Are you still looking to make money from your blog? A great spot to start is with a little site called Text Link Ads. They’ve been in the game for many years now and are a solid company to deal with.

Since 2007 I’ve been utilizing (TLA) on my hiking trail website, Virginia Hiker. All I’ve had to do is put up a small widget code on my site’s sidebar and let it run. Every so often I get an email from TLA saying that they’ve sold a link on my site and that’s it – I don’t have to do anything else. The links are automatically added through the widget and there is no maintenance on your end.  Then the following month the check just shows up!

Now, the amount that I’m making each month from Virginia Hiker (which is currently my only site that has sold links through TLA) is not anything to go crazy about and call my self an expert on. However, every amount helps at the end of the month and puts you on your way to growing your business!

Here are a few answers to common questions you probably have about TLA.

How long does it take TLA to review a submitted site?
It can take 24 hours to be approved. Then you need to add the code on the exact same page that was approved, then 1-3 days to get packaged on and placed on the site depending on number of submissions. Another great feature is that you can keep adding multiple sites if you have them and manage all your sites under one account. This can really grow your earning potential!

Can I control what links appear on my site?
Yes, you can choose to be emailed every time a new ad is sold so you can approve it or deny it from being published. This is great because it also helps you keep track of how many links have sold on your site by notifying you that a link has sold.

Can I run Text Link Ads along with other ad systems I am currently running?
If you’re link me, you are trying to expand your money making avenues and running multiple different ad programs on your site, or selling links and banners privately. Well, it’s great to know that Text Link Ads can be run along any contextually served product. They do ask that TLA be the sole provider of static HTML advertisements, as this will protect the value of the advertisements as well as give you the highest payout.

I hope this quick post has given you some ideas about different revenue streams out there. There is so much talk about making money on Facebook, Twitter, and all the other social media sites, that sometimes people forget to monetize their own website!

Give Text Link Ads a try and let me know what you think! Like I said, I’ve been with them since 2007 and have only had great experiences. Their support has been great when needed too, so if you have issues with getting your widget to work on your site, just contact them and they will be quick to help!

Good luck!

Only 2 days left in this great offer!

The sale is over, but the book is still an amazing one to pick up!

If you have big dreams for your blog but have been putting improving it in the ‘one day’ basket – you’re not alone.

31 Days to Build a Better Blog is a downloadable e-book from Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net designed to help you revitalize your blog by giving you 31 tasks that will all help to turn it into the page view powerhouse you’ve always dreamed of.

Each day in the project contains:

1. A Task – something to DO that day.
2. Teaching – each day you’ll be given great instruction on both the WHY and HOW of the task of the day.

This two pronged approach is designed so that you come away from the challenge having not only learned how to build a dynamic a blog but you’ll have actually DONE something with the knowledge.

How to Use the Workbook

While originally designed for bloggers to work through over a month – the feedback that we’ve been hearing from bloggers indicates that 31DBBB is being used in a variety of ways including:

• Intense Training – bloggers setting aside weekends or weeks to go through multiple tasks at once
• 1 Task a Day – the way we designed it – one day at a time
• 1 Task a Week – bloggers taking their time with the challenge and making the tasks week long tasks
• Monthly Cycle – bloggers using the tasks again and again each month as a monthly routine for their blogging.
• Occasional Inspirational Resource – bloggers dipping into 31DBBB on a more occasional basis – using it on days when they have time or lack inspiration.

The great thing about 31DBBB is that you can do it at your own pace and in your own way.

Who is this Workbook for?

31 Days to Build a Better Blog is for bloggers at different stages of their blogging including:

• those who have just started a blog but who don’t know what to do next
• those who have had a blog for a while but it’s stalled in its growth
• bloggers with bloggers block and lacking inspiration

This workbook is NOT designed for bloggers yet to start a blog (PreBloggers). It doesn’t cover setting up a blog. If that’s you check out the ProBlogger book which covers this aspect of blogging.

By the end of the 31 Days you’ll have:

• written a variety of different types and styles of posts
• learned techniques for coming up with new post ideas
• promoted your blog in a variety of ways
• built relationships with readers
• reached out to and developed working relationships with other bloggers
• developed an editorial calendar for your blog going forward
• discovered ways to be more connected to your niche/topic
• designed a plan for the next month of your blogging

All in all the daily tasks are 31 steps to transform you blog into a valuable online asset.

3 New Year Bonuses

Bonus #1: Free Report: 9 Things to Do to Get Your Blog On Track in The New Year
Bonus #2: Podcast with Leo Babauta from Zen Habits
Bonus #3: Podcast with Neil Patel from QuickSprout

There are less than 2 days to get the bonuses, and the half price discount. This book normally sells for $40, here is your chance to get so much more for so much less at just $19.95. I just picked up my copy and plan on starting reading it tomorrow, but I wanted to pass along the great savings and opportunity to you all! Go check it out now! Click here to view more details

I’m so sorry I didn’t post this earlier but I am just getting to it and now there is REALLY limited time! Check this out everyone! If you haven’t already tried out David Risley’s 3DayMoney video training course and you want to learn how you can make money online and through your website, then you need to take advantage of this offer.

Like I said, the offer is ending soon, so there is only until September 8th at 2 PM EST to get the half off price of $49 versus the regular $97. It’s a one time deal – one payment, no recurring memberships or anything like that.

In Only 3 Days, You Can Have the Internet Strategy Which It Took David 11 Years To Figure Out! The Same Strategy That Made Me $141,011.55 last year while Being My Own Boss, Working From Home, And Wearing Shorts and a T-Shirt All Day.

By signing up and trying out this course, you get the following:

• 14 Multimedia video presentations where I personally guide you through
• A total of over 2.5 hours of video content!
• A full transcript of the presentations for your reference, any time, anywhere. 92 pages total!
• MP3 audio of all presentations for listening on the go
• Full, step-by-step checklist to guide you through the material and ensure your full understanding

Plus, since there is limited time to act, to make it more attractive, David is throwing in even more freebies!

1. Blogging Formula Using Wordpress – a 12 VIDEO course which takes you  from blogging basics through installing Wordpress, customizing your theme, adding plug-in’s, promoting your blog and getting  traffic.
2. Quick Start Guide To Online Profits – With so many others already earning money and touting the praises of their methods, where exactly do you begin? This report will give you a great head start into the world of Internet business .

It has been months since the last promotion David ran for 3DayMoney so there’s no telling when the next time this offer will come around again!

In part 1, I gave a quick background on my latest affiliate marketing efforts, suggested you sign up with Market Leverage and Commission Junction, and also talked about deciding on the type of offers you want to promote. Now that you’ve got the offer you want to promote, perhaps something in the dating arena, it’s time to move forward with setting up campaigns within the different advertising arenas, analyzing your stats, and testing keywords.

I’m just going to use the topic of dating offers as an example, but the tips I’ll give obviously apply to any niche or offer you pick.

Getting traffic to your offer

You can’t make money without traffic. So, getting people to see your ad, click on your links, submit their info, or even purchase something is the most important part of all of this. Deciding on where you want to get that traffic from is the tough part. There are so many options – Google AdWords, Microsoft AdCenter, Facebook, Twitter, and many more. For this example, we’ll stick with AdWords and AdCenter since they are pretty similar.  Sign up for both of them as you’ll want to diversify and test which platform works better for you. Most affiliate marketers seem to believe that AdCenter converts better, but it takes longer for a campaign to ramp up and receive traffic, where with AdWords you may see impressions and clicks more quickly, but not necessarily any conversions. Test them both and keep working with them.

Within each of the sites, you’ll be able to set up different campaigns. I like to to test different keywords, so if we are dealing with a Dating offer, then I may set up the overall campaign with the offer name. Then within the campaign you can set up your different ad groups. These are the ads that will be displayed and the keywords that they would show for. I set up different ad groups based on different groups of keywords. To get off the dating example for a second, a better one to understand this might be if you were promoting an affiliate link for a discount printer ink website. You could have Ad Groups for each different printer type or manufacturer (Epson, HP, etc) and then have all your keywords relating to that manufacturer or group. This way you can see which keywords are performing the best within different ad groups. I think that explanation makes sense, if not leave a comment and I’ll try to help explain some more!

Once you’ve got your Ads and ad groups set up, set your budget for spending and let it go.

Finding Keywords

Doing keyword research is probably the most time consuming part of this process. There are so many tools out there and different websites you can use. Ian Fernando just posted a video about the Google Wonder Wheel which is an excellent tool to use and gain ideas from. Within Google AdWords and Microsoft AdCenter there are also keyword research tools which are pretty helpful in giving you ideas. You can just put in your main keyword and it will spit out tons of related terms and even show you the search volume for them. I’ll post more in the future about keyword research as I get more into it. Right now, I don’t really have any set method or system that I use besides the research tools within AdWords and AdCenter.

Testing, Testing, Testing

The biggest part to making this venture successful besides effective keyword research is continually testing every aspect of your ad and campaign. You always want to be changing your keywords (removing some and adding others) to see what works, changing the text or copy of your ad, and also your ad headlines. Another tip is to make as many ads as you can! There’s nothing stopping you from creating hundreds of different ads and seeing what performs the best – this is what some of the big guys do…all day. Just changing a word or two can make a big difference.

Along with testing, you want to keep checking your stats to see what keywords bringing impressions, and more importantly, are getting clicked. Also, be ready to drop some money to see some rewards. I’ve probably spent about $200 to make the $60 that I did. So there is definitely a big learning curve involved, but you could stumble on a great niche or ad that converts great and makes all that money back for you right away!

Over the weekend there was a bunch of sites posting about selling advertising space on your website or blog. A lot of it was great information, so I recommend you check it out. In case you missed some of it, I’ve linked up a few of the articles that I enjoyed below that have great suggestions about attracting and retaining advertisers on your blog.

5 Ways To Make An Empty Ad Slot on Your Blog Work for You on ProBlogger.net

7 Reasons Not to Have Empty Ad Spots On Your Blog on ProBlogger.net

Sold My Advertising, Now What? on Retire@21

Finding Your First Advertisers For Your Blog on Retire@21

5 Ways to find Direct Advertisers for your Blog on ProBlogger.net

If you are looking for an affordable and easy way to manage ads on your blog or website, I suggest checking out OIO Publisher. OIO Publisher is a plugin that I have used on some other sites of mine and will be implementing on the new release of Dorm Room Biz.

In tough economic times like that of which we are experiencing today, coming into 2009, everyone is looking for extra ways to make some side money or even a very lucrative side income.  This is especially true for students and young entrepreneurs, or any internet entrepreneur. For those that focus on working with affiliate marketing and affiliate offers, conversions may be down and earnings may have dropped a little bit. For those focusing in other areas of the make money online arena, you could also be hurting.

One way to pick yourself of by the bootstaps and make a little bit of extra money is by using GPT sites or Get Paid To sites. Get Paid To sites, or GPT as I will continue to use, are sites where you sign up and then complete different offers. These could be entering your email address at a site or signing up for a free trial of Netflix or taking a survey. In return for signing up or completig an opportunity, you get paid. Now, the payment can range in amount from 25 cents to $20 or more. There are many websites out there that you can use to do this, but one of the best that I have had only amazing experiences with is CashCrate. CashCrate has been absolutely awesome for me.

Here is how it works.

CashCrate has a very wide range of offers and opportunities to participate in. Many are 100% free to participate and some have a cost associated with them. Those that have a cost may be around $1 – $5 which would cover the shipping of a product or sample to you. However, in return for signing up and paying the shipping charge, you could get paid $15 for completing the offer. Here is an example: because I use eBay a lot, I’m always looking for new product sources. CashCrate was promoting an opportunity to sign up for a free trial at a website that offered tips and resources for selling on eBay, including a wholesale product area. The cost to me was $1.95 to sign up for the “free trial” but in return, CashCrate deposited $15 into my account. The trial period lasts 7 days and I will call today to cancel my account so that I do not start getting charged the monthly fee. $13.50 for 5 minutes of work, I’ll take it. The great part is that there are tens of offers like these that you can sign up for. You could easily sign up for 5 of these offers that have a similar payout ($15) and make around $60 for a half hour worth of work.

There are also TONS of completely free offers. The payout is not as large, somewhere from 25 cents to a couple bucks. However, if you have the free time while at home or at work and take 20 minutes to participate in a few of them, you can easily add an addtional $10 to your account in one night.

Here’s a hypothetical situation added up:

• 5 offers with payouts of $15, cost of $1.95 each. Earnings = $65.25
• 10 offers with payouts of $0.30. Earnings = $3.00
• 5 offers with payouts of $0.50. Earnings = $2.50

Total time spent at most: 2 hours
Total earnings: $70.75
Hourly Rate: $35.37

I’d say that is a pretty good hourly rate! Now, the best part is, you can do this everyday! CashCrate pays out monthly as long as you meet the minimum earnings of $20.00. Repeat the process just 5 times a month and you drop an extra $350+ into your pocket.

There are people who earn a full time living from sites like CashCrate! All you have to do is spend the time to continuously complete the offers and wait for them to get cleared and deposited in your account. Then at the end of each month you collect a check for your time!

Now, here’s another added bonus to the site.

CashCrate has a great affiliate program. You can refer as many people as possible to the site. If they sign up and start earning money, you also earn money! The first level of commissions for 1-50 referrals is 20%. You’ll also earn an additional $3.00 per referral that signs up and earns $10.00 through the site, ON TOP OF the 20% commission. So even if all you do is promote the system and refer your friends and people to sign up for the site, without completing any offers yourself, you can still make money. I’ve read about some other small bloggers who have referred a couple hundred people and make over $1000 a month in JUST referral commissions.

So, if times are tough for you or your just looking to put a little extra money in your pocket, I suggest you sign up for CashCrate and give it a shot. I mean you really have nothing to loose if you participate in the free offers and within 20 minutes you could reach your $10 mark and an hour you can get to the $20 minimum payout.

At the end or beginning of each month when I do a montly income report for Dorm Room Biz, you will start to see CashCrate popping more more and more and being a part of the income. That’s because I am going to be utilizing the site more and taking advantage of the opportunity! “There’s money to be made in them there hills!”

Affiliates, Take Home An Unheard Of 90% Commission In January

You heard right, OIOpublisher, the premiere blog monetization system is giving away a whopping 90% commission to any affiliates during January. This is the perfect opportunity to help your visitors get the best private ad sales platform on the web and make a nice commission off it too. It is so good many of the big name bloggers use it to maintain their ad sales and keep things on auto-pilot!

OIOpublisher converts extremely well, the average conversion rate of signups to sales is constantly 35% plus. This makes getting sales easy, just point the traffic to the product and see what happens. We provide you with banners as well making putting OIOpublisher on your website easy and quick.

Anyone who has used OIOpublisher can confirm that it is truly the best website monetization system out there for private ad sales.

This wont last long, this unheard of 90% affiliate offer is only valid through January 2009. Get your piece of the OIOpublisher pie, sign up as an affiliate today.

So I just posted about my little make money online experiment with promoting Halloween costume offers on eBay. It was a big success and if I had started the campaign a little earlier, I probably would have easily broken $200 in affiliate commissions. However, like I mentioned, I had a few issues over the last few days and I wanted to touch on them as they are real problems that you could face if you attempted to repeat this process (with any kind of product, not just Halloween costumes).

Like I said in the other post, I searched for costumes that did not have many active listings, but were selling successfully for any listing that was up. So this meant that I listed popular items and with any luck the demand would be high. Well, the demand was high. Total, I had 26 costume sales on eBay, pretty damn good for about 72 hours. It was roughly $1000 worth of business in eBay’s eyes…to me it was $136.

So anyway, here are the problems I ran into.

1. With my first few sales, the price I listed it the costume at was too low to cover the eBay and PayPal fees and to cover the actual cost of the costume. I lost between 50 cents and a dollar on 4 sales, not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. To rectify the situation, I increased the listing price and added a a little bit to the shipping price the buyer paid. This then covered the fees and cost of the item and gave me now a small profit of between 50 cents and a dollar on each sale.
2. I placed 6 orders with one company whose affiliate program I was apart of one night. Then the next day I processed a few more with no problems. However, before heading to bed that night, I went to place a couple more that had sold on eBay…yet they were out of stock! This put me in a panic. I had to search for another company that was selling the same costume for the same price or less AND become an affiliate of theirs immediately to be able to process the orders that night. Luckily I was able to find another website that I could use and processed a handful of orders with them.
3. The third day my second ’supplier’ was out of stock when I went to process another batch of orders. Well shit on me! I was even more worried about it now because I knew these were hot items and finding another website that had a good stock of them would be a problem. Luckily I got approved for another affiliate program with costume website and I started processing orders.
4. This past Monday (the 20th) I get an email from the 3rd supplier telling me that they were out of stock of everything I ordered (even though their website showed it was in stock) and that ALL of my orders had been canceled…all 10 of them! I called to find out what the problem was because I placed all the orders on Friday, the 17th and the website said everything was in stock. Well apparently it takes up to 6 hours for the website to reflect the real inventory levels and when the site updated to being out of stock, I had already processed all the orders I had and they could not ship any of the costumes. All the charges I had through PayPal and my credit card had been refunded and all of the sudden I had an extra $600 in my PayPal account. Well, it was a popular costume, and after trying another 6 websites, just to process the orders – even if I could not get affiliate commissions from them, everyone was out of stock.
5. I had to refund 10 orders…this hurt…bad. Not only did I have to go through and individually refund 10 people’s money, I had to make sure they all went through, document the refunds (to make sure I was keeping track of everything), and contact them all to let them know what was going on. I emailed everyone and explained the situation, sent the refunds, and then left feedback on eBay for them all. Some have left feedback for me and I hope the rest will as well.
6. I still got charged the eBay fees!!!!!! When you refund money through PayPal, you get the fee refunded as well – so if you send me $50, the PayPal fee may be $2, netting me $48. Well PayPal refunds the $2 fee if I refund you the $50. BUT I still incurred the eBay fees for each costume purchase (this is about $4.50 a costume). So, now I am going to be down about $40 because of the stinking eBay fees. It’d be nice if eBay could follow a PayPal refund and then you could ‘cancel’ a sale within eBay so you are not charged the fees because the transaction was not completed. Oh well. Luckily this is not coming from out-of-the-pocket money, but it will be covered by my affiliate commissions.

SO, if you are thinking about doing this sort of thing in the future, here are a couple tips I have.

• Contact an affiliate manager and make sure that what you want to do is alright with them and does not violate any terms or conditions.
• Contact the company you want to process orders with and make sure they are alright with you selling on eBay and processing the orders through them.
• Make sure the company has enough of the item in stock to fulfill your demand! If you can, get a certain number of the product reserved for you so that you know you have a certain number available to sell. This is the biggest thing I will try to do next time I do something like this.

Good luck with if you want to do this type of making money online experiment in the future and see how much you can earn in affiliate commissions. When I do a blog income report at the beginning of November, I will include this affiliate commission amount, but I will figure out what the real number is (my earnings of ~$136 minus eBay fees) to see how well I really did.

The big holiday season is quickly approaching (Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years) and I was looking for a way to make some money off of it a couple weeks back. As I started looking around the web to see what I could do to make money and utilize affiliate programs I came across some offers from companies for Halloween costumes and accessories. The payouts were pretty good – around 15% of the sale price.

Once I had a couple affiliate relationships set up with the companies, I started to do some promoting on my sites and through over avenues…yet nothing seemed to be working. So, I went to what I know best – eBay. I took the description from the costume supplier website, created a list on eBay in my store, and built the price up a little bit to cover the eBay fees.

Within almost an hour of listing the costumes in the store format on eBay, I received sales and payments. Now I needed process the orders and this is where the money making comes in.

I had an referral link for the company that I was going to be ordering from and placed a button on a couple of my sites (including Dorm Room Biz). I booted up my laptop, launched a browser, and clicked the link. I made the purchase through my affiliate link, using my billing information and credit card and then had the costume shipped directly to the person who bought it from me on eBay. Essentially I created my own drop-shipping service. Now the important thing to remember when doing this is that the websites track the orders through cookies, so in order for all the orders to count towards your earnings that you place, you are going to need to delete your cookies, history files, and temporary files. This clears everything out and gives you a fresh launching point. The you just repeat the process – visit your referral link, place the order, clear your cookies etc, and so on.

Through eBay I made about 25 sales of a few different costumes which came to about $136 dollars. The best part of this? It all happened within about 72 hours of putting up the listing. I started the auctions on Tuesday and was going away for the weekend so closed everything on Friday. I didn’t actually get any orders on Friday, so everything pretty much happened within 3 days.

Finding which costumes to sell was the hardest part of this whole process. Basically I searched for about 15 different costumes on eBay and found which ones had few listings but always sold and for a good price (at least what it would ‘cost’ me from the supplying website or more). Once I came across a couple, I set up the auctions and let them roll. The orders just continued to come in sometimes within an hour of listing an item in my store with a quantity of 5 available, they all would sell and I would have to relist it.

Now, I do not know to what extent this is bending the rules of an affiliate program as I do not do much work in the area, but I thought it was a clever way to make some eBay sales and earn some cash through an affiliate program. It is a win-win for both parties – they are selling their products and still making their profits, and then I am making money from promoting their items. However, this is not something that I would continually do over and over again unless I spoke with someone in depth about this either on the site of the actual company or an affiliate manager.

Anyone else “gamed” the system this way to take advantage of the holiday season? If I could find a product that would do this well related to Christmas I would probably start promoting it on eBay right away! Later, I will discuss a couple of the downsides to this plan and money making experiment that I encountered.

This is a great way to make money online or make money from your dorm room for not doing much work. Try it out next year!

Today, I am going to share one way that I make a little extra cash online. I sell my “art”. It seems pretty obvious and possibly a bit of a stupid post doesn’t it? Well, not many people actually think of doing it, but I got around $100 profit last month from doing about one days full work (I had a lazy month where I didn’t do much else)!

I’m not very arty at all, but I can paint something onto a small canvas, and that’s all you need to be able to do to bring in some extra cash, in fact, if you really hit it off you could turn it into a small part time business. So, what exactly do you have to do? Well, you paint some original pictures and sell them. It is quite a nice little thing to do, as you don’t have to put much effort in, but the returns are pretty nice!

Step 1: Gather supplies

The first thing you need to do, is to get the stuff you are going to make your art with, now I don’t want to turn this into an art lesson, so I’ll focus more on costs and materials. I buy 50×40cm canvases for just under $4 each from a DIY store near me, seriously, they are pretty cheap and probably cheaper on the internet. Then you need some paint, I find that a pack of 10 acrylics usually sets me back $15 and lasts about 10 -20 canvases (don’t worry too much about quality of paint) so about $1.50 maximum for paint costs. Then you need some stuff to package your paintings, I usually have some stuff lying around, but buying in bulk you can get the cost down to $0.50 a package. So, our total costs are $4 for canvas, $1.50 for paint and $0.50 for packaging. that is a total of $6 for one painting, and you can probably bring the cost down if you buy more from the right places.

Step 2: Paint the thing

Your next step is to paint it. Like I said, this isn’t art class, so I’ll just give you a few pointers:

• Make it original – this is what will sell the art
• Stick to a style – I find modern art is easiest, because it doesn’t have to resemble art that much and gives excuses for mistakes
• Use color – color sells best and is quite attention grabbing, however, saying that I sold a nice black and white picture, but I have quite a few that haven’t sold.
• Don’t spend too much time on it. They are so cheap that if you muck one up, you may as well start again.

Step 3: Sell your master piece

Now you need to sell your work. I use eBay, you may want to try something else it is up to you. The main thing you need to think about here is price. The minimum you want to sell it for is 1.5x, but that only leaves you with $3. I try to price mine at 3.5x the price to produce. In reality, say I sold 10 in one month, 70% of those would go for 3.5x the price, so $147 in total, then I might decide that honestly, I can’t sell two of them (they aren’t good enough maybe) so I might package them as a two for one, or just keep them. The last one might be a lot better so I sell for 5x the price ($30) so I have made up the cost of the other two. You have to really think about the worth of the paintings, and how much they honestly are worth. With the right price though, these things pretty much fly off the (virtual) shelves. Remember, your main selling point here is totally 100% original canvases.

Step 4: Rinse and repeat or expand (and final tips)

So, you can do this a few times and make some extra money, but there is huge potential for you to expand and rinse and repeat this method any time you need some extra cash. If you really want to, you could easily setup an online shop and really boost your revenue, but honestly, I’m too lazy more interested in other things and concentrate on them and just use this as an extra boost of cash if I need it.

Sophie