How to Create a Gravatar

Today’s “Quick Tip” was inspired by a funny post I read over at Misc Bytes. As I was reading the post it reminded me of the Gravatar I am using and where I got it. When I first started leaving comments on blogs I never used a Gravatar, as I never even thought about it.

But when we started Making Money Online we decided we needed some cool Gravatars so people could relate the name to a face. Well I have always liked those cartoon looking cariactures I have seen around the net, so I searched around for different companies that created them. I ended up finding an AWESOME company that not only does a great job, but they only charge around $5 to create one for you. The company is called CartoonMe, and not only do they do a great job, but they have a fast turnaround time (less than 72 hours) as well.

I have actually used them several times now, but when I first ordered one… I didn’t have any recent photos of me or Mark that I liked. I did have this photo of us from several years ago on St. Patrick’s Day (when our wives use to let us party) at one of our favorite bars. So I scanned it and here is the original photo. (I am on the left and Mark on the right)

Then I cropped each head and made them their own image, as CartoonMe will only do one face at a time. The ordering process is beyond simple. You give them your email address, select the photo you want to use, crop the photo right there online and make your payment. Then within 72 hours (but we got them back much faster) you are emailed your cartoon.  Here are the results from our first order…

As I mentioned that photo was from several years ago (I think around 7) and I have probably gained 20 to 30lbs since then.  So I have been using that as my Gravatar… since it is a more flattering image of me. I am planning on losing weight by the end of the year, so I will update my Gravatar then . You can see a more recent image of us on our About Us page if you like.

So, if you are looking to get a fun cartoon-type image for your Gravatar, or just want to have one for something else, I suggest you give CartoonMe a try.

And for any of you Graphic Designers out there… since our site is about making money online, you might want to consider developing this skill yourself and offering this service. It could be a good lead-in to offering your clients other services you provide.

Now if anybody decides to get one, please let us know… as we would love to see the finished product!

What You Can Do With PLR Content?

Today is a follow-up to the post I wrote about Private Label Rights content, which I basically described what it is, as well as the other type of “rights” that are available like “Reseller” and “Master Reseller” rights.

In this post I am going to talk just a little bit about some different ways you can use PLR content to; help build your subscriber list, help you create awesome sales pages and helping you with making some money online.

But first I want to say again to all you bloggers out there reading this… I DO NOT RECOMMEND THAT YOU USE PLR CONTENT FOR POSTS IN YOUR BLOG!!!

Also, I am just going to go over a few simple ways here to use PLR content. If you want to really learn lots of different way to utilize it… I strongly suggest you sign-up for our FREE COURSE. It is a 2-week course where we send you a new chapter each day with lots of useful content. Okay… enough with the free sales pitch.

As I said in the previous post, PLR content comes in many forms nowadays like; articles, ebooks, graphics, software, audio and videos… and each can be used in different ways. I have never personally used any PLR audios or video yet, but I can see where they have their place.

Since I don’t want to make this some monstrous post I am just going to go over 3 different ways you can use PLR content to help you with making money online…

Create an eBook as a gift for subscribing to your newsletter. If you read my previous post, “5 Best Bribes to Build a Subscriber List” you know that offering a free eBook is a great way to get people to subscribe to your mailing list. Now finding good PLR content is a great way to create this type of gift. There is literally tons of great PLR content out there on every niche imaginable, so finding content for your eBook shouldn’t be too hard.

You probably can find an already completed eBook on whatever niche you are in, but I would never go that way. It is much better to find many different articles that you like on your desired  subject and save them in a folder. Then when you find all you need… take them and lay them out in an order that would make sense to your readers.

Next comes the fun part of the process. I would then go through each article word-by-word and change them up as much as needed. I would reword them, add to them, and take away any text that was not needed. I would add links where needed, as well as affiliate links to hopefully generate a little extra cash. That is basically what I would do.

Next I would create an eCover for the book. Fortunately, I can do that myself, so I don’t have to hire anybody. But if you don’t… it is easy to find someone to create you a good one for $20 or less. Then just turn the project into a PDF file and you are done.

Create an awesome sales page – Not all, but many PLR providers that offer eBooks often give you complete sales letters along with graphics for each eBook they have available. The cool part about that is all the sale letters come with private label rights too. That means you can take your favorite parts from each sales page and create your own. I can honestly say that I have almost zero copywriting skills when it comes to creating a sales page, but I have hundreds of PLR eBooks with sales pages on my external hard-drive to grab from.

Now most of the copywriting that you get isn’t as high quality as paying someone 10K to create for you, but they do the trick. When I have a project that needs a sales page I can just grab a line or two from one source and maybe a few from another and slowly build myself my own unique sales letter. Unlike a swipe file where you use it mainly for ideas… with a PLR sales letter you can take a sentence word for word if you like, but I always think you should modify it a little.

Making money online with PLR content – There are unlimited ways to make money online with PLR content, but I will quickly go over a few of the ways I have made money over the years with it. Again, if you want more details you should sign-up for our course.

- Create an eBook and sell it. Follow the instructions I mentioned above on how to create an ebook… just make sure you really give it your own unique touch.

- Create 2 or 3 eBooks like above, but instead of selling them, offer them as FREE bonuses for purchasing a product through your affiliate link. This is an easy way to sell a lot more affiliate products.

- Create niche information sites and earn money through Adsense. Again, you definitely need to change the articles up quite a bit to make them more unique for Google and the other search engines, but I have made a TON of money from Google Adsense with a few of these type sites over the years.

- For more ways… sign-up for my FREE COURSE! *** NO PLR CONTENT WAS USED IN CREATING THAT COURSE ***

Here I go making my post way too long again, so I should stop. I was going to tell you how you can get a ton of PLR Content for FREE, but I will have to save that for tomorrow

What is Private Label Content?

As everyone knows there are unlimited ways of making money online and new ones being created all the time. Today I want to talk to you about Private Label Rights Articles and Products. If you want to learn about it in much more detail I suggest you sign-up for our free e-Course here. It is a 2 week email course that teaches you all sorts of ways of making money online with Private Label Rights content. We use Aweber as our autoresponder service, so if you don’t like the course (which I know you will love) you can unsubscribe at any time, plus we will NEVER share your email address with anyone.

I am sure most of you know what Private Label Rights content is, but there are some people that don’t, so I think I better go over exactly what it is first…

For those of you that have signed up for our free PLR Secrets Course the description below might sound very familiar, as I am taking a lot of the information below right out of the first day of the course. It was easier than having to rethink everything over again, plus we only have a little over 30 subscribers so far… so most of you have not actually read it yet.

You probably keep seeing the term Private Label Rights popping up everywhere you look these days. You may have even seen them abbreviated as PLR products. If you’ve been wondering what the heck they are, but were afraid to ask, well now you’re going to finally learn.

In a nutshell, Private Label Rights products are products that you buy (sometimes when you’re lucky, they’re even given away) that you can use, basically any way you please. These types of products can take on a several forms nowadays, as you can see them as articles, e-books, software, graphics, audios and we are starting to see a lot of PLR videos as well.

PLR content is sold in several different forms; people sell articles and products individually, they sell them bundled together as packages and there are lots of membership sites that charge you a monthly fee for unlimited access to there usually ever-growing collection of PLR content. We have joined several of these type of membership sites over the years and still belong to a few which we love.

So listen up, because here’s the good part. Let’s say that you were to buy a bundle of PLR articles. You’d then be able to take those articles, and change them in anyway you want – by rewording them, adding to them, taking away from them; you name it, and making them your own. In fact, though many people don’t change them like this, I highly recommended that you do. Actually… the more you change them the better. If I am using PLR content for a project I really just like using it as a starting point. From there I delete whatever information is not needed, then I try and add a lot of my own content, and then I arrange it so it fits my project

What Are Your Rights?

Before I go on any further and confuse you, let’s talk about different types of rights on the products you can buy, and the rights you have with those products. We know that with Private Label Rights you can change them however you want, but that’s not always the case with everything you buy, and it’s important to know the difference to help keep you out of heaps of trouble for using someone else’s content illegally (as in getting sued!).

Okay, the one you’ll see very often are products with Resale Rights. These are very simply a product that you have the right to resale, however you do not have the right to claim them as your own, or change them in anyway whatsoever. You pretty much have to sell them for whatever they’re priced at by the creator of the product. You can make money from resale rights, but more often than not, these products are sold by everybody and their mother. You can definitely make money promoting these types of products, but there are better options in our opinion.

Master Resale Rights on the other hand are a little more lenient. With these, in many cases you have the right to give them away (but check with the TOS) – for instance to your list, or to new subscribers as a gift, etc. You also can pass the right for others to resell them, or give them away to their customers. This comes in handy for the purpose of viral marketing.

Here’s something else that you’ll like. With Master Resale Rights, you usually are given the sales copy, plus the graphics for the website, very often given in a handy little zip file for your convenience – therefore letting you bypass that step which is not easy for most.

All of your rights are given to you in what’s known as the Terms of Service (TOS). ALWAYS read these… just because you’re getting a certain bundle of rights, say Master Resale Rights, it doesn’t mean that all Master Resell Rights are the same. Some things change just as in any contract. The only one way for you to truly know, and keep yourself out of the deep stuff, is you must read the (TOS) and follow the rules.

Okay… now I am sure there are many of you that will scoff at the idea of using PLR content as they think the quality is poor and that they are way overused. Well like anything there is not so high quality content out there, but I am here to tell you that there is some really great PLR content out there as well… a lot of it.

To be honest, I would never use PLR content for any of our blogs (except for an occasional website flip or maybe some post ideas), but for creating some product giveaways and some other ways of generating money online… PLR is perfect. If I told you how much money I made over the past 5 years using PLR content you would be be amazed.

I better stop here for today as this post is getting way too long. Stop by tomorrow and I will tell you a little more on why you should think about using PLR content for “some” of your projects and where you can get a lot of really great PLR content for FREE.

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!

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