Why Comment on MakingMoneyOnline.com?

As Making Money Online Dot Com is a fairly new site, we are pretty happy with the amount of comments we have received so far… but we want more, a lot more. After reading “7 Ways to Reward Your Blog Commentators” from Dan Keller of TycoonBlogger.com we took inventory on what we have been doing to reward our readers for commenting on our site. We were happily surprised to see that we were already doing most of the things that he had mentioned in his post. We weren’t doing them all though, so we decided to implement his other ideas as well and see if we can get a lot more comments.

So the first thing, starting tomorrow August 1^st, we will be running a “Who Comments Most” Contest each month, and the winner will get some premium ad space in our sidebar. Actually we will have 2 winners each month. The two visitors that leave the most comments (*see rules below) will each receive a premium 125X125 banner spot on our sidebar that will be displayed for the entire following month. Then those ads will be replaced by the next month winner’s ads… and so on and so on. In the event of a tie which would give us 3 or more winners, we will just rotate all the ads in those 2 spots.

*RULES: The rules are very simple. The top 2 people (plus ties) in our “Who Comments Most” section will win 1 FREE month of banner space in our designated area. We reserve the right to refuse anyone and any banners that we do not feel are appropriate  for this site. For a comment to count, it does not have to be long, but it does have to be useful to us and/or our readers. Just writing, “Great Post! Keep up the good work” will not count as a comment towards winning the contest. We need to know that you actually read the post. Mark and I will have the final say on what we feel is a comment. Also, the maximum comments we will count per day is 3. That way it will keep someone from waiting until the last day and posting a bunch of comments. We reserve the right to modify the rules AT ANY TIME.

Now for the second thing, Dan mentioned to create a post once a month with links back to the readers who leave the most comments on your site. We are going to give that a try as well. Either at the very end of the month (like today) or the beginning of the next month we will create a post with at least one link to the top 5 on our “Who Comments Most” section. This month we went a little crazy and are giving “Link Love” to a lot more than the top 5, but next month we want to give you guys something to work towards.

So here are some our friends who are in our “Who Comments Most” section. We really appreciate all your support!

Brian – SEOmkt.com – Search Engine Optimization and Marketing Blog

Brian (he has 2 sites) - BlogEngage.com – The idea of Blog Engage is to promote interaction between bloggers by “Engaging” with each other’s blogs.

John – ExtremeJohn.com – Posts on Blogging, Business, Twitter, Rants, MMA, and his life.

Gooroo – iBlogPlanet.com (was FinanceAdvisoryStop.com) – Finance, Internet, Marketing, SEO, and Miscellaneous Topics.

Sire – WassUpBlog.com – Tells you wassup in the blogging world in relation to blogging for money avenues, blog tips and tricks, etc…

Deneil – DeneilMerritt.com – An Internet Entrepreneur’s Journey

Asswass – Asswass.com – Ramblings of a rich donkey and his website.

Benjamin – BenjaminCip.com – Start Your Making Money Online Venture

Lax – TechZoomIn.com – Blogging and Internet Tips ‘N’ Tricks.

Sandeep – CuriousLittlePerson.com – Blogging for Unlimited Possibilities

Dan – TycoonBlogger.com – Adventures in Blogging

Lee – MyBlog2Day.com – Making Money Online with Blog

Tony – PaidScribe.com – SEO Writer

George – Serradinho.com – Blogging news, tips, tricks and free downloads.

Jared – TheMoneyCult.com – A No B.S. Blog about money, the tools, and people trying to make it.

Please make sure and check out the blogs above, if you haven’t already.

Another thing we did today was add “Linky Love” to our site to also encourage visitors to leave some comments. After you leave 3 comments the “NoFollow” rule will be lifted and you will start receiving some much coveted SEO “juice”.

Unfortunately, we are still having some issues with this theme and CommentLuv, so it is still not working, but we will eventually figure it out. The plugin works fine when we activate it, but for some reason when it is turned on… it makes EVERY LINK on the site open up a new tab when clicked and that really bugs me. Has anybody else experienced that problem, and if so… did you find a solution you could share?

Ok… I think that covered everything. Anybody have any more suggestions for getting more comments? If so, please let everyone know in the comment box below.

2 Simple Fixes that Could Increase Comments on Your Blog

Lately I have been doing lots of “Blog Surfing” to not only see what people are writing about, but also to comment on blogs to get our name (Making Money Online Dot Com) out there. Now I am definitely not one of those people that just say something like, “Great Post! Keep up the good work!” I like to read each post and if I have something I think I can contribute… I try and leave a useful comment. Sometimes they are quite lengthy and sometimes they could be fairly short, but I always try to add to the conversation.

While visiting all these blogs lately there are a couple of things that I have come across that has kept me from leaving comments on posts where I usually would. Here are the 2 things that keep me from sometimes leaving comments:

1) Comment boxes that don’t auto-fill. This one probably bugs me most of all. The first time you go to a blog and leave a comment you usually have to leave at least your name and email address. Most sites also let you add your web address and many nowadays let you add additional information like your Twitter ID and more. Most sites require that your first comment be manually approved by the blog owner before it appears to the public, which totally makes sense. Another thing that is common in most blogs is once you leave your first comment… your information is stored on that site so when you go to write another comment you don’t have to fill out your personal information again. There are some sites that I have found where each time you leave a post you have to fill in that information again.  I absolutely hate having to do that each time I comment on the same site and I am sure there are many others that feel the same way.  So if your site does not have that “Auto Fill” feature I think you should fix it!

2) Captcha in the comments section. This one really bugs as well. I understand that nobody wants to get a bunch of spam posts on their site (me especially), but that is what the plugin Akismet (which comes with every WP blog) is for… right? It catches almost all the spam comments we get on our sites. It’s true, we have to check the spam folder each week to make sure it didn’t grab some legitimate comments, but for the most part it works great. I hate it when I leave a comment on a blog and then I come across one of those Captcha codes that are really hard to read. Then I have to refresh it until I can read it clearly or it takes me several attempts until I type it in right. It makes me want to just leave the site and abandon my comment. Now I can definitely understand having Captcha on your contact form, as you really don’t expect too many contact emails each day. But having it in your blog comment section is really not needed in my opinion. Why even risk lose visitors to your site?

Of course these are just my personal feelings. Maybe I am the only person this bugs. All I know is having those 2 things on your site might be costing you some comments from me.

How you guys? What do you think about my opinions… do you agree? Please leave your comments below.

Build a Subscriber List for Free

Everyone knows that to really start making money online you are going to need to build yourself a subscriber list… right?

Well last week I wrote a post titled, “5 Best Bribes to Build Your Subscriber List”, which listed 5 different things you could use to bribe your readers into joining your subscriber list. In the comments section there were some of you that wanted to learn the basics of setting up the entire process of building a subscriber list without having to pay a 3^rd party provider like Aweber.

Well we have been using Aweber for many years now and have never tried to set-up a free service because we love Aweber and their reliability, and there is no way a free service can duplicate their delivery capabilities. But I did say that I would post a way to do it, so I spent several hours scouring the web and asking people for their solutions. I found it amazing that there weren’t more free solutions out there.

I finally did find a solution that should work. It is called, Your Mailing List Provider” and they are actually are a really cool service. They are not a full-blown autoresponder company like Aweber, but more of a mailing list manager and should work for building a simple subscriber list.

The major concern in my search was finding a solution that was FREE, and Your Mailing List Provider is free to start. They are also very reasonably priced when you move up to their Pro, and Pro-Plus version. The only major differences I see in the free version versus the paid ones is you don’t get any of the tracking features with the free version, you cannot manually add subscribers, and it is only free until you get your first 1000 subscribers. After that, you will have to move up to one of the other versions, which run only $3.75 per month for the Professional Version and $5.00 per month for the Professional Plus. Hopefully when you have 1000 subscribers you should be earning a lot more than that per month, so the upgrade cost shouldn’t be too hard on you.

So let’s walk through the steps for setting up you first mailing list. The first thing you are going to need to do is sign-up for a free account. You can signup here.

As this is a follow-up to my “5 Best Bribes” post, I am assuming you are going to want to give away some sort of BRIBE to entice your reader to subscribe. Since this is not an autoresponder service we will have to do it a little differently than we normally would. The way I would usually set it up would be that once the person signs up and confirms their subscription, they would receive an autoresponder message with a link to their ebook, or I might even send it as an attachment in that email. For this site we are actually giving away an entire free course that is delivered over a 2-week perid. Well we cannot do that here, so we are going to need to create a download page where the user will be redirected to once they subscribe. That should do the trick.

1) Create a free account – YourMailingListProvider.com

2) Create an eBook (bribe) and upload to server

3) Create a “Password Protected” Download Page

4) Create a Subscription Box

5) Upload Code to Your Blog

6) Test

To help make this easier on all of you out there, I decided to create a video walking you through the process. After I completed the video I realized that I could have done it a little differently, but I spent SO MUCH TIME creating the video that I didn’t have the energy to redo it.

The one thing that you don’t have to create is the “Password Protected” download page, but I actually like having the ebook protected myself. You can do it that way, but you could also send the link to your eBook in the “Welcome Email”… it is up to you. Other than that step, everything else is fine.

For some reason (which I know why) this video is not as clear as my last one, so I suggest you double-click on the video and watch it on YouTube in HIGH DEFINITION. Don’t forget to click the HD button. (sorry for the inconvenience)

Again, let me say that I have never used this service before, so I make no guarantees about anything. You guys asked for a “Free Solution” and this is what I was able to come up with.

If anyone has used this service and could give us some feedback in the comments section below, that would be awesome. Plus, if you have any better suggestions, we would love to hear about them as well.

Also, if any of you try this, please follow-up with us to let us know how it works

Our First Meetup.com Experience

I was searching for a local internet entrepreneur group in my area, and I found one called Meetup. I asked Doug if he knew anything about it, and he thought it was a networking group. It did sound interesting, so we talked our wives into letting us go out to do some research. Research usually means a few beers, so we packed up the laptop and headed out the door.

Our Meetup group was held in a quaint coffee shop (quaint meaning small) and the room was packed. The host charges a minimal fee (only $3 in our case) and he provides a one hour presentation from a well outlined series of topics. Our host was very welcoming, entertaining, and we felt like we fit right in. He wasn’t selling anything, which I liked, and Doug asked several questions during the presentation that were quickly responded to. I am the internet entrepreneur virgin, but I like to talk a lot. Doug has the knowledge and experience, but he prefers to let me handle most of the verbal duties. We work well together in this way. My motto is “Ignorance is bliss” and I usually live up to the task. Take this short story for example:

I used to go to a nightclub hypnotist with a group of friends for the entertainment of it. While I was always a willing participant during the show, my skeptical friends could not allow themselves to get hypnotized. I enjoyed being a willing volunteer rather than a witness to the volunteer’s stupidity. At the end of each show, the Hypnotist would thank his audience for attending, and especially those who allowed themselves to follow his “Power of suggestion” which is also known as hypnosis. Then he would tell us that each show is only as good as his subjects, and this is also true with each Meetup group.

Nice segue, huh? I hope I didn’t lose too many of you with my story, but it does prove a point. You get more out of life when you participate in it. I hope that by reading this article, you look up your local meetup group and give them a try. Try different topics, and you may just meet some very interesting people. That is what we are all trying to do in the first place, isn’t it? Making connections, sharing thoughts and business techniques. If you have a great idea, share it with us and our viewers.

We are definitely not the first people to mention Meetup, but we do want to share it with you and hope you give it a try. What have you got to lose? You should go in prepared with a list of questions, and also bring an open mind. You find some of the brightest things said are not the ones that you bring with you. I am usually reminded that I talk too much, and I don’t let others into the conversation. I am working on this one, really I am. My father used to tell me that God wanted me to listen and not to speak, that’s why he gave me two ears but only one mouth. So here I sit quietly, but I can type pretty fast with my two hands! Always trying to out smart the fox!

Have any of you been to a Meetup group? What was your experience? My dad also said it is nice to share, so let’s have it!

Making Money Online Selling Posters

We decided to create a new section titled “Money Making Affiliate Programs”, where each week we will be talking about some of our favorite affiliate programs we have used over the years, or new ones that we think have a lot of potential.

Since summer is going to be over before we know it (sorry), I decided to talk about an affiliate program that has brought me in many 1000’s of dollars over the years and does exceptionally well at the end of summer. Not to say it doesn’t do great year-round for making money online, but I just seem to have promoted the products more at the beginning of the each school year.

So what type of product am I talking about? POSTERS! That’s right, just plain old posters… well not just “plain old posters”, as this company has over 500,000 in stock and they are adding more and more all the time. The company is called, All Posters, but that could be a little misleading as they have grown over the years and now they sell; posters, prints, stand-ups, magnets, apparel, and much, much more…

Like any legitimate affiliate program it costs nothing to join and they offer some very advanced linking methods to make promoting any type genre of poster a breeze.

You can actually earn money a couple of different ways, which I really like. You can earn money by selling posters directly to public, which is where I have made most of my money. Plus you can earn money recruiting other affiliates to market their products, which is called a two-tier commission structure.

So here is how the commission structure is broken down:

Tier 1
You earn 20% commission for any purchase someone makes on All Posters via your affiliate link. If they purchase anything on the site for up to 10 days after they clicked on your affiliate link, you will still earn the 20% commission. The one thing I have noticed about selling posters is hardly anyone purchases just one poster. Most people purchase several, plus they offer framing and all sorts of other products, so their total bill can grow pretty quickly.

Tier 2
You can earn up to $8.00 for each new affiliate you recruit, plus lifetime residual income.

• You get $3.00 when they make their first sale
• You earn $5.00 when they make their second sale
• You earn 5% of every sale they make for life (this can be very lucrative if you recruit yourself some super affiliates)

As for marketing posters, there are many ways to go about it. I created a really basic site, PosterDiscounters.com… many years ago (which really needs a major overhaul), and for not getting much traffic it has always done pretty well at converting sales. It does especially well when I spend some time and promote it.

But don’t think you need your own custom site to make money selling posters, as I have had a lot of success over the years using other more direct methods like promoting to my different mailing lists, PPC advertising, adding their dynamic code to niche sites, etc… The only limit to marketing posters is your own imagination. Once you sign-up you will see all the cool different ways you can add posters to your site(s).

So if you are interested in making money online and are looking for another potentially lucrative income stream, sign-up here.

Quick Tip – Simple Affiliate Cloaking Method

The last 3 days have been super hectic around the office, so I have not had much time to write. My business partner Mark has been on a 2 week vacation and will be back to work on Monday, and in his absence I have had to do everything around here, so I am a little behind. Plus, my kids just got out of school Tuesday for summer break. So today is going to be one of the first of what I am calling “Quick Tips”. It will just be a quick tip on how to do something specific. I am thinking about making this a once a week type post, but we will see how it goes over.

Today I am just going to show you a quick way to “Cloak” your affiliate links. There are a many reasons to do this, but probably the best reason is it helps keep people from hijacking your affiliate links and stealing your commissions.

There are lots of different ways and services out there with which you can cloak your URLs. Simply do a Google search for “URL Redirection Services” and you will see lots of different options.

For this post I am just going to show you a really simple PHP script that you can create in seconds and works great for a simple redirection.

Here is what we use on a lot of our sites. Now this only works if your server is running PHP. Again, there are probably lots of ways to do the same thing, but this is what we have always used.

1) Open up a text editor like Notepad and paste the following code onto your page:

—————————————————————-

<?php

$URL=”http://www.PUT_AFFILTIATE_URL_HERE.com“;

header (“Location: $URL”);

?>

—————————————————————-

2) Change http://www.PUT_AFFILTIATE_URL_HERE.com to whatever your actual affiliate link is.

3) You have 2 different options on how to save it and I prefer the 2^nd method (which takes an extra step or two), but both work fine.

• Give the file a name and end it with .php extension. For example is you were promoting an affiliate program for guitar lessons, you might want to call it “guitar-lessons.php”. Then you just upload the file to your server and you are done. Then whenever you are promoting that guitar course you would use the address www.YOUR-WEBSITE-URL.COM/guitar-lessons.php.
• With this one, you are going to need to create a “folder” with whatever title you like. For the guitar lessons example, you will probably want to call the folder something like “guitar-lessons”. Next you want to save the file you created above as “index.php” and save it in the “guitar-lessons” folder. Then you just need to upload the entire folder to your server and you are done. Then whenever you are promoting that guitar course you would use the address www.YOUR-WEBSITE-URL.COM/guitar-lessons. Another option you see nowadays using this method is;  create a main folder entitled “recommends” (or whatever you like) and they upload all the affiliate folders into that file, which also helps organize the folders on your server. Then whenever you are promoting that guitar course you would use the address www.YOUR-WEBSITE-URL.COM/recommends/guitar-lessons.

So let me show you step-by-step real live example. I will create a redirection URL for an affiliate link to Jamorama.com, which is one of Clickbank’s top selling merchants for Guitar Lessons.

Step 1) I pasted the following into a blank Notepad document:

—————————————————————-

<?php

$URL=”http://www.PUT_AFFILTIATE_URL_HERE.com”;

header (“Location: $URL”);

?>

—————————————————————-

Step 2) I changed http://www.PUT_AFFILTIATE_URL_HERE.com to my actual affiliate link:

—————————————————————-

<?php

$URL=”http://mrdomains.jamorama.hop.clickbank.net”;

header (“Location: $URL”);

?>

—————————————————————-

Step 3) I created a main folder called “recommends” and then a sub-folder called “guitar-lessons” and I saved the file as index.php in that folder.

Step 4) I uploaded the folder “recommends” with everything in it to MakingMoneyOnline.com and I was done.

Step 5) Now, whenever I want to promote Jamorama, I just point people to: http://www.makingmoneyonline.com/recommends/guitar-lessons and it takes them right to Jamorama via my affiliate link. Give it a click and see it works.

After you have done this once, from then on all you need to do is create the file and affiliate folder and upload them into the “recommends” folder and you are done, which literally can be done in less than one minute.

This method also REALLY WORKS GREAT when you create eBooks and eCourses, or even offline affiliate marketing. I have even used this method on business cards.

5 Best Bribes to Build Your Subscriber List

As everyone SHOULD KNOW or you probably have heard… that the MONEY is in “The List”! It is still the best and fastest way of making money online and off, and it will probably always be that way. That is why you see companies like Google and other huge corporations spend BILLIONS of dollars on companies that have HUGE subscriber bases or followings. They want access to those users!

As for us small business owners who don’t plan on selling our businesses for billions of dollars (unless someone offers it to us) building a strong list of subscribers is of utmost importance for our long-term success.

Your list can be used for keeping your readers informed of what is new on your site, let them know of new products you have coming out, promote affiliate products, recruit affiliates to promote your product(s), etc… the list could go on and on. It is not uncommon for Internet Marketers with large lists to make many thousands of dollars in one day by sending out a simple email to their subscriber list.

As for collecting names and emails there are many different options, but one of the best and most efficient ways is to use an autoresponder. Not only can you build a subscriber list with an autoresponder service, but you can also utilize their built in autoresponders which is basically a 24/7 (working while you sleep) sales machine. I am not going to go over all the reasons why autoresponders are so great in this post, as you can read that elsewhere.

I would say however that one of the best autoresponder services on the market today is Aweber. They were one of the firsts in the business and are still the cream of the crop (IMO). We have had our account with Aweber for at least 6 or 7 years now and we have over 40 different autoresponder lists for different niches setup with just that one account. It is a must-have in our marketing arsenal!

But enough about that… What this post is about is the “Best Ways to Bribe People to Subscribe to Your List”. Yes, I said “BRIBE” people to subscribe to your list. Nowadays it is harder than ever to build a list, as EVERY WEBSITE you come to is designed to try and get you to give them your name and email address. So the best way for you to succeed is to literally BRIBE them with something in exchange for their precious contact information.

You see some sort of BRIBE on most sites nowadays as well… like the site owner that is offering you a FREE eBook or eCourse for simply providing your first name and email address. We even do that on this site with our Private Label Secrets, which if you haven’t signed up for, you are missing out on a great resource (Yes, that was a plug).

So here is a list of some great bribes you can offer your readers to help build your list and start making more money online…

1) An eBook. This is probably the most used method today and still works pretty good. We use this method on several sites and it works great. The key is to offer an eBook that really relates with the niche you are in.

2) An eCourse. An eCourse is similar to an eBook, but is usually distributed to the reader over a period of time via email. The good thing about this method is you are carrying on a continuous dialogue with your reader each day (or at whatever intervals you prefer). The key is to end each email with a little taste of what is coming up next to keep your reader intrigued and excited about getting your next email. If you would like to see this in action, sign-up for our newsletter and we will send you our eCourse on making money with PLR products. You can always unsubscribe at anytime if you like, but I don’t see why you would.

3. Run a Contest. We have had some great success with this method over the years and will probably start having contests on this site soon. Basically you just say something like, “Sign-up for our newsletter and get into a drawing to win _______”. Now there are actually several tricks to this one to help you build your list faster and to keep your subscribers longer.

• Run a raffle for your subscribers once a month, or more often if you like. Give away something that your readers will want. Use your imagination on what you can do for prizes. If you have a marketing budget you can buy prizes, but if you don’t, you will have to be creative. Do you have a skill that is valuable that you could offer as a prize? I have seen designers give away complete site makeovers, banner creations, logo creations, etc…. What do you know how to do that would be valuable to your reader? There’s gotta be something!
• For one of our other blogs we are getting our prizes from local merchants for advertising on our site. They actually pay us to advertise on our site, plus they give us free stuff that we can give away to our subscribers. Not a bad deal for us at all. I have sitting in an envelope on my desk right now; eight movie tickets, four $25 gift cards for our local brewery, two gift certificates to Extreme Pita, four free 20 inch pizza coupons from our favorite pizza shop, and more things coming in the next couple of weeks. We are hoping to be able to give away one prize a day, Monday through Friday, 52 weeks a year. That should definitely help build up our subscriber base.
• (ADVANCED METHOD) Sell the eBook that you created instead of giving it away like I mentioned in #1. Create a simple sale page for it and charge $24.95 (just an example). That way you are giving the book an “actual value” instead of giving it away and saying it’s worth $24.95 (the “perceived value”). Next… you run a contest and use your eBook as the prizes. Maybe you give away 10 copies a month, or if you have lots of traffic, 10 copies a week. It really doesn’t matter to you, as you were going to be giving it away for free anyway. This can actually work better than just giving the eBook away, as many people assume if you are giving something away, it doesn’t have any value. But if they have a good chance of winning something of value, you have better odds of getting their name and email. NOTE: If you use this method, make sure that you take the extra steps to create a really good eBook, as you might actually sell some, and you want to be known as someone who over-delivers whenever possible.

4. Subscribers Only Gifts and Deals – Let your readers know that your loyal subscribers get free stuff and deals that regular visitors don’t. You can do all sorts of stuff with this technique. You can occasionally send your subscribers free gifts like ebooks, software, maybe some custom graphics… use your imagination. You could create them yourself if you have the skills, you could have someone else create them for you, or you could customize some PLR products you have. There are all sorts of ways to come up with worthwhile gifts.

You could also offer your subscribers discounts on products you sell. We plan to use this method for the new product we have coming out. We are probably going to be selling it for $7.00 (as per the $7 Dollar Secrets Method), but we are going to give all our subscribers a $5.00 OFF Coupon Code so they can get if for only $2.00. So again, if you are not subscribed to our newsletter, you should sign-up right away.

5) Access to Membership Area – Here’s a way to really build up a subscriber list, but it probably takes the most work. Again you can do this in a couple of different ways as well. You could have your main site that has lots of really good information on it, and then create a free membership section where you offer something more. Maybe something like “advanced techniques” or “how-to videos”, just something special that the regular visitors don’t have access to. To get free access, you readers will need to join by giving you their name and email address.

Another method would be to create just one great website and only allow access to subscribers. This method is a little harder to build your list, unless you already have a good reputation built up. With the first method, at least the reader has a chance to view some of your work first, so they can decide if they like you before they give up their contact information.

Ok… that’s it for this post, as it is starting to get REALLY LONG! I could probably add several more techniques, but my fingers are starting to get tired.

Why don’t you guys give us some more tips in the comments section below? What is something people could give away to bribe people to subscribe to their list?

What’s New at MakingMoneyOnline.com?

It’s Sunday afternoon and I am sitting at my new favorite spot to write… by our pool watching my boys having fun. It is about 95 degrees out today, so we absolutely had to get wet. We started the day by going to the movies (where there is great air conditioning) and we saw Ice Age 3 which was actually really good.

Today I am writing about what is new at Making Money Online Dot Com and to celebrate the first month anniversary of this site. It has been a pretty good first month, but we have a lot of really great stuff planned for the upcoming months, so we hope you keep coming back.

First off… this weekend we have finally joined the world of those of you who “tweet” and created a Twitter account for the site. It is http://twitter.com/mmodotcom. We wanted to get twitter.com/makingmoneyonline, but unfortunately that was too long. Please take a peek and let us know what you think of the background and let us know if there is something you think we should change.

Now for you veteran Twitterers out there, how do you guys use Twitter? Do you post what you are doing all day, just links to your blog posts, or do you do something else? Since we are new at this, we are not sure how to actually best use Twitter to our advantage while making it something worthwhile to our followers. Also, do most people have it connected to their cell phone? That seems like it would get annoying rather quickly if you receive everyone’s posts to your phone.

In regards to our Twitter account, we would love to have you follow us. We would also like to follow anyone who has some of the same interests as us. So if you have a blog or website that is in the “making money online” niche, “blogging” niche or something else you think might interest us, please leave your twitter address in the comment section below. We would love to see what you are up to, plus it will let our readers know about you as well.

Also this weekend, we expanded our “Footer” to include 3 widget boxes which now include, “Most Recent Comments” and “Who Comments Most”. We will be using the second one to start running some contests in the upcoming weeks to encourage commenting, so stay tuned!

The one section of the site that we are still behind on is the “Business Spotlight” section which will be located in the top left widget box on the homepage. We actually have several people lined up to interview, but we have not decided what the best medium is to bring that to you. If you have any suggestions, please let us know.

Since this is our one month anniversary, we thought we would list our favorite posts that you might have missed if you are brand new to the site. Here are some of the ones we really like:

- Gurus Make More Money Online and Have a Lot More Fun While Doing It!

- Buy, Test, Review, Earn Your Money Back, Profit, Use Forever, Keep Making Money… Sound Good?

- How to Come Up with Blog Post Ideas

- Sometimes it Pays to be a Nice Guy

- Hey Bloggers, Scratch Our Blog and We’ll Scratch Yours

- Making Your Blog More than Just a Blog!

Well that’s it for this post. It’s time for me to jump in the pool myself!

Bloggers: Do You Want to Make Money With Your Blog?

I love reading blogs to see what people are writing about, and I like to check out the different bloggers writing styles. I also want to see the different ways people have setup the overall design of their blogs; the colors they use, the layout of the blog, the way they display ads, if they have a newsletter/rss subscription box, etc… I just like to get an overall feel for the blog.

With all the blogs I visit, I always wonder how the blogger plans to make money with their blog. I understand that there are many bloggers out there that don’t think you should make money with your blog, (which is fine) but I am not one of them

The reason I am writing this post is that I visit lots of blogs that are in the “Make Money Online” niche and I am not sure how they plan to make money online with their site. Some might have a few affiliate banners up and some Adsense ads, but nothing more. I wonder if they have any long term strategy to do so.

Since today is Friday this is not going to be a long post. I just want to ask you a couple of questions.

The first question can be answered in the following poll. I am assuming the answer would be “Absolutely“, since you are visiting a site called, “Making Money Online Dot Com“, but it might not be.

If you answered Absolutely, (and if you wouldn’t mind) please share some of your ideas for how you plan to make money with your blog in the comments below, other than just displaying banner and Adsense ads. I am sure our readers would love to hear your ideas.

Build It and Eventually the People with Money Will Come

I was having a chat this morning with one of my buddies who is one of those successful Bloggers/ Internet Marketers who many of us (at least I am) are striving to emulate. I called him up because this blog (Making Money Online Dot Com) has been live for about one month now and yesterday was my best day (as far as profits go) for this particular site.

Just yesterday alone, this site earned a whopping $148.97.  $145.20 came from 3 different affiliate product sales, and $3.77 from Adsense. Not a bad day at all for being such a new site. Unfortunately, as of me typing this… the site hasn’t made a penny yet today, but the day is not over yet.

The reason I am sharing this information with you is because of something my buddy told me when I first decided to start this blog. He gave me a very encouraging tip that I think a lot of the newer bloggers who aren’t making money online yet will really appreciate.

He said, “Build it, and eventually the people with the money will come”. When he first said it I chuckled, as it reminded me of the line from the movie, “Field of Dreams” where a voice keeps whispering to Kevin Costner’s character, “Build it and he will come”.

He explained to me that building a successful blog comes in basically 3 phases:

PHASE 1

When you first start out blogging you really have nothing but some (hopefully) good content. The next thing you need to do is market your site and build up your reputation, and the best way to do that is by networking with other bloggers in your niche. There are many ways to do that like leaving useful comments with back-links to your site on other blogger’s websites, as well a Guest Blogging. There are lots of ways to build traffic, but I am not going to go into that in this post. The key point here is to get your name in front of everyone you can.

PHASE 2

Soon your traffic will start to grow slowly, and hopefully your reputation. Here you will start to see some money, but the big money won’t start coming in just yet. The reason is that most of the traffic you are generating is from other bloggers in your same niche, many of whom are just starting out like you and don’t have a lot of money.

Traffic will continue to grow as more and more people learn about your site through word of mouth advertising, and you should start getting some organic search engine traffic in this phase as well. The key here is to not get discouraged that your aren’t making a lot of money yet, and to continue to do what you have been doing, as this phase can last for quite some time.

PHASE 3

This is the phase where the big money comes. Eventually, you will have built yourself an “Outstanding Reputation” as being an expert in your niche, and 95% (just a made up percentage, but probably close) of the bloggers that were around when you first started will have thrown in the towel… leaving you to shine with your other friends who have stuck it out. Now your name is everywhere and all the new bloggers are looking up to you. Your subscriber lists are all off the charts and anything you recommend sells like hotcakes!

I know it sounds a little oversimplified, but it absolutely makes sense.

So my question to you is…

Are you going to be one of the ones that stick it out to the end?

I know I am!

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