Make Money Online with SponsoredReviews.com
February 7, 2008
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Lately I’ve been using Sponsored Reviews to make money online. I know that before I have talked about cutting out the middle man - and for good reasons. By cutting out the middle man you have to have to follow another site’s rules on the reviews you write while they take a cut of your pay. So instead, you should also offer private advertising opportunities on your blog, and let people pay you directly via Paypal. That way your advertisers save some money and you get 100% of the profits, while setting your own rules and prices.
However, there’s one problem with that. You’re missing the marketplace. Most sites that manage paid reviews have a marketplace so advertisers can find you. By running the advertising privately, you don’t have that exposure. I can’t stress enough that you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket, so instead, run your own advertising and sign up on the paid review sites as well.
And in my opinion, Sponsored Reviews is the one to sign up for. They have a wonderful marketplace - the advertisers can find you and you can find potential advertisers as well. Sponsored Reviews has a great system to rate a site’s quality, and you choose your own price. Then you can bid on opportunities to write about.
Even though Sponsored Reviews takes 35% of the cut (which is better than ReviewMe’s 50% share), I still make more off reviews there than I could selling them privately here, even after Sponsored Reviews takes their chunk of the earnings. That’s all thanks to the marketplace, and the way they rank the sites in the system.
And if you manage to have your blog rank five stars - or checkmarks in this case - which is a very easy thing to do, then Ben at Blogging Experiment has shared his way of earning hundreds of extra dollars. It’s bold, but it’s a pretty easy thing to do and could actually turn out making your income rise through the roof without any extra work.
As an added bonus, you could even draw in plenty of traffic for your reviews. After reviewing Credit Karma, I was on the first page of Google for the term for a while, and got a lot of visitors that were trying to read up on their service. If you write an excellent review, it could do well in search engines and bring you tons of traffic in the long-term.
Out of all the paid review sites including PayPerPost, ReviewMe, Smorty, and others, Sponsored Reviews is my favorite. They’ve definitely proven to be the most profitable for me and it looks like my income from them will continue to only go up. I completely recommend them if your income needs a boost, because it’s incredibly easy to make more money than you would otherwise.
You can sign up now if you like, or go ahead and ask any questions you’d like in the comments. I would feel free to help you learn how to maximize your earnings from Sponsored Reviews, or just how to sign up or use the system in general.
So you don’t miss out on more money making tips in the future, subscribe to Super Blogging, because there’s much more to come!
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Are Audio Ads the Next Big Thing?
February 3, 2008
Photo credits: hundrednorth.
Basically these ads are a 5-second audio clip that plays whenever someone visits your site. Because of this, you are paid for every single visitor, 100% of the time. This is very different from advertising networks such as Adsense, which are shown on your page but require someone to click on them for you to be paid. With audio ads, every visitor grows your income and helps you monetize your site - not just a select few.
However, if you’re running a professional site or one that’s never supposed to normally have audio, then this type of advertising might not be for you. If a visitor comes to your site and is startled by sound, even if for only five seconds, it might send them away for life. While it’s true that about 60% of people browse the web with their volume off, that still leaves 40% of your visitors that you might scare off.
Sites that might work with audio ads are sites that are very unprofessional and don’t require any reading. If your visitors will be reading articles or come for information, then audio will be inappropriate. However, an online game website or a site profile might be okay with audio ads. You just have to think of what your visitors want and need. Put yourself in their shoes and imagine what your first impression would be on your website if it had a 5-second audio clip that played. Would it bother you, or would it not make a difference?
Audio advertising can be a fantastic way to monetize your blog or site if implemented properly. It won’t be right for everyone, but if you run a site that can work with it, you’ll be paid for 100% of your site’s visitors, even if they have their volume turned on or not. If that number doesn’t impress you, then what will? If you have any questions about the benefits of audio ads, how they work, or if you want to know whether they’ll be good for your site or not, go ahead and drop a comment and ask - I’d be glad to answer. Click here to sign up for audio ads.
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3 Ways To Make Money Online With Donations
January 9, 2008
Photography by annia316.
Why To Accept Donations
Maybe Adsense isn’t doing so well for you, or you can never seem to make enough with your affiliate sales. It might be time that you could start asking nicely for donations.
First of all, you might be wondering why anyone would want to give you something for free, and why you should even bother with trying. If you’re working hard on your site or blog, then someone out there might be compelled to help you out or reward you for that hard work. If you try your best to help your readers, then maybe one will come along that wants to help you in return. And besides, setting up a donation button or page takes a couple minutes of your time. It never hurts to try, and you never know - you might turn on the computer one day and have a nice surprise waiting for you!
If you add a little donation area in your sidebar, or a small page dedicated to the purpose, someone might donate to you because they like your cause and they appreciate what you do. Don’t push the donations - instead, use one of the following sites or widgets to help you out:
PayPal
“Collect donations from a button on your website, or even using a link in an email! PayPal Donations is a low cost way for you to accept credit card and bank account donations. Integrate PayPal Donations with your website in a few easy steps.”
PayPal is very easy to use on your site to generate donations. All you have to do is insert of a snippet of code to create a little donation button and you’re ready to go. Some good things about PayPal include the fact that donation payments are handled with your account like any other transactions (so PayPal doesn’t take a huge cut of your money), and PayPal is also a universally accepted way to transfer money - your visitors will feel at ease using it.
ChipIn
“ChipIn is a Web-based service that simplifies the process of collecting money from groups of people. We make this process quick, easy, and secure, and we provide organizers with numerous ways to get the word out about their ChipIn event.”
I really like ChipIn. Basically they allow you to sign up and create a widget, and you can also set a goal for how much money you’d like to earn. Then, as people donate, this widget visually tracks your progress to that goal. Best of all, ChipIn uses your PayPal address to collect your earnings for you, so it’s easy to use and easy to trust as well. If you’re going for a certain monetary goal or want a cool-looking widget, then ChipIn is what you want to use.
ScratchBack
“ScratchBack is an online ‘tipping’ system (or as we like to call it, a fancy-schmancy tip jar). It allows you, the blogger, to accept tips and ‘give back’ links or images in return on your blog.”
ScratchBack is the newest way to accept donations, and it’s probably the best idea so far. You need absolutely no skills to set it up; all you have to do is insert the code where you want the widget to show up. Then your readers can buy links off your ScratchBack widget as a way to thank you for your hard work (these links are nofollow, so Google WILL NOT penalize you for them). You can set whatever price you like, and even though ScratchBack takes a small cut of the earnings, they deserve it. This is the one that will earn you the most because your readers will be more likely to donate since they get something back in return.
How To Accept Donations
Readers always like getting something back in return, especially if they’re thinking about helping you out and donating to you. But if you’d like to take it a step past ScratchBack, where the donators get temporary exposure on your blog, then you might want to consider making a donation page.
You can create a donation page in so many ways. You can accept money via PayPal or even use ChipIn to keep a running total for you. At the top of the page you can display the total money you’ve acquired from all the donations, and then after that you can give a permanent link to everyone who has donated, in order from greatest to least on how much they have given (and showing that number as well). You’d be surprised at how some people will donate in order to just get a link on your blog or to be included in the list!
However you decide to do it, donations can be a nice way to make money online - and it can be nice for both parties, not just for you, if you’re willing to take a little time to thank and give back to those who help you out.
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Make Money Online With Your Talents
December 27, 2007
Photography by: flikr.
We all have different talents and abilities, but as bloggers we must learn to recognize what we’re good at and use our unique traits to help us make money online. Obviously as bloggers we should be able to write and we should know what we’re writing about, but there is more to us than just that! Everyone has a multitude of talents, and all you’ve got to do is think about what they are and put them to use, implementing ideas no one else would think of.
A huge part about making money online is being unique. Think about one of the most popular blogs in your niche, whichever one that comes to mind first. Did that blogger get successful by copying others and never doing anything new, never sharing their unique talents? Of course not. You need to separate yourself from the crowd and offer something different.
Right now I challenge you to sit down and grab a pen and a piece of paper. Jot down at least ten things that you’re good at, and think about how you can use these abilities to make money online. Take notes on how you can apply those talents to new projects or how you can work them into your existing blog or site and create linkbait or money-making potential. This might seem hard, but honestly it isn’t. The key thing here is to be open-minded, to think out of the box. Open your eyes to a new perspective so you can see how your talents can be used in a different way from the norm.
It’s obvious that you can use your talents and abilities to start new projects. For example, if you’re a great cook you can start a baking blog, posting photos and recipes to some great dishes or even a video of you in the kitchen. But there are already plenty of blogs like that, and unless you can think of even more ways for yours to stand out, it could end up being a wasted effort.
Think about how you can use your talents and apply them to your current blog or site, no matter what its niche is. If you can draw, draw a picture of an A-list blogger and it’ll probably get plenty of attention. Can you sing or write songs? Make a video of you singing a song you’ve written about your niche - it might go viral like Kina’s song about Digg did. Like mentioned above, maybe you can bake. Bake a dessert or cookies that resembles something in your niche, such as a popular site’s logo. Use your abilities and your creativity to your advantage!
There are thousands of ways to create linkbait and draw attention to your site, thus helping you to make money online - all you have to do is open your eyes and look around for something unique that you can do. One of my New Year’s resolutions for this blog is going to be offering something different and being more unique. What about you? Share your ideas and opinions in the comments section!
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WidgetBucks Pays… But They’re Still A Scam!
December 5, 2007
I recently wrote about how WidgetBucks is a scam. Now, it turns out that they HAVE paid people, and written about payments on their blog. So you must think that I’m feeling pretty stupid now for accusing them of being a scam - but I’m not. Just because a program has sent out payments does not mean that they’re 100% legit.
They pay people to convince you they’re trustworthy. There has been word going around lately that WidgetBucks is a scam. But most people think that once everyone has received their payments, a program is valid. That’s not always the case. WidgetBucks has paid their members to convince everyone that they ARE a trustworthy company and instill that in your heads, while they’re still saving loads of money by removing earnings from people’s accounts and/or banning them for no reason at all.
Yes, they do remove their members’ earnings. It’s not only happened to me, but several other people. You log on one day and find your account is perfectly fine, except then you go to see how much money you’ve made and find the amount total a lot less than it was the day before - or completely gone - with no reason given whatsoever! WidgetBucks claims this is because the members are breaking the rules, but I seriously doubt this is the case. I know I broke no rules, yet the few dollars I’d earned were completely removed from my earnings. And if I had broken rules, why was I not sent an email or shown a message on the site telling me so? OR, you can be banned for no reason and for doing nothing, which also saves WidgetBucks a lot of money from having to pay you. I think WidgetBucks is using that excuse as a reason to not have to pay people the money they’ve rightfully earned.
They can afford to pay some members because they steal from others. WidgetBucks is still saving money even when/if they pay you, because they’re inconspicuously removing money from other people’s accounts when they think it won’t be noticed - and when it is noticed, they claim that you were breaking a rule or performing click fraud even when that’s not true - but only if you notice. They don’t say anything otherwise.
And how can WidgetBucks be a completely legitimate company when they’re so unprofessional? Let’s look over a few things that a professional company would not do:
- Their company blog would not be a free one hosted on Blogspot.
- They would not have the word suck in their motto, “Ads suck. Ours don’t.”
- They would not have made the decision to not pay for international clicks.
- And the already-stated, they would not dishonestly remove earnings from their members’ accounts or ban their members for no reason (or for a false reason at that).
That’s not all, but I think you’re getting the message. WidgetBucks is trying to get you to trust them, so they can get away with more scamming. They have the $25 signup bonus there to draw you in and convince you they’re legitimate, they pay a lot more money per click than any other company out there, and they’ve paid some of their publishers - they want you to trust them. But if you do, they can only continue to cheat the money away from the other half of their publishers. Like I said before, just because they’re paying you doesn’t mean they’re not stealing from you too. When it’s likely to go unnoticed, earnings might go missing with no reason provided.
Disclaimer: Everything that is stated above is based on my opinions, theories, observations, and realizations. I am in no way 100% correct, but that doesn’t mean I am incorrect either - and either way, I still firmly believe in all I have said (and if you’d like to know more on my opinions, just ask). While I could be wrong, I don’t want anyone to be cheated out of their hard-earned money and I want everyone to be completely honest with what’s going on - primarily the WidgetBucks company - but that’s not likely to happen. We may never know the reasons behind some of the things WidgetBucks does, and we may never know for sure why they’re removing money from people’s accounts - I DO know that that is happening for a fact. If you’ve gotten paid by them, then good for you. However, I advise you to check up on your earnings several times a day if you have the time, and pay close attention if any of them disappear. Please leave me a comment letting me know your opinions, for I’ve already stated mine.
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