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.

I have been writing an eBook for awhile now, and thats why I have not been posting as regularly as I should be doing.

The eBook will be released in the coming week hopefully next Monday.

If you have not read my last eBook at making money with image hosts I put my money where my mouth was by offering full refunds and also giving the damn thing away for free.  If you have not read the eBook it is available for free here, here, here and here.

If you have a blog and would like a review copy and you can post a review on your blog please get in touch via the contact form and I will make sure that you get a copy.

On the other hand if you are any good at making eBook covers or landing pages please get in touch f I like your work you can also have a free copy in exchange to carry out some work.

Bear with us people.

Luckily I started to notice that serp traffic started dropping and investigated. Turns out that I was not even ranking for “Mubin Ahmed” anymore. Kind of sucks when your domain name is “http://www.mubinahmed.com”.

I installed the optimal title plugin,waited, and prayed. Just installing the plugin was not a gurantee that my serps would be returned to me.

I have noticed since yesterday that my listings in GooGle have changed from the way they were to the way that they should be with optimal title installed.

Still waiting for my site links to come back though.

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.

I guess I know how John Chow Feels now.

For all you white hat SEO’s out there, please do not start preaching to me.  I didn’t do anything wrong.  I think it had to do with my server being down, and me using a new theme, but that should not have a effect on the url structure or on my serp’s.

C’mon google “Don’t be evil”

I am really regretting giving away this site now as it is ranking really nicely for some great keywords.  A promise is a promise though, and I promised my readers a free blog and by God that is what I will give them.

The winner of the free blog is: Adam Dempsey,  Adam please get in touch with us within 24 hours or we will have to give up the blog to someone else!

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:

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 10^th 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 10^th and stopped promoting on the 24^th of September. Here is the screenshot for September:

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.

I am starting to believe that the term was something invented by frustrated SEO’s to convince clients that had sepnt 1000’s that the reason that the site is not ranking for the term “home loans” is because of the ever omnious GooGle Sandbox.  What they fail to mention is that some sites get indexed and ranking for top terms WITHIN hours of DOMAIN REGISTRATION.

Yes, it is harder to get a site about “credit card repayments” ranking on the first page.  The reason?  First there are over 1000 credit card companies that deserve to be there before your spammy site because they actually have the qualitity content that the searcher is looking for.  Obviously visa or mastercard are going to rank on the top because they are an authority/trusted site.  They have people linking to them on an hourly basis for no particular reason.  They have people on their site staying on their site for more than the 30 secs that they would on your site.

So there you have it ladies and gentlemem.  I have officialy claimed that there is no such thing as a GooGle sandbox.

Little did I know that this little site of mine would soon start to rock the serp’s.

If you do a search on GooGle for “firefox promotion” please take a look at the number 6 positions and think about that the next time you decide not to enter into one of my contest!!

The winner will be picked on Friday.  Entries for that particular contest are now over.

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!