube Partnership Program!
YouTube earns a large percentage of their revenues from advertising programs and to attract more viewers to their advertisement, they prefer to partner with those YouTube account holders who have regular page views.
When you partner with YouTube, you are entitled to a share in the revenue the website gets when people click the advertisement banners from your YouTube video. Not only does YouTube give you a share in their revenue but you can also rent out YouTube videos and create your own brand presence.
However, to take advantage of all these benefits, you need to become a partner; but the fact is, not everyone can become a partner.
YouTube has its own rules and regulations that they follow during partner selection. For instance, you need to be popular on YouTube and get lots of visitors daily.
Within this partnership program, there are two categories: account level partnerships and individual video partnerships.
In the account level partnership, you need to have a strong YouTube following and, as said before, get lots of daily views on your multiple videos.
In the individual video partnership, you can become a partner on the strength of a single video that is so popular that it receives thousands of visitors daily without delay.
In either kind of partnership, you earn when you allow YouTube to display relevant ads embedded with your video.
Suppose you have a video on a perfume manufacturing industry. Accordingly, YouTube will search for relevant ads and embed it either in the bottom or at the beginning so that it gets the visitor’s attention.
In short, here are some of the basic criterias to fulfill before getting accepted in the YouTube Partnership Program:
  • You must be above 18 years of age.
  • All the videos uploaded onsite should have your copyright. If someone else has made those videos, you need to have their written permission granting you the rights to use the content in any way possible. Any copyright violation will lead to account termination.
  • You should have a good YouTube following.
  • Your videos should have a good number of visitors daily
  • This program is not available in every country. If you are from Germany, Australia, Canada, Brazil, Spain, UK, US, Netherlands, Mexico, Japan, France, Israel and Italy, you can become a partner.
Other Benefits:
When you become a YouTube partner, you have the opportunity to rent your videos. Of course, these are videos for which only you have the sole copyright and therefore, permission to rent or sell them.
If you have filmed something that you know people will be interested in seeing and won’t mind shelling out minimal dollars, you can use the YouTube Rental option. Please remember that this option is open for only United States residents.
Another benefit of the program is that you get to create and promote your own merchandise and use the traction to build your online brand.
You may start out with the intention of only making money from YouTube, but in the long term, this same source will help you to start and establish your business if you want.
Forget about your own merchandise for a moment; think about those branded companies who are willing to spend thousands of dollars just to be able to purchase advertisement space on your YouTube channel when it becomes ultra – popular.
Ford, Kia Motors, Hasbro’s Trivial Pursuit, Taco Bell, Pepsi, Colgate and GMC are some companies that have benefitted from YouTube branded campaigns. Through your YouTube channel, they promote their products and in return, YouTube pays you a generous share from their revenue.
After reading all this, you may question – what if I decide not to join the YouTube Partnership Program? Will it still be possible to earn money from YouTube?
Of course, if you are using AdSense on your website. Without being a partner, you cannot earn as an advertiser but you can earn by promoting your website where you can advertise.
Through YouTube, you can pull visitors to your website by creating content about your website and embedding it with your website link. Interested people will click on that embedded link and will be directed to your website. From there on, it is up to you whether you are able to do any business or not.
Earning from YouTube may not require upfront investment but it does require hard work from your part to make your account popular.
With thousands of videos being added every minute, your video content should be really worthwhile to make it stand out from the other YouTube videos published in a similar niche. Once you begin to get regular viewers, it is relatively a smooth journey from then on.

Creating a Marketing Plan with Facebook


Creating a Marketing Plan with Facebook

Facebook – the largest social networking site presently – is a phenomenon that is hard to ignore, especially when it offers a lucrative platform to promote and advertise your business.
With millions of active users, Facebook provides the best form of social marketing exposure.
Creating a Marketing Plan with FacebookHow does Facebook help?
When you have a website, you need traffic to make the website popular, right?
This is what Facebook does. With accurate search engine optimization, you can use this social networking platform to build and grow your online businesses. You get targeted traffic to your website, build your brand name and also increase your profits.
There are two ways to market on Facebook; free marketing and paid marketing. But before we go into the details, let’s check out the reasons why marketing on Facebook is so beneficial:
  1. With 450 million users worldwide, out of which more than 50 percent of members are actively involved on Facebook, it represents a potential market. An Internet marketer would be foolish not to tap into this market and allow your competitors get ahead of you.
  2. If you think Google is the best search engine ever because it receives unprecedented amounts of traffic, think again! Recently, Facebook surpassed even Google due to getting the most traffic in a single day.
  3. Facebook is multi-dimensional because it provides lots of profitable ways to ‘soft – sell’ your product or services. Unlike Twitter where marketing and advertisement is restricted to 140 characters or… unlike StumbleUpon where promotion is limited to bookmarking or showing ‘thumbs up’ or thumbs down’, Facebook allows you to promote your business through multiple ways – creating groups, fan pages, social advertisement, adding pictures, updating profiles, uploading videos and others.
In short, Facebook gives you three things important for marketing – potentially an untapped market, lots of free traffic and multiple ways of marketing and promotion.
How successful you are in utilizing this resource optimally rests on your shoulders!
Now that we have seen why Facebook is extremely beneficial, let’s learn the differences between free marketing and paid marketing.

Free Facebook Marketing

Assuming that you have a Facebook account, you must have noticed pages and groups where the owner regularly posts updates about new products and services, and invites group members to join them.
Not all of them are business – oriented though. Some people create them for charity organizations and whatever donations are received are promptly given to the charitable organization.
Creating a Facebook ‘Group’ or ‘Fan’ page is easy and free. If you want to market any product or service as an affiliate or you want to promote your business, this is where you should start – the basic level.
What you do is go to the Facebook settings page and select either ‘create a group’ or ‘create a page’ option.
There you fill out complete details and then forward its link to your friends. Some Internet marketers use this medium only when they have thousands of people added on their “friends” list.
Suppose you have 3,050 friends. When you promote your group or page and your friends visit and ‘like’ them, those pages are published on their ‘home’ page as well.
To give you a quick idea about how creating ‘groups’ and ‘pages’ will impact your business, note the following: you create a ‘Page’ and send it out to 3,050 friends on your list.
Out of those, 2,500 show interest, visit your ‘page’ and ‘likes’ it. Now the friends listed on your friend’s profile can see the ‘like’ update and visits your original ‘page’ and if this number is 500 per friend, you receive 2500 x 500 = 1250000 visits in a matter of a few days.
Therefore, we can say that by investing 2 hours in creating a ‘fan’ page and sending it to your friends, you receive 1,250,000 free traffic visits.
Does this sound like a lot of investment?
Like this, it creates a viral page of sorts. Even if you are not making sales in the beginning, you are surely getting lots of traffic and that is a POSITIVE OUTCOME.
You can create as many ‘Groups’ and ‘Pages’ as you like!

Paid Facebook Marketing

The advertisements published and visible on the right hand side of Facebook pages are the paid advertisements.
Facebook offers paid advertisement services to any small, medium or big business enterprises. They are search engine optimized and target a particular demographic section of Facebook users.
This is the reason why not all kinds of Facebook advertisements are displayed on a user’s profile.
Facebook marketing department takes note of the user’s preferences, hobbies, tastes and interests and then decides which advertisements to display on a user’s profile page.
As an Internet marketer, you want users to click on your advertisements which can be achieved through using well researched and solid long tail keywords.
Major businesses like Honda, Coca – Cola and Budweiser have found immense success with paid Facebook advertisements in a creative manner.
The Marketing Solutions forum of Facebook gives us examples of their creative advertising campaigns. Few months back, Coca – Cola created an advertisement campaign through which they sold virtual coke bottles and promised to donate $1 from each sale to a charitable organization.
Budweiser received a viral response when they encourage social interaction between its customers when they offered them the choice to select which commercials to show during televised sports games.
Similarly, to maintain its brand name and keep its customers faith intact, Honda used Facebook advertisements to keep consumers updated after their Honda recalls.
Apart from products and services, Facebook has the functuality to advertise relevant causes, links, contests, photos, videos, business events and business USP.
You can also integrate offline advertisement campaigns with your online campaign and get real – time information from your “fansumers.”
Facebook phenomenon has led to the creation of new terminology – “fansumers,” who are people who has “become a fan” of a particular Facebook brand, according to Forrester Research.
If you want to create a fantastic list of “fansumers”, you need to make your brand page interactive.
An interactive fan page will engage a participant; otherwise, people will remain a spectator but this strategy will not yield any long term results.
When your brand “fans” endorse any product or services, it increases brand value and your popularity rises.
The paid Facebook advertisements can be ‘online’ for as long as you want. From an investment perspective, they are not that costly at all. At least, they are less expensive than other forms of mainstream advertisement.

Concluding Statement

From the lengthy discussion above, we can infer that both free and paid Facebook advertisement is beneficial to promote your business.
If you wish to optimize on the untapped Facebook market, use both options wisely.
First, optimize on the free marketing option and then when comfortable, go for paid advertisements. The cost of paid advertisements can easily be recovered when you make sufficient profits from sales through Facebook.