Dear Making Money Online,
I’ve tried the blogging thing. Affiliate marketing was fun until Big G axed my money pages. Contributing posts to revenue sharing websites works OK, as long as I don’t want to earn any more than a Starbucks coffee (not even a Latte) each month. In short, I need some help: What other legitimate ways are there to make money online?
–Whiskey Pete

Well Whiskey Pete, you’re in luck, because this week I stumbled upon a site that’s intended for people just like you. My friend Brock Hamilton has put together what just may be the web’s most comprehensive list of legitimate ways to make money online. His website 101 Ways to Make Money is just the thing for anyone who feels like their online cash generating skills are in a rut.

Need to get a little more creative than the usual money making tricks?

Sure, you’ll find the usuals there, like making money with online surveys or blogging, but Brock has gone much further to help you find your own personal cash machine with such unusual tactics as scrap metal, animal ID tags, or even poetry.

One of the good things, as well as one of the bad things that happens when you run a business (online or off) is you get contacted by all sorts of people trying to sell you on something… either a must have product or service of some kind.

Well yesterday I was contacted by this guy offering me to beta test their new traffic monetization system. To be honest I really wasn’t too interested, but I checked them out anyway. Since this site is about making money online, I figured I should test out as many different ways as I can to make money online and report back to you guys if they work or not.

The program is basically an advertising revenue sharing program, similar to Adsense, but with a cool twist. With this you place keyword text links that you choose right on your website. You can choose high paying keywords if you like, but for my test I chose keywords I know my readers are actually searching for. When a visitor clicks on one of the text links, relevant ads are then displayed right on your website. The site owner then earns money each time a user clicks onto an advertiser’s link.

When I was asked to test this program, the guy was hoping I was going to test it on MakingMoneyOnline.com, but this site is very new and not much traffic comes from search engines. It gets some, but not a lot and I know programs like Adsense get a lot more clicks from people coming from search engines. I think the reason is they are already in a clicking mood, but I am not sure. I just know that is the way it works.

Now on the other hand, we do have a site that gets a majority of it’s traffic from search engines. That would be our community website MiraMesa.com. You can see in that pie chart that over 82% of the traffic comes directly from search engines… which seems like the perfect site to test this traffic monetization program.

Now implementing the program was pretty simple. Once you sign-up you have to list the sites that you plan to use it on. Since I originally wasn’t planning on testing it on MiraMesa.com I had to wait a couple hours until it was approved.

Once approved it was fairly easy to set up. You need to create your text links for whatever search terms you like. I just went into my Google Analytics and I looked for what keywords people were using to find our site and I used several of those, and then I threw in some more that I knew people would be interested in… like Mira Mesa Real Estate, Apartments, etc…

That’s a screenshot of the text links that we are using on MiraMesa.com. I have them displayed right on the top of our sidebar so it is one of the first things people see when they go to the site, so we are hoping they get a lot of action, but we will have to wait and see.

The one other thing you have to do to make the system work is create a search results page. Unfortunately it is not setup to work with WordPress yet, so I created a simple html page with basically just a header and then inserted the code that they provided and uploaded to my server. That was it. It is not beautiful or anything, as I just wanted to get it up, but it will work for this test. If it ends up being profitable I will make it look much better. You can see what the results page looks like below.

So does it make any money? I have no idea as I just installed it… but I will let you know in a couple of weeks. I can definitely see it having potential, and I have a few niche sites in mind that I think this will do awesome. I am not sure if it is the perfect fit for all blogs… but I will know more after I run my test.

He did show me some examples of other sites that are testing it and they are actually what sold me on trying it.

• http://workathomecommunity.com (keywords right under the header)
• http://www.totalhair.net (keywords in top left navbar)
• http://www.backyardchickens.com (keywords above the Adsense ads in footer)

If you are interested in testing this out too, send me an email and I will put you in touch with the owner. To be accepted your site needs to be getting a pretty good amount of traffic, otherwise they will probably not accept you. It is still in the beta testing stage so they are not ready for the whole world to sign-up just yet.

So what do you guys think of this? If it ends up paying well, do you think it is something you would consider adding to your site?

*** UPDATE AFTER READING FIRST FEW COMMENTS – PLEASE HELP *** One thing I have found from people not living in the US is that very few ads appear and more often no ads appear at all when someone clicks on a text link. Can you do me a favor and test a couple for me and let me know in the comments section what Country you live in, and if any ads displayed. You can just click on these 2 keywords… Make Money from Home and Mira Mesa Real Estate. I would think Make Money from Home should produce results for everyone as that it has worldwide interest… so I am interested to see your results. I do not want you to click on the ads… I just want to know if people outside the US can see the ads.

THANKS!

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.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

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.

As we get started we are not sure what the best way to present this to you should be. Should it be all text, audio, video, or any combination of the three? Our goal eventually is to travel to the different locations where our interviewees will be and do one-on-one video interviews, but that will be down the road a bit.

Here are several questions we have come up with (in no particular order).

1. When did you get started making money online?
2. How did you make your first dollar online?
3. What was your first big success?
4. When you first started, did you have a full-time job as well? If so, at what point did you quit your full-time job to focus on your online business?
5. What do you do yourself and what do you outsource?
6. Do you have employees?
7. How much time do you spend each day online?
8. How long did it take you to consistently make money online?
9. What key factors contributed to your success?
10. What were your goals when you started your online business?
11. What key advice would you give to someone just starting out?
12. What niche do you think is still viable?
13. What do you think is the next big thing online?
14. How long do you stay with a product before you move on to the next one?
15. Who are your influences/mentors?
16. Other than yourself, who would you recommend as a great resource?
17. Who do you respect in this business?
18. What is your favorite quote and why?
19. Finish this sentence: I am the best in my field because…
20. What is your favorite book?
21. What is your one “Must Have” piece of software?
22. What is your homepage when you turn on your computer?
23. If you were just starting out today, but know what you know, what would you do to make money online?
24. Do you have a favorite blog, and if so, what is it and why?
25. What do you feel is the lifespan of an online business?

Those are just some of the questions we came up with so far. We will tailor the questions for each particular person we interview. What other questions would you like us to ask? Also, is there any particular Internet Entrepreneur that you would like us to interview? Please leave your answers in the comments section below.