Never Underestimate The Value of Good Content

June 5th, 2008 3 Comments   Posted in Making Money Online

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After the success of my recent firefox blog and seeing how the traffic was really good once you started to see that GooGle had indexed the site I decided to give it another go with the exact same theme. I decided I wanted to try another firefox blog. With the upcoming release of Firefox 3, I knew that there were going to be alot of searches for the terms “firefox”, “download firefox”, and “firefox 3″.

So I quickly went out and bought my self a nice little domain for a firefox 3 download site. The initial idea was to get the site setup and flip it for a profit. After not being able to sell the site I decided to just let it sit there for awhile and see what it could do for me.

Bare in mind that I have done no work on this site since the last post. No backlinks no directory submissions and no linkbait. Luckily enough it is indexed in GooGle and ranking for some great terms already. I am not making a crazy amount of money from it. But it is already covering the cost of the domain, and its share on my hosting account.

That is only with 3 weeks in the works. I am expecting a mad rush of traffic when firefox 3 is released and the traffic should be relatively good until firefox 4 is released.  I set this site up on a Saturday while I was eating cereal and watching cartoons.  Its not always hard work, and I might just make another one this weekend with another topic in mind.


If You Sold Your Blog Would You Tell?

May 17th, 2008 6 Comments   Posted in Making Money Online

With the recent sale of JohnCow.com, I was bit disappotinted to find that not only had the new owner not wrote a introduction post to tell us what his plans with the blog are, but the leaving owner did not even bother to say a goodbye to all the readers that had made his blog a huge success.

Whilst Im sure that this was a deal set in place by the new owner so that any new readers would not be lost.  I have the feeling that this is going to turn into another cashquests type deal where the new owner is just using the readers as an extension of their already successful bsuiness model.

Just a bit disappointed, and thought I would rant a bit.


How To Make Money Online With A Image Host Part 4

May 9th, 2008 10 Comments   Posted in Making Money Online

It is time ladies and gentlemen for the post you have all been waiting for! This section of the make money online with a image host series will show you how to get the targetted traffic to your site!

TRAFFIC!

Before we get started on this, I want you all to take a look at the screenshots of the traffic you can expect to receive from your image hosts.

Monthly Screenshots:

PikPunk.com

For those of you that can’t read it shows August stats of 17 Unique visitors. And September stats of 36,025. That’s about 1k unique a day, but I only started promoting after the 10th of September. Now you are all probably thinking that Im lying right? Well here is another screenshot with the proof that I started after the 10th and stopped promoting on the 24th of September. Here is the screenshot for September:

PikPunk.com

Made it a bit bigger so that you could see the daily unique.

Now come the part where I tell you all my dirtly little secrets on how to get traffic to your image hosts. This is what you have all been waiting for.

The way to get traffic to your site is very simple. People come to an image site looking for PICTURES! You just have to post pictures on forums and people will click through them and I am going to show you how exactly.

Step 1: Getting Pictures: You have to get the pictures before you can actually post them anywhere. The best source for getting celebirity pictures is http://www.forum.phun.org. These are all updated daily and they are mostly brand new. Now make sure that the pictures you source are not already posted on the other forums where I tell you to post them. So now you have your pictures.

Step 2: Upload the Pictures: Now this is kind of obvious but the pictures that you get have to be re uploaded on your site, I was about to skip this step but then remembered that there are actually people out there that would skip this step. The reason you have to reupload them is so that you are actually using your own site in step 3.

Step 3: Posting your Pictures: I only use 3 forums to post pictures on, and the traffic has sustained itself. The forums to post the pictures on are:

http://www.celebs.me.uk

http://www.masalaboard.com

http://www.santabanta.com

That’s it. Take the pictures from Phun.org, download them, reupload them to your site, and post them on the other forums in step 3.

It might also be a good idea to put your site in your signature on these forums. Since people are actually also posting pics on these forums they may be inclined to start using your site. That way you have people doing the work for you.

Another method that could be successful for you is to post funny/interesting pics on digg, it might not always lead to a front page dig but it will lead to a backlink and SOME TRAFFIC. First thing you need to do is get some funny/interesting pictures. Once you have those you have to upload them all to your image host. Than 3 times a day post an article on digg with a link to the image. If you are lucky enough to get dugg to the FrontPage you are looking at over 10k hits to just that image. But that’s not it, diggers have websites and they use forums. So the pictures would go viral and you would see a crazy amount of traffic. This is not something that is guaranteed but is good if you get it done. The forums should be enough to keep you happy with regards to traffic.

There you have it ladies and gentlemen. A tried and tested method that will make you money, and all you have to do is spend less than 15 minutes a day to make sure that you continue to make money. The proof is all there in the screenshots, and if you are still not able to make money with this method than you sir is a nincompoop! Also remember when you get tired of working those laborious 15 minutes a day you should be able to resell the site for 10X monthly revenue very easily.


How To Make Money Online With A Image Host Part 3

May 7th, 2008 5 Comments   Posted in Making Money Online

Hi Guys, in case you missed part 1 and part 2. Go back and read them first before you start reading this part about how to make money online with a image host. This is a pretty long post so I have kept it on its own. This sections has to do with monetizing that damn image host! After you read this section you should be able to have a fully MONETIZED image host.

Monetization:

Now come the nitty gritty of the actual ebook. The monetization section. It is important to talk about Monetization before the traffic because you should have the ads on your site before you move to promote your site.

There are 5 ways that I have been monetizing my inmage hosts, you do not have to implement all of these you could pick and choose the ones you need. They are:

1. Adsense

2. Adbrite

3. Azoogle

4. Link Sales

Adsense is the obvious choice to go, but you must consider one thing with adsense. While you may get over 10-14 THOUSAND impressions a day it will lead to very FEW CLICKS. Seriously people coming onto image hosts for some reason do not want to click on an adsense ad for some reason. It is beyond me. Don’t believe me? Check out these 2 adsense screenshot for 2 of my last sites. As you can see there are alof of daily impressions but not that much has been made from adsense.

 

As you can see from the screenshot there are a lot of impression but no earnings. This is not to say that you should not have adsense on your site because every once in a while you will get a click for $1.00+ that makes it all worth it.

Here is a screenshot from my second site that should drive the image home for you:

 

Adbrite is what you will have to use to pay your server bills. After finding out that I was not making enough with adsense to cover the overheads I started looking into other advertising mediums. I thought that a CPM advertiser would be a good way to go because of the fact that I was getting over 12k Impressions a day. So I decided to give some of my advertising to adbrite. The good thing is that you don’t have to worry about users clicking on ads for you to make money. You just have to have the ad displayed there and you will get paid. Another thing that you must remember to do is turn ON the interstitial ads so that if a user is viewing more than one page you will also get paid for that. I started out with one banner in my footer and then added 2 more. On top of that I also removed all the adsense ads and replaced them adbrite.

Here is a daily screenshot of the earnings I achieved with adbrite.

 

And here is a daily screenshot:

Azoogle. Now this is a big boy. You only have to consider this if you have found a good campaign that you think will convert well on a image host. Because you wont get paid for impressions, and you wont get paid for clicks. You will only get paid when and if a customer converts for the advertiser! So think of it like this, they come to your site. See an ad that interests them, click on it, and fill out a form as simple as submitting a cell phone number or there zip code. Or as complicated as a 4 page questionnaire. Obviously you will get paid more if it converts but it is also a lot harder to convert. Think twice before giving up your adspace to this one.

Link Sales are a nice and lucrative way to make some money as well. Im not going to go into too much detail about it here but if you click on this link you will see the DigitalPoint thread where I sold the links as you can see it is a nice way to add some monthly revenue to your site.

W00t! 75% of the work is now done. The only thing left is to get traffic to the site now. Usually I would never give out this type of information but because its MY eBook you all should KNOW!


How To Make Money Online With A Image Host Part 2

May 6th, 2008 2 Comments   Posted in Making Money Online

How to Make Money Online With A Image Host Part 2. In this section of the series we will discuss scripts and hosting. We have already discussed the domain and now its time to show you where you can get the script from and where to host the site. At the end of this post you should now have a fully functioning image hosting site.

Scripts:

I am not going to tell you that there are 100’s of scripts out there and I have tried them all. The truth is very simple. I have checked out over 20 image hosting scripts and I have come to use only 1 of them. You have to be very careful with image hosting scripts because for some reason hackers love to hack image hosts. Luckily with the script I have been using I have never been hacked once and there have been attempts. It’s just that some image hosts are easier to hack than others.

The script that I am going to tell you to download is a free image hosting script, it is released by The Mihalism Fourm, now usually you could go there and download it after registering but I know that at the moment there servers are being bombed by downloads so if you use the link at the end of this section you should be able to download it without troubling them too much.

Here is a screenshot of the actual page after you upload it to your server:

In the bottom you have the footer area which once successful you should be able to sell text links for.

In the highlighted red areas you have the adsense ads.

In the blue you have the multi upload feature. Forum posters absolutely LOVE the multi-upload picture parts, because they get a chance to upload a full set of pictures at one time. Thus saving them time. Now you may be saying “But Mubin, if we keep it to one picture at a time wont that make them keep coming back to the homepage to upload more pictures?” The simple answer is yes, but the more detailed answer would make you think about the fact that if I have to upload 15 pictures I do not want to have to keep going back and forth to do it. I may do it once, I may do it twice, but I will not be there the 3rd time. You have to consider it like a cost-benefit analysis do you want that user on your site once or do you want the traffic that he will bring by posting all those pictures on a popular forum? You make your own mind up, I have given you my opinion on the matter.

On top you have the gallery feature which is great for keeping people on your site.

People click through on all the pictures and stay on your site. The more people on your site opening more and more pages the more revenue you have BECAUSE of more page views! Plus the longer they stay on your site the longer they actually have to remember the site and pass it on to a friend. So try to make sure your gallery is populated properly.

With this script you have the option to edit the number of field used for uploading. Sometimes I have it set to 5, and other times 15. I like to experiment.

Now for all you people that want to download the script you can download it by CLICKING HERE! Yes, I know it leads to page on my blog with a link to rapidshare. I did this on purpose so that in case the rapidshare file goes down, I do not have to edit the ebook just the actual post. SO BACK THE FUCK OFF HATERS! There are no ads on the actual post just a straightforward link to where you need to go.

At this point in time you should have your image host’s domain name ready. And you should have downloaded the script and familiarized yourself with it a bit.

Hosting:

There are 3 main types of hosting out there.

1. Shared

2. Virtual Private Servers (V.P.S.)

3. Dedicated

The best shared hosting that everyone will go to and that is dirt cheap for the first month is HostGator, if you use the promo code “hgc25” or “iceishot” your first month will only cost $0.01. This is okay to get your image hosting site of the ground, but I pretty much guarantee you will have to move on to something else after the first month if you follow all the directions in this ebook till the end. Hostgator is good if your plan is to make an image host promote it and than sell it because you will just be paying $0.01 with HostGator. If you want to go down that route, than please do sign up with HostGator now.

A V.P.S is a good idea if you want to host your site without much trouble of it going down or an email from your host saying that you have exceeded your bandwidth limits. I have yet to find a decent VPS provider that I can stand behind and say that I recommend them. I can say this though be very careful of unscrupulous resellers promising you the world at a price of $5. IT’S NOT FRIGGIN POSSIBLE! So don’t be a fool. If you are luck enough to get to the point where you need a VPS spend the money and reap the rewards.

Dedicated. You will be very lucky if you get to the point where you will need a dedicated server. BUT IT DOES HAPPEN. At this point in time you should be making more than enough to cover the costs of your dedicated server. Again don’t try to get stuck with a seller that is just reselling someone elses service. Now I have actually used a dedicated that I can stay I will stand behind. On customer service and uptime you cannot beat the service provided by “thewird” you will have to go to the proxy.org forums to find him, but he is the guy to go to if you need a dedicated server. He is online all the time as well so he can answer your questions instantly as well. I am not getting paid by “thewird” to write this. I have used his servers for my proxy’s for the last 6 months, and every time there was a problem it was usually something that I did wrong.

Now that we have hosting, the script, and the domain name sorted there is just one thing left to do, and that is get the site monetized, I know I know its getting better and better isn’t it. Don’t worry we are coming to the traffic part in a bit.