How To Make Online Money

To follow-up on my post about ‘Child Labor’ (ie: the shameless exploitation of your own kids to help you build web content), I thought I’d share another idea:  give someone the ‘gift’ of a blog!

Recently, I decided to give my wife her own blog.  She’s big into gardening, and very knowledgeable about it.  So I bought a domain name, installed WordPress on it, and customized a template that would fit her style/personality well.

I created an introduction post, and a page with some book recommendations (using my Amazon affiliate code and a cool Carousel widget).

When I showed it to her, she was tickled pink!  It took me all of about 20 minutes to teach her how to login and make posts.

I have admin access, so if she writes a post that has content that can be naturally affiliate-linked, I add the links in there.  That way she doesn’t have to do any ‘coding’, or even know HTML.  She just writes posts about her favorite topic!  She’s having fun, and it’s created another income stream for us along the way.

Her blog is a Vegetable and Flower Gardening Tips blog, called Green Thumb Momma.  You can find it at http://www.greenthumbmomma.com.

So if you have loved ones or friends who would enjoy having their very own site to blog on, give them a blog!  Tell them you’ll take care of coding in the background!  It’s a win-win situation!

How to use Child Labor…and get away with it!

When I say “child labor” most of the time the immediate image that comes to mind is a sweat shop where poor kids are working in dangerous conditions. But what I’m talking about is legal, ethical, and the kid will probably like it!

“Content is King”, when it comes to Internet Marketing. But usually the folks who are doing Internet Marketing are so busy with the marketing that they don’t have time for the content.

Before you go paying good money for Private Label Rights articles, or paying someone to write blog posts for you, why not leverage some good, free content? Tap the content rolling around in your child’s head!

Children’s opinions matter. They matter because of the marketplace. Most content can be related to a child. Find out what yours thinks and blog about it…or better yet, get them to blog about it if they’re old enough to type in coherent sentences.

Don’t restrict your thinking to content related to Toys. That’s obvious. If you have a niche about toys you can regularly share your child’s opinions about them and have instant content. I’m talking about getting a child’s angle on other niches. Here’s a few examples of what I’m talking about:

• a niche about a hobby - get the child to talk about the hobby, how their parents got them started in it, what they like about it
• a niche about a product - find out what kids at school say about the product, crazy uses for the product (that only a kid could think of), etc.
• philosophical ramblings - explain deep thoughts to a child and get them to summarize it in their words.

Hopefully you could think about your particular niche and figure out your child’s perspective.  Heck, even something like ‘Global Warming’…if you had a blog about enviromental issues and could get your child to offer thoughts about it regularly, that could become a featured item that would draw visitors.  (You can just type it for them, using their exact words.)

It becomes even more useful if they’re old enough to type.  If you’re up for it, register a domain name for them, set up a blog, a cool-looking template, related to something that really interests them.  Put some ads on it (instruct them NOT to click them, ever), maybe create some pages with affiliate links, and let them do the rest.  Let them blog their thoughts, while you build traffic to it.  Then come back and show them while you insert some affiliate products.  Get them to review a product (from a teen’s perspective).

Bingo.  Free child labor.  Good, unique, relevant content.

Google Adwords offers two different ways of displaying your ads. You can have your ads show up as part of the search results, or in the “Content Network”.

The search results ads are shown on Google’s page, when someone enters a search. If someone searches a term with a keyword on which you are bidding, your results will show up at the top or along the right side of the results (if you bid high enough). Search result ads are more expensive because they do get good, quality clicks, and because of the competitors bidding for a given set of keywords.

The Content Network are the pages on the internet that are using Google’s Adsense code to display relevant ads. So, for example, a blog about bicycles might have Adsense ads about bikes displaying on the site.

Content Network (CN) traffic is very different than Search traffic. It’s much less targeted, so people clicking are more likely to be ‘browsers’ than ’searchers’. Browsers generally convert less. Content Network traffic is therefore much less expensive. Your bids for keywords on the CN should be much lower than those for search.

In fact, for search, many times Google won’t even activate your keywords unless you bid a minimum amount…and this amount can go up if the search term becomes popular.

But here’s the trick with the Content Network…some people will type in the displayed URL directly, without clicking.

I’ve had two different websites with campaigns running. On BOTH, I noticed an increase of 3% of DIRECT traffic after I started running my CN campaigns, and that was WITHOUT any clicks.

It feels like cheating Google. Google is displaying my URL tens of thousands of times per month, and I’m not paying a penny. Well, sometimes I pay a penny. In fact, my bid on those terms is set at $.01…one penny. So the times that someone does actually click my link means I don’t pay very much.

The point is this: if you are hesitant to pay for Google Adwords ads, start with the Content Network. Keep your bids to one penny. Enter a ton of relevant keywords (and segment your campaigns as much as possible to test which keyword combos are working well). And make sure that your display URL is something that people will want to see. They are more likely to type in a name that is short and directly related to what they are looking for.

So get going with your super-cheap campaigns and take advantage of the free traffic that will come as folks type in the URL directly instead of clicking!