Earn Extra Holiday Cash from eHow

Happy Holidays! Just want to pass on good money making opportunities to everyone. eHow is offering a special promotion and extra cash during this holiday season. If you'd like to learn more about eHow and online-publishing, read my post regarding how to make more profit from eHow, Squidoo, and HubPages.

Here is the detail from eHow:

The holidays are a time for giving-- not only is eHow extending the holiday promotion, but we are DOUBLING the money we are giving away!

We are extending our holiday promotion until 12/29/2008. Contribute your original articles now and have a chance to win $200 or more by being featured on the eHow homepage. Articles must be featured on any day from Monday to Friday and be in one of the following areas: Today's Top How To, Featured How Tos, or the eHow of the Day. You will receive $100 if your articles are featured on Today's Top How To and Featured How Tos, and $200 if your articles are featured on the eHow of the Day. We will deposit all winnings in PayPal accounts on December 31^st, 2008.

Want to start earning money for your articles, but aren't currently a member of the eHow Writer Compensation Program? It's easy, just click here to fill out your information and start earning more money today!

Press Release: Online Business Review

Hello World! To help online business starters speed up the development of their websites or web services, I've put together a new blog - Online Business Review. The blog aims to be the best and most comprehensive resource for online business starters who look for the best choice of products and services to support their business development. I hope you find Online Business Review useful and keep it as your business companion.

How Much Money Can You Make From Google AdSense?

[Updated: 12/18/08]

There are a lot of people on the Internet claiming that they have made a good fortune out of Google AdSense from their websites. Some of them go even further to show the checks they've received as a proof. Few people would remain untouched, after seeing those checks. They all want you to believe in their claims, so that they can continue on selling you their secrets for success. As an engineer, I am usually skeptical of those claims. I never believe in quick fortune, not because no one has done that - in fact, some have, but because I've also seen lot of "what comes fast goes fast."

Let's not let my personal beliefs stay in your path to success on the Internet. Let's look at only numbers and the facts to see what fortune one could possibly make out of Google AdSense. To keep it simple, I'll focus only on the contextual-targeted ads of Google AdSense which is Pay-Per-Click (PPC)-based advertising. That is, the ad publisher gets paid a portion of the advertising revenue, when the visitor clicks the ads. In this context, the key factors that directly determine how much revenue the publisher makes are the click-through rate (CTR) and the average cost per click (CPC).

What is Click-Through Rate (CTR)?
Before explaining how the CTR is calculated, we have to talk about page impressions. Briefly speaking, the term "page impression" refers to the number of times the visitor arrives at a page in which the ads are displayed. It is not related to how many ads are displayed. Behind the scene, there is a piece of JavaScript embedded in the web page that displays the ads provided by Google and redirects the visitor to the advertiser's website, when an ad is clicked. Google keeps track of both the number of times the script has requested to display the ads and the number of times when an ad is clicked. The CTR is then calculated by formula (1):

CTR = Number of Clicks on the Ads / Page Impressions (1)

What is Cost-per-click (CPC)?
CPC represents the cost that the AdWords advertiser pays for the keywords related to your websites or the clicks on the displayed ads. CPC varies primarily based on business competition among the advertisers. It can also be seasonal and related to the formats of the ad, such as, text, image, or video. In the context of this discussion, CPC refers to the portion of the advertising cost that Google passes on to the publisher, when the visitor clicks on the ad.

The revenue formula and examples
Given CTR and CPC, the ad revenue is calculated using the following formulas:

Revenue = CPC * Number of Clicks (2)
Revenue = CPC * CTR * Page Impressions (contextual) (3)

So, what's the average CPC and CTR? There are no clear references. Many sources have posted different numbers, which vastly depend on their sampling websites and the approach used. Most of the CTR numbers fall in between 1% and 5%. I'll use a couple of numbers for the average CPC just to get some sense about the kind of ad revenue we would expect. Keep in mind that you could equip your websites with multiple streams of advertising income, such as, placement-targeted ads or affiliate sales. Also, note that I did not qualify these data with a time frame.

Table 1: Ad Revenue Examples

CPC	CTR	Page Impressions	Revenue
$0.10	2%	1,000	$2
$0.10	5%	1,000	$5
$0.10	5%	10,000	$50
$0.25	2%	1,000	$5
$0.25	5%	1,000	$12.5
$0.25	5%	10,000	$125
$0.25	5%	1,000,000	$12,500

What do we learn from the above examples?
Looking at this table, you probably are not impressed by the amount of ad revenues you could make. The problem with those Internet marketers showing off their big checks is not that it can't be done, but that they make it sound so easy and quick. They tell you that you can build a content rich website with high paying keywords in ten minutes and start making money right away. (Watch out for plagiarism!) I have also seen many low-quality websites that simply pull the content from all over the places like article directories or some mail archives only to see if I happen to click one of those ads. Upon arriving at one of those sites, I typically say "Oops!" to myself, click on the Back button, and run away. Just for fun, you may notice that many of those sites don't even update their copyright notice at the bottom of the page. Or, they don't even have one.

I recall that I came across a personal blog site that had PageRank at 6/10."I didn't intend to make money, when I first started building this website. I focused on producing the right content and the services valuable to my visitors. The traffic just took off after two years." said the author. That's the attitude that creates a long running business and hence a sustainable income.

In any case, one thing is clear: We, the ad publisher, don't have much control over the CPC. But, we have some control over CTR and a lot to do about increasing page impressions. The most effective way to raise CTR is perhaps to make sure that the ads Google provides are relevant to what your visitors are looking for. This can be achieved by implementing domain focused and specific content for your websites or blogs are very domain specific.

I'm not talking about using key words or artificially repeating the key words all over the place in your web pages. The search engine has grown very sophisticated as to determine how relevant your content is relevant to a specific subject and how creditable your website is. Your content shall naturally incorporate the right key words or relevant phrases, if it is written about a specific topic and readable by human. Although I agree it's important to research the market using key words, I would not recommend you to build a website or start a blog with sole intention to focus on the high paying key words.

Rather, I'm talking about maintaining a clear theme to the content you published on a particular site. For example, it is better for you to create separate blogs to discuss dogs, investments, and your other favorite topics than all in one single blog. Mixed content makes it difficult for the search engine to determine which ads are best to display for the visitors to your website.

Obviously, the page impression or the site traffic is what we all should be working on. One can invest in marketing programs to promote his or her sites or in search engine optimization (SEO) to improve the page ranks. Without the credible content or service, though, it would be hard to have your visitors stay on or come back. Without the sense of trust, the visitors wouldn't even try to poke around your site and read your content, needless to say that many of them have gradually become "ad blind." So, spend time producing unique content, goods, or services, before investing in any serious marketing campaigns or SEO.

I've learned a lot from some of those books listed under On-line Advertising at your right; such as, Pay Per Click Search Engine Marketing for Dummies, Google AdSense for Dummies, and Google AdWords for Dummies. You may want to check them out, too.

Boost Site Traffic via Article Marketing?

[Updated 12/12/08]

After spending lot of effort in producing content for your blogs or designing your web sites, you start wondering how to bring in visitors. There are many marketing mechanisms ranging from search engine advertising like Google AdWords or Yahoo! Search Marketing to off-line medias. One of the popular marketing approaches has been Article Marketing.

What is Article Marketing?
As the term has suggested, article marketing promotes a product, service, or web site via articles. Article marketing is really nothing new. Many companies have written up and give away so-called white papers to the prospects who want to do a bitof research of their own, before they initiate the conversation with any potential vendors about their business problems. The white paper typically starts with a discussion that demonstrates the company's understanding of the business problems, before presenting their product.

Article promotion works the same way. An article typically consists of three parts: the title, the body, and the resource box. The article body is a short-form of a white paper that seeks to establish the author's credentials in the reader's mind. The resource box at the end of the article is the bio about the author, which is perhaps the whole reason why the article is written. The resource box briefly describes the author's expertise followed by a couple of links that help direct the article readers to the author's blogs or web sites.

How and where to distribute your articles?
Once you've written up a nice piece of article, how do you distribute it to people who may be of interest in the products or services you're trying sell? There are many so-called article directories happy to do the distribution job for you. Here is how it works: You register with an article directory as an author and submit your articles. Once accepted, the article directory will start distributing your articles to thousands of publishers through various means; for example, e-newsletters, e-zines, RSS subscriptions, or syndication. Or, your articles may be viewed or picked up by opt-in readers who visit the directory. The basic requirement for the publishers to freely reprint the articles is to retain the entire article and the resource box intact.

For your convenience, I have included a few article directories as follows:

• Ezine Articles (PageRank 6/10) is the industry leader that emphasizes on "quality" by accepting only articles that meets certain criteria.
• Search Warp (PageRank 4/10)
  
• Go Articles (PageRank 6/10)
• Other article directories include Article City, A1 Articles, iSnare, Idea Marketers, Free Article Zone, Article Bin, Article Marketer, Amazines, etc.

Most of these sites offer free services to the authors and the publishers. Some of them impose fees, when you submit more than a certain number of articles. You as an author may pay premiums to place your articles at the home page of the directory or the first page of a particular category to increase the exposure. Some directory sites offer proofreading service at a fee or even produce the article for you. Others sell you software that would "automatically" submit your articles over thousands publisher sites. I have no experience with any of those software. If you do, feel free to let me know how they are useful to you.

Does article marketing really work?
Submitting your articles to the directories should in general improve the ranking of your web sites or pages in the search results thanks to the increased number of back links. That statement is yet to be proven, though. The search engine determines the weight of each link based on various factors including the credibility of the publisher site that reprints your article. Unfortunately, many article publishers pulling content from the directories are those sites whose sole purpose is to make money from the ads all around your article.

On the other hand, read a few submitted articles in the directories and you'll find that most of them rush to direct you to their "single page web sites" that either promise you easy income or sell you secrets to make quick bucks. If you're somehow interested in any of those marketing schemes, I'd urge you to reconsider that decision and save that money for better uses. There are effective ways to start or grow your Internet business, but no shortcuts to success. To see for yourself, simply click on the links from whichever articles you stumble on that were published a while back. You'll find many of those pointed sites no longer exist, barely functional, or very out-dated. The sites that are still fully functional are those that run a serious business via hard work.

Still, article marketing could work for you. If you are able to produce a lot of high quality articles, chances are some of them may show up in reputable web sites. Not only do those articles improve your search result ranking, but will also help direct quality traffic to your web site. You have to be persistent and tenacious in both quality and quantity for article marketing to work. To tract the progress of article syndication, use the "intitle:" operator (case-sensitive) in the Google search box; for example:

• intitle:"The Title of My Syndicated Article" to look for all the articles with the given phrase in the their title. You should replace it with your own article title.
  
• intitle:"The Title of My Syndicated Article" +source +ezinearticles.com to look for the articles with the given phrase in their title and 'source' and 'ezinearticles.com' in the page. This assumes that you submitted your article to ezinearticles.com and its name is included as part of the article. You should replace it with the directory you use.
  

If you are determined to go that far, you should consider publishing your articles to reputable sites like eHow, HubPages, and Squidoo. They are very different from article syndication and are operated under different terms, though. Read my post about how to make money by publishing to eHow, HubPages, and Squidoo.

Find The Home For Your Blogs: Blogger v.s. WordPress

[Updated 12/5/08]

As discussed in my post regarding passive incomes over the Internet, one of the most popular platforms for publishing your informational content is blogging. Blogs are on-line journals or diaries of a topic of your choice. By default, blog posts are organized in the chronicle order upon their publication. They can also be grouped in categories or tagged for easier navigation or look-up.

Today, there are many hosted blog services that free you from hosting your own and form the communities with millions of bloggers. Among the popular ones are Blogger, WordPress, Yahoo! 360, Windows Live Spaces, and TypePad. Alternatively, you can post your blog entries at e-publishing sites like HubPages and Squidoo. Squidoo also provides its lensmasters a blog service, called SquidTop, via WorkPress. It's worth noticing that WordPress can also be downloaded and hosted by your own. Movable Type - an open source organization that brings blogs, web sites, and social networks under one software does not offer the hosting service.

To make it easier for you to find the home for your blogs, I have compared Blogger and WordPress feature-by-feature in the table below. While browsing through the table, you should start considering which features are critical for your blogs. For me, the primary factors are the following:

1. Fees: I think you would agree with me on opting for blog services that are free of charge with a reasonable sets of functionality and storage space. It is particularly important, when my adventure is still at the exploration phase. Consider a brand-name service from Blogger run by Google, Windows Live Spaces from Microsoft, and a few others, so your precious work wouldn't be lost due to malpractices or abrupt business turmoils.
   
2. Multiple blogs: Although your blog can cover all interesting subjects, I recommend that you create separate blogs for different topics. Not only would the separation improve the rankings of your posts in search results, but also help make searching engine advertising more efficient. By being focused, your blogs offer more relevant posts to your readers. In return, you'll find a better targeted group of readers. As such, the capability to have all my blogs (e.g. Project BKO and Fishtarian) under one user account makes my jobs much easier.
3. Customization or extension: Most of the blog services provide a rich set of features without any special customization or coding. It is, however, important to keep customization or extension as an option. The blog service should have public APIs available for developers to add new widgets or plug-ins. When necessary, I may need to customize the template or implement certain features (e.g. supporting excerpts).
   
4. Advertising: Internet advertising is a key element of the Internet business. Although not a primary reason, generating passive incomes is always a welcome gift.
5. Team contribution: This feature is important so that my kids can contribute to my blogs. It would become handy, when I later recruit some partners to join my adventure.
6. Openness: It is also important that I am able to move my posts to other blog services via export and import utilities and not get stuck with a service. You may want to perform your own backups occasionally.
   

Table 1: Comparing Blogger and WordPress

Features	Blogger	WordPress
Fees	Free.	Free WordPress.com blogs come with 3GB of space for storing uploaded files and images. Pay fees for very advanced features or more upload space.
Setup	Hosted.	Hosted or download the software and host your own blog.
# of blogs per user	Unlimited. This is very useful, if you plan to blogs on various topics.	Unlimited.
# of pages per blog	Only the home and the post pages.	Can create additional pages to the home and post pages. Pages are not meant for displaying posts (although possible via plug-ins) but to display static content (e.g. About, Copyrights, Policies) that is less time-sensitive like posts.
User name	Display name can be different from the email you use to login and can be changed later. You can also choose to show your real name.	Display name is the login user name and can not be changed.
Import	Import from AOL only or a Blogger XML file.	Support Blogger, Moveable Type, TypePad blogs, WordPress export file, or LiveJournal XML.
Export	Export to a Blogger XML file.	Export file in WordPress eXtended RSS or WXR format can be downloaded and saved as a backup.
Page design	Support additional page elements in header, body, side-bar, and footer areas. drag-and-drop positioning.	Spport additional widgets only in side-bar.
Themes	Choose from about a dozen of templates; preview with the pre-loaded image. Template CSS and HTML can be customized.	Choose from over 70 templates with a two- or three-column layout. Excellent preview with the real post content and the click-able links. Template CSS can be modified.
Post editor	Support rich text and HTML editing. Tables are supported by editing the HTML. Remove all line breaks between <table> and </table>.	Support rich text and HTML editing with support for excerpt, categories, and tags in the same editor page. Better support for audio, video, and polls. Tables are supported by HTML editing.
Post categorization	Assign tags to the post. Posts can be grouped and viewed by tags.	Assign categories and tags to the post. Posts can be grouped and viewed by categories or tags. Categories and tags are very similar and sometimes confusing. Categories generally don't change often, while tags usually change more dynamically with every post and can be shown in the "tag cloud".
Permalink	Automatically generated; can not be changed.	Automatically generated; can be changed.
Comments	Support anonymous comments and moderation.	Support anonymous comments and moderation.
Linkbacks to keep track other sites that have links to the posts.	Support backlinks.	Support trackbacks and pingbacks.
Advertising	Ads are allowed. AdSense ads are natively supported.	For performance reason, Adsense, Yahoo, Chitika, TextLinkAds, sponsored/paid posts including PayPerPost, ReviewMe and Smorty; affiliate/referral links to the following domains: usercash, clickbank, clickhop, cashrocks, payingcash; clicktrackers and any promotion of the “I made a million on the internet and so can you” type of advertising are not permitted to be added by users, unless you're one of those VIP blogs. AdSense ads may be added by WordPress, but can be avoided with a fee.
Custom domain	Supported.	Supported.
Traffic analysis	Supported via Google Analytics.	Supported navtively via Blog Stats.
Team blogging	Grant users admin or author roles.	Grant users admin, author, contributor, and editor roles.

Also, read this post at eHow and HubPages.

Monetize Your Web Site via Affiliate Marketing

One of the most popular ways to monetize your web site is to become an affiliate.

What is "affiliate?"
An advertiser is a merchant that initiates an ad campaign to promote its products or services. An ad publisher displays ads from an advertiser on its web site. An affiliate receives a commission, when the visitor to its web site takes a required action. An affiliate promotes the merchandise via articles or ads of various forms that are compliant with the terms agreed on with the advertiser. The two most common models on which the commission structure is based are:

• Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) A visitor referred by the affiliate purchases products and services from the advertiser.
  
• Cost Per Lead (CPL) A visitor referred by the affiliate completes a form on the advertiser's web site.
  

Since an affiliate is paid based on the results it produces, affiliate marketing is often referred to as Pay-Per-Performance (PPP) or Pay-Per-Action (PPA) marketing. Many advertisers prefer the low-risk affiliate marketing in that they pay only for proven results. The pay structure is often multiple-tired to reward affiliates at various performance scales.

Become an affiliate
You can become an affiliate by signing up the affiliate programs directly with a merchant or indirectly via an affiliate network.

• Merchants: Well established advertisers may choose to deal with their affiliates directly. Not only would the direct association remove the mediation costs, but also retain the close relationships with the affiliates. Affiliate programs are available from brand names, such as, Amazon, AmericanExpress, Discover Card, eBay, and etc.
• Networks: Rather than direct dealing, the advertiser may choose to delegate its affiliation handling to a third-party company - an affiliate network that mediates between advertisers and publishers and facilitates the logistics from managing campaigns, generating links, tracking, to payouts. An affiliate network is particularly useful to a publisher, because the network enables a publisher to manage over hundreds of advertisers under one roof. Be aware that signing up an affiliate network does not automatically grant you permissions to promote all the participating advertisers. Upon expressing your interest, your application to promote a particular merchant is still subjective to a review and approval process. Some merchants or the affiliate networks impose certain requirements on the traffic to your web site as well as the content. Popular affiliate networks include Advertising.com, ClickBank, CommissionJunction, ClixGalore.com, Google, LinkShare, Yahoo (via Commissionjunction), and etc.

Note that Google Affiliate Network acquired from Performics DoubleClick in 2004 is operated separately from Google AdSense. Therefore, an AdSense publisher is required to submit a new application in order to become a Google affiliate publisher. Yahoo Affiliate Network is managed by CommissionJunction.

How to choose an affiliate network?
Before joining an affiliate network, consider the following factors:

1. Reputation: An affiliate network with a good reputation is typically more trustworthy in tracking the links and accounting practices. Working with a trusted network as your business partner typically results in less feuds that cost you valuable traffic and precious energy.
   
2. Advertisers: Have a look at the participating advertisers to get a feeling of the kind of products or services you'll be promoting. You should make sure those goods are aligned with the content of your web site and are something your customers or visitors would be comfortable with.
3. Features: Take your time to understand how easy or the tools provided to search for the products or services that you want, to generate and implement the ads or links, to track and generate reports, and to get paid.
4. Support: Spend some time understanding the support you'll get from the network. Browse through the community forums or blogs to find out what the participating advertisers and publishers are saying or complaining and how the issues are resolved.