zerotomed.com

This blog post is proudly sponsored by: The Tech FAQ.

There are many different ways to monetize a blog. Personally, I don’t do a lot of these for this particular blog. To be completely blunt, I only do two of them and one of them has not made me a single dollar yet. However, what I can say is that there are many ways to monetize a blog and I intend on showing you as many of them as I can think of. There will be a few affiliate links (so if you do decide to sign up, please be kind and sign up under me. Thanks!). There will be some obvious ones and then there might be some ones that you still don’t understand. If you don’t understand, please leave a comment and I’ll either explain it a different way in the comments OR I’ll dedicate a post to your question. Now, to the methods!

• Adsense/YPN/Adcenter/Whatever: This is an obvious one. I don’t really know very many blogs that don’t have this on there. It’s real simple, anyone can do it and if you’re getting a load of traffic, you really could make some decent money from it. The only worry is that people make mistakes. I’ve made mistakes and accidentally clicked ads and you can get banned from it. (How I hope I don’t). YPN, I think is best, but I work with Adsense because there are more targeted links. YPN just pays more. When YPN becomes public, though, expect a lot of people to go there, advertisers and publishers.
• Affiliates: Sites like Azoogle, Commission Juncture, Click Bank and all of that really do offer quite a bit of money to be made. If someone is selling a product for $50.00 and they offer you $20.00 for every sale you make, they make $30.00. Now, why would someone pay that much? They want to get seen by more people. By offering it on all these different sites, people see it and they may get more sales. Everyone loves Amazon.com. But, not everyone goes there all the time. But, by seeing the ads while reading content, you might be interested to buy something and voila, the webmaster has made money.
• Sell Text Links: This is an obvious, I know. I do it, but in a different way. I also, though, try and sell text links through Text Link Ads because I really do think that it gives me a better chance to get found. The same reason why people sell their products on affiliate sites like that. If a lot of people go to Text Link Ads then there is the potential for there to be more money made for me. Isn’t that what we all want when we are working on our sites? The potential to make more money? Duh!
• Check your web host and see if they offer an affiliate program. People are always looking for great web hosting and if you have a great host, then it’s really a good idea to look into trying to sell people your hosting. I get $50.00 for every person that buys from host gator through me, but I have to add some information in to get paid still and I’ve neglected that. Going through host gator is a great move for people wanting to set up an affiliation with because they offer quite a bit of money if you can get tons of people to sign up for hosting. An example they use is if you send them 21 sign ups in one month, you could make $2625.00. That’s some pretty good money, huh? If you’re looking for good web hosting, check them out here.
• Selling blog post sponsorships. People like these because when it comes down to an individual post, there is really only one link. I came across someone that bought ten of them (thanks! Because of you, I was able to afford my vBulletin license for SciFreak) and that is some nice money. I only have a PR4 site. But imagine if my site was PR5 or PR6. I could sell them for $20.00 a link. If I posted 31 times a month, that’s $620.00 in a month. It’s not a lot of money, but it’s still not that bad. And $20.00 is even low. You could sell them for more!
• Sell banner space at the top of your site. People like to buy banners at the top because it is very obvious and if you’ve got a ‘cute’ banner, people will click which sends the customer traffic. By taking advantage of this ‘cute’ look, people can expect to get a lot of traffic from your blog. If it’s a success, they’ll come back again and again and again. This is a good way to make a solid block of money each week/month. I’m more for the per week purchase, but that’s only because I like to offer different people the chance to get a spot (if I offered it) and it’s also the best bet. After a month of seeing it, the regular readers might get bored and never click it.
• Write reviews of blogs. John Chow makes $250.00 a review. If he writes ten of those, he’s made two and a half thousand dollars. I write a post a day. If I could have made two and a half grand for writing those ten posts, I’d be so excited. He makes the money by reviewing other people and he makes quite a few. My only advice is that you don’t write too many of these. I’ve sort of stopped visiting John Chow as much (Sorry mate!) because of all the reviews. Granted, there are not as many anymore and I have returned slowly, but if you post too many, people get fed up. They want content, not to read reviews. I’d stick to maybe five at most per month, but in the end, you’re the boss.

These are just a couple of ways you can monetize a blog. Do what ever you want to make your blog earn. Want to throw adsense on there, sell text links, throw a banner at the top and sell blog post sponsors? Great! Do that! You will really see yourself making a pretty penny. The general rule is that you must not throw all your eggs in one basket. What if you drop that basket? All the eggs are broken then. Good luck everyone and if you can, PLEASE Digg this! Thanks!

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This blog post is proudly sponsored by: Link bait Your Blog.

Because there is only so much that I can do to grow SciFreak, I have thought about my other sites that are in the works.  They are still mysterious sites that people don’t know much about yet, but there are plans.  Plans that will help me to get good link backs for SciFreak and plans that will help me build a very deep linked network of science sites.  Because of my slowly growing myspace connection, I will be able to get into contact with some really intelligent people that know science better than a lot of people.  Myspace is a horrible site that I hate, but it is great for networking and finding people that know about different topics.  Science is just one of them.

With this second site being planned, I have been trying to figure out how I could maybe include another method of making money.  I know that I want to get big with using adsense, but I know that I need to get all my eggs out of a single basket.  I was thinking that I might try and sign up for azoogle.  Or I’ll do Commission Junction or Click Bank or something.  What I do know is that I need to get my eggs out of JUST adsense.  If I have them all there, if something were to ever happen, I would be seriously screwed.  I have to figure out what I want to do when it comes to that.

I have been compiling a few writers.  I have a friend that would be interested in writing a few articles here or there, so that would be extremely beneficial.  If I can get a couple of writers to help compile articles with me, when the blog started, I could get a significant amount of articles uploaded and ready for show.  I think before I added a link from SciFreak to the blog, I would get about ten or so articles.  However, my one plan would be to link to deep links in the biology blog if I write about something on SciFreak that needs information about a certain topic.  I wrote an article about Viagra for Pulmonary Fibrosis.  Now, had I had an article about pulmonary fibrosis, I could have linked to it in my biology blog.  It works.  It’d get PR higher.  Anyways…I’ve got work to do!  Wish me luck! 

This blog post is proudly sponsored by: Expert Flash Design.

There is no real reason for me to continue talking about how the blog got over 1000 visitors and how I am going to be building a forum based around it.  However, due to some new things that happened today, I know that I’ll be going in the right direction to building a successful forum.  First and foremost, I wanted to thank all of my blog post sponsors for making it possible for me to afford a vBulletin license.  Without you, I’d be stuck WAITING and WAITING for that pay check from Google to equal $160.00 before I could ever imagine getting my forum.  Yes, all the money I have earned online and invested online has been earned online.  I have never taken a dollar from off the internet to invest online.

Anyways…I chose a theme for today.  It’s resting in my bookmarks and I am excited.  Granted, it is not a custom one, right now I cannot afford that.  It’s a clean cut, professional, science looking theme that’ll only cost me $29.99.  And the best part is that I can get a second one for free.  So, that’ll be three themes that the members can choose from.  The first one being my favorite, the second being the free one and then of course the default theme that vBulletin offers.  I know that I said I wanted to keep the default theme, but I think that these other themes will really add something good to the forum in the long run.  And they look good.

I’ve been thinking about ideas for contests for the forum, but I think that I might post that in another post and get the opinion of my readers.  Opinions are great, you know.  Anyways.  The one thing I have been thinking about is really deciding whether or not to hire a paid posting company.  I know that there are a lot of good ones out there.  I am not sure which one I’d go with (if you’ve got one and you read my blog, feel free to let me know).  I think that even just a few posts would at least get things rolling a bit for the few members I invite to the site before opening.  Anyways…A lot is planned and I really hope to see this get going.  Thanks!

This blog post is proudly sponsored by: SEO Directory.

It appears that Viacom is finally attacking Google for YouTube. We’ve all been waiting for something like this to happen and let me tell you, it is definitely happening hard now. Viacom has decided that they are going to sue Google for one BILLION dollars for copyright problems. All of this content on YouTube is supposedly causing Viacom a ‘loss in profits.’ While I disagree, they are entitled to sue and they are going against one of the biggest online companies. It’ll be interesting to see what happens. Is it really Google’s fault about all of this? How can they police all of this illegal content? Google bought YouTube for over a billion dollars and it appears that it’ll really be costing them over two billion dollars.

Let’s think about something, though. What will the judge say? “Pay them a billion dollars, GOOGLE!” Or…Will the judge take a different approach to it? Will he say, “Google, you have six months to somehow clean YouTube up and get the content off of the site.” How is Google going to respond to all of this? Maybe we’ll see an agreement come from this that will give Viacom more than a billion dollars, but also not cost Google a billion dollars. It’ll be interesting to see what the future holds for this. Read the article here at CNN.

This blog post is proudly sponsored by: 5000 Web Directory Listings.

Normally, I don’t post about stats except at the end of the month because I really don’t think it is good to waste the time. A month can get so much better or so much worse and there’s really no reason to mention stats not even half a month having passed so far. However, I have to mention this because of its importance. SciFreak.com WILL be getting a forum. As you can remember here and here, I made mention that I would be giving a forum to my growing blog when it reached the 1000 uniques point.  So far, on March 13th when I write this post, it has surpassed 1000 uniques.

So, now I need to decide what I want to do.  I will be connecting the forum to the blog.  I thought about making a domain name for it, but for right now, it’ll be connected to the blog.  Truth is, SciFreak IS my network site.  It’ll link to all the other science sites that I own in the future.  I figure I’ll have one big forum and each additional blog that I make will link to that initial forum.  That way, I can build one massive forum rather than a bunch of small forums.  Good thinking or am I just a crazy person?

Now, I’m going to get a vBulletin license.  Forget phpBB or any of that free software.  I want vBulletin.  However, I am going to work with the normal, default theme.  It’s simple and that’s something I want.  I don’t want something out there.  I just want simple and plain for right now.  In the future, I’ll invest in other themes for people to use if they want, but for right now, I think for a science site, the default vBulletin theme is a good choice.  I might be wrong, but I think that it is good.  Maybe I’ll add in some color to make it match SciFreak, but even that will be getting a makeover, so I don’t want to do anything just yet.

SciFreak will hopefully only grow more and more.  I need to think about ad placement for the forum and I need to think about how to get a lot of members to go there.  Do I mention in its own post a “FORUM” is made or do I just include a link in the blog roll and then include some links at the end of posts?  One final thing that I need to worry about is content on the forum.  I don’t want it to be a dead forum when people see it, so I have to think about what I want to before showing the world the forum.  Should I just post on it myself with a few friends to get some content on it?  Or, should I open it right when it’s finished with a contest and start posting like mad?  I haven’t done forum work in a while, so I have some things to think about.  Anyways…Let’s hope for a success on SciFreak’s forum when it opens!

This blog post is proudly sponsored by: Top Paid Directories.

I have decided that I am going to run a small case study of my own to see just how good targeted myspace marketing can be on a blog with a niche such as science. I will start out with a brand new account and build it over the period of one week. When that week is over, we will come back in and take a look at my stats and see whether or not myspace really was useful for my blog or if it was a big waste of time. We’ll see if earnings went up at all and finally, what we’ll see is whether or not someone should devote time and energy to building a myspace account to try and better their site. We’ll see what myspace can do for my small, but growing science blog.

As of 2:10 EST, before my myspace growth began, I had 275 uniques for March. The day prior, I had 28 visitors and the day prior to that, I had 78. So, we were looking at mid-xx for my daily visitors. Nothing horrible, but definitely not something to brag about. In one week, I will sit down and determine just how useful myspace was for my site. I will compare it to last month’s results and we will also see how many people actually came from my myspace profile to my blog. This is just a small study. Hey! I’m a science major. We’re all about experiments and studies. We’ll see just how good the blog does with myspace on its side! Stay tuned.

This post is proudly sponsored by: Deep Link Directory.

The idea for this blog post actually came from this post’s blog post sponsor.  People forget the importance of deep links sometimes when they are working on their blog posts.  I know that I do.  However, sometimes you get so in the moment with your post that it is understandable that you forget to link to other posts.  I am typing this post fast and hard and normally, I’d forget to link to another post, but I keep reminding myself that I have to.  Anyways…Deep Links.  They are extremely important.  Let’s assume that you have a great post that you posted a month ago.  It’s an amazing post and you know that it’d give information to people.  What do you do?  Link to it in your post.

If you link to one of your own posts, you give it the chance to increase in page rank.  We all know that having a high page rank is nice because you can sell links and make profit.  Is it really all that important anymore?  No, not really.  But, for selling links, it is always a nice thing.  With that, if you have PR4 deep pages, people will begin to say, ‘Hey, that’s really cool…Let’s get a link from there.  Loads of links that have PR4 deep pages…Yeah, that’s good.’  So, by linking to your own posts, you allow for traffic to get around on your site and keep the visitor on your site longer.

Deep links are important for the growth of your site.  Without them, people read one or two blog posts and then go somewhere else.  However, if you offer a place for them to go, they might stay around a little while longer.  It’s not just ‘Oh, this is interesting, but there’s nothing else to expand my knowledge.’  With a link to another blog post, it can become, ‘nice post, oh, here’s more information.’  Deep link your posts…It really can help.  For more information on links, check out this post: Getting Back Links.

I have decided that it is too good a method of link baiting to just sit here and watch other bloggers do it. So, I have decided that I am going to offer all my readers the chance to get some link backs in return for a review to my blog. Now, I know that John Chow does this as well as a few other large bloggers. However, I do think that this could help out a lot of the smaller bloggers that are really looking to get going. Only a few months ago, I was a nobody, but slowly and surely, I have acquired a collection of readers and I can really say that the blog is growing. People pay me $5.00 a day for a link in one of my posts, but I am offering them to you for FREE if you post a review about my site.

Here is how it’ll work. You write a review that is at least two hundred words long about this site. You write an honest review, whether it is good or bad, and you post it on your site. You include a link to my homepage as well as a link to THIS post. E-mail me the URL to the review to: mafiamaster922@gmail.com Once I have read it, I will add you to a list. Once I have acquired ten reviews, I will post up your link along with everyone else that has posted.

Now, where does the money come into play? Every month, I am going to sit down and read over my favorite blog posts. I’ll read over the reviews and pick three lucky people. The top three reviews will win money. First prize will win $25.00. Second prize will win $15.00. Third prize will win $10.00. So basically, everyone month, I will give out $50.00 in prizes to the top three reviews. There is no restriction on the number of readers you have or your PR. That will not have any say over who wins. The BEST review wins, simple as that. But, since there are three prizes, you have the chance to win some easy money. At the end of the month, I will pick the top three and send the winners the money via paypal.

So, all I need in the e-mail to mafiamaster922@gmail.com including the following information:

URL to the review

Paypal Address

I will send the three winners the money at random and then once a day has gone by, announce them on here with a SECOND link back. Wow, I am feeling generous! So, what is stopping you all from posting some reviews?! Go get er done! :-p

This blog post is proudly sponsored by: CBravo.com Web Directory.

Last night, I got into a conversation with someone about the structure of a network of sites. Most people here know my opinion about how I intend on making my network, but I’ll share it anyways. He and I had a difference of opinions. No hostility, just a difference of opinion, which is normal in this sort of market. People always disagree over what is good and what is bad, what makes money and what doesn’t, what is easiest and what is hardest. That’s understandable and that’s fine. However, the two of us just had different opinions. I’ll post mine and then post his. Leave some love and tell me which you think is best!

My Opinion:

You should pick a network of sites that you are a specialist in. If you know sports like the back of your hand, go into a sports network. Make websites about all different sports. But the ONE thing that is key about this is make the sites intended on being big. Don’t make a site with the hopes of making $5.00 a day on it. Make a site with the hopes of making $500.00 a day on it, if not more. Never be petty and try not to earn more. But, keep the number of websites small. Don’t try and make fifty websites that will make $1.00 a day rather than making two websites that make $25.00 a day. Which is probably easier to update?

Since we all know content is king in this business, we know that without there being updates, people will get bored. That’s why I sold Genetics Source. I wasn’t really going to add anything to it, so I decided that getting rid of it would be the optimal move. However, that’s not to say I don’t have an idea for my ‘army’ of websites. I do and I figured it out last night while talking to him. There are two types of websites.

1. The site that you really love and is one that you really want to see get big. My sites that are that are this one and SciFreak.com.
2. The site that you open to get money whose sole purpose is to help the growth of 1. That means that you take the money from this site and devote it to making your real big sites even bigger. My arcade site is an example.

My opinion was simply that having a series of number two sites is fine, so long as you really don’t need to go in there and play with them much. If you intend on running a network of two sites, then that’s great. But, in my opinion, the best method of earning is by focusing your energy on a few small sites. Once the sites are large, you can maybe hire a few writers and then go onto something else. Just don’t stretch yourself too thin.

His Opinion:

Now, you must understand that this is not a wrong opinion. It’s just not one that I agree with. He said that it was better to just make a bunch of websites and set them on auto-pilot. He intended on building twenty or blogs and putting auto-updaters on it in the hopes of getting loads of content. There have been a lot of these going around and I even almost bought one myself because they are so damn seducing. You don’t have to do an ounce of work and the site just grows because they keep getting more and more content. However, the only problem is that the content is not and never will be unique content. Isn’t unique content best?

So, which is the better move? Owning loads of auto-updating sites or owning a few sites that you can update yourself? I think owning a few, which is why I currently only have two blogs. But, a site army is not wrong. I intend on having one myself, a bunch of number 2 sites whose sole purpose is to help the growth of number 1 sites. Enjoy.

Dig It For Me!

This blog post is proudly sponsored by: Credit Card Offers.

Everyone knows about forums. If you don’t, then go check out this random forum GatorEnvy. Now you know what a forum is. The point is is that everyone knows what a forum is. Some people make tons of money off of their forums and other people are barely able to scrape by because of their forum. Yet, more and more people are pumping out forums as if it’s nothing. I know that I tried to do that and the result was complete failure. I was just not good with running more than one forum. But, I’ve been thinking about the pros and cons of forums.

Pros:

1. The members are a big contributor in content and they tend to come back continuously to post more content. Even if it’s just responding to a thread, it is their opinion.
2. The fact that people are constantly posting, there are always changes in ads because the keywords changes. This means that the ads are much different and allow for numerous different types of clicks.
3. Content begins multiplying as more and more content continues to appear. So, if you post ten threads, you might expect to see thirty posts. Post twenty, you might see sixty.

Cons:

1. Starting a forum can be so difficult. Getting members to the site is extremely difficult when a forum is brand new.
2. Because a forum is a community, members begin to get used to ads and it becomes difficult to get them to click the ads.
3. You have to deal with all those people that spam forums with “VIAGRA!” ads. They can get extremely boring.

Those are just three pros and three cons. There are obviously more pros and more cons, but those are just a couple of them. I can say that I am very excited for starting a forum on my science blog. However, it is going to be difficult. It will be hard and the cons will be tough for me. But it’ll be more traffic to my blog and the blog will send traffic to the forum. I am very excited for this and can only hope for the best! But, forums, in my opinion, are a great idea!