Sunday, September 30, 2007

Whypark Day 19 - Type of Searches I'm Ranked Top In

Its day 19 of the Whypark trial, and I've been checking out Google's webmaster tools to see what type of searches my site ranks in. Also including from Statcounter what type of keywords are showing up to get to my site.

So after 19 days of being indexed

Rank 9: problems filling your car with gas
Rank 10: succession plans private equity
Rank 30: what to do when your girlfriend is broke and needs money

Interesting searches, and I have to note that I'm not sure how they are related to the keywords I put in. I also want to point out that the money that the Adsense revenue shows different keywords from Statcounter.

Rank Search
#10


how much money do car dealers make
#10


how much should a dealer come off msrp
#7


www.how much will it cost
#8


talentdrive scam
#?


promoting your grocery store
#9


do i replace the whole toilet
#?


key to a successful entrepreneurial venture

Please note that these results are from using articles that are pretty broad. If one were to setup a niche site with targeted keywords, you would definitely do better with the Click Through Rate(CTR) on the ads. I'm not complaining though so far with what little traffic I've gotten Its been averaging around 3-4% CTR.

I'm not sure how your parked domain is doing, but if these stats sound better that what your making from sedo/namedrive etc try out Whypark for yourself and see the difference.

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Whypark Day 15 - My First Dollar Earned From Adsense

Well today I'm just following up on my post about setting up Whypark on my site. Today is day 15 on the Whypark test, and I can say that I earned my first dollar from it. Google so far has indexed about 100+ pages so far, and still going. I'm not ranked on the first page of any keywords yet, but I picked some pretty broad terms like 'money'.

The visitor experience? I have Stat counter installed so I was able to see the what keywords this person came in from. Apparently this visitor found a page that was newly indexed so it ranked fairly high in Google for 'Entrepreneur'. After that the visitor moved on to read about 6 more articles on the website before clicking on an ad to exit the site. Overall time spent on site was about 4 minutes. So far so good, and I hope to be bringing more good news as time goes on.

Thursday, September 20, 2007

CashCrate Payout Reached $10.45

Just an update on CashCrate. I joined CashCrate on 9/17/07, and well 3 days later after filling out free offers, and joining different programs I hit the minimum $10 for the payout. $10.45 cents to be exact. They requested my telephone number for verification. Lets see if I get a check next month mailed in to me. I'm still waiting for for more offers to clear pending since I have another $29.55 there. I guess what I really should put up on the side there is how much I actually got confirmed from these companies instead of the pending amounts. I'll fix that today.

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Flooding the Warcraft Gold Market Some More

Yup, right now if you go to Sparter to buy gold the average price for 1000g on my server is about $50. Sucks for me since I usually get to sell it for more. So now my question is should I sell my gold not or just sit back and stock up until the prices go back up. I'm averaging about 300g/day just logging in for about 20-30 minutes for the days that I DO log in to check my auction house sales. For right now I think I'm just going to wait till the next wave of gold farmers get banned for me to sell my stuff. Yes I know its ironic for me to wait for people to get banned when I'm selling gold which can get me banned from the game eventually. =)

Anyways a week or so ago I said I was going to create a landing page for World of Warcraft gold guide. So far I've been getting some hits to it, but no actual sales. I think I'm going to rethink or rework the page or maybe tryout one of the other Clickbank guides to sell if this one doesn't do well. If I'm really going to make it from gamer to making a living online I need to get the affiliate marketing thing down. So if anyone has got some tips to share with me please feel free to drop me a note.

Back to World of Warcraft though. I guess I can give a freebie on how I make this amount of gold. Currently I'm alt tabbed out of the game waiting for my mail to finish up opening up. In the 12 minutes I've been online I have collected 1125g from yesterday's sales. Nice huh?
You can ignore that earned/hr part since I was only logged in for 12 minutes or so.

Everyday I earn gold via the auction house. My character is a 375 Jewelcrafter with most of the recipes. What I basically buyout the whole auction house of Adamantite Ore to prospect, and then resell the gems (blue and green). Two useful mods that you will probably need is Auctioneer, and CT Mailmod.

Check the prices of all the blue quality gems on the auction house. That way you can figure out what price you need to buy the ore at. (average on my server is 12g for Talasite up to 55g for Star of Elune). On my server this comes out to about 20g/stack of Adamantite ore.

Prospect all the ore that I get, and vendor the dust (I don't have time to make it into mercurial stuff)

Cut and sell all the gems and list them on the Auction House at cheaper than what everyone else sells it for. Auctioneer will let you put up multiple items with ease and speed. Also it will also calculate the price so you can beat everyone Else's price on there. Very handy, and otherwise it would be too time consuming to do this method without the mod. Best selling gem is Solid Star or Elune followed by Glowing Nightseye, and Runed Living Ruby.

That's it, that's all I do. Thought it was going to be hard? I have a few other tricks up my sleeve to make gold, but this is by far the most efficient for me. Drawback to this is its huge start up cost (around 7k to get 375 JC with all the recipes). As time goes on I'll post some other ways to make gold easily on the game. Anyways that's all for now I've got gems to cut.

Monday, September 17, 2007

Cashcrate Review - Not Much Yet But it Helps

So I have been procrastinating about writing some articles up, and making a landing page to advertise some Clickbank products. I don't know something about writing an official article compared to just blogging just makes it seem harder. Anyways in the midst of trying to figure out what to write the article about I revisited CashCrate. After the horrible experience of signing up for MediaDollarz, I was very reluctant to join another get paid to complete offers site.

This time I made myself ready for the incoming spam though. I created a new account at Hotmail, and used it to sign up with CashCrate. After filling in some details about myself, I found my way to the offers section. This was nicely separated into a cash or point offer section which is sortable by payout amounts as well as 100% free only. Thats the section I chose my offers from, and well after about an hour of filling out applications my balance was a nice pending amount of $11.50. Two of which I are now confirmed as I write this post (so $1.00 confirmed 10.50 pending). I guess this gives me something to do if I'm not working on anything. It also gives me something to add on to the income earned section on my blog finally.

A note for anyone new to these paid to complete offer sites. When completing an offer in CashCrate DON'T click on yes for information regarding other surveys etc. What you will eventually realize is that many of the offers themselves will try to sign you up for offers which are already offered within CashCrate.

Last of all if you try it out, and like the service refer your friends to it for extra money! For every person you refer to CashCrate that reaches the $10 payout mark you get $3. While this program won't make you rich, it passes the time when you're bored at home rather profitably.

Saturday, September 15, 2007

Save Money on Whypark if You Are a Clickbank Member

Reminder regarding the Whypark post I made the other day. If you are a Clickbank member then you can pick up Whypark for yourself to save yourself about $50 bucks. If you’re not a member yet then you can sign up for a Clickbank account, but there’s a catch. To qualify for the 50% commission on the Whypark sale you need to have sales from 5 different states (including you) on other Clickbank Products.

As for the trial domain I put up (http://www.MoneyNe.ws), Google indexed about 20 pages so far, and still needs to index another few thousand articles. I’ll update more once I start getting search traffic.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Why Park? Cause Domain Parking is Slow Enough Already

Tired of your unused domains collecting pennies a month? Try out Whypark. Unlike the traditional domain parking you're actually allowed to send traffic to your domain. Link building, article marketing etc. I would not recommend buying traffic though since all it does is increase visitors from china/middle east that stare at the screen for 7 seconds that never click on anything(I tried it and checked with Google Analytics 100visitors, 0 clicks, 100% bounce rate woo!). With Whypark you don't share you revenue, your in control of what content you put on there. Even the way it looks with custom css layouts etc. Whypark adds relevant articles which basically makes it show up on the search engines so that you have targeted traffic coming to your sites from places like Google/yahoo/Msn. You can apply for Google Adsense as well as set up text link ads once you get your page setup.

Why this post about Whypark? Well I have to admit I started looking into making some money online after I read an article somewhere about some cyber squatter making a couple thousand dollars off of a domain name. I thought, hey I can think of something to sell. Anyways a few days later I checked around, and found out that most domains were already taken. This left only a handful of names that were short, and some of them not even pronounceable or extremely long names that nobody would ever think to type in. So when I found that MoneyNe.ws wasn't taken yet, I though hey I can use this its the whole phrase with just a period I was pretty stoked. Only later did I find out that domain hacks as this one was called aren't really valued much for resale unless they were really good. Anyways I'm not giving up on it yet. Maybe someone will come by, and think of it as pretty interesting as the world's Internet addresses start getting all used up.

In the mean time I heard about one of the features of GoDaddy which is Domain Cash Parking. I thought hey, this time I'll just park my domain, and make some money that way. Only to find out parked domains don't make that much money since you aren't allowed to advertise or build traffic to it. So the thought of slowly making a few cents a day from parking for doing nothing at all didn't really sound like a good idea to me. I also tried Sedo.com, and Namedrive.com. I stumbled across another domain parking method called Whypark. This option seemed a little better for me so I'm trying it out now. After about a week or two the site is finally indexed in Google today.

So today is day 1 in the Whypark/Adsense test. I'll keep track of how that comes along. If you've got a list of domains, but skeptical about the $100 bucks for 100 domains price send me an e-mail so I can maybe set up a test account.

Thursday, September 6, 2007

Click Bank Woes, and World of Warcraft Haunting Me Still

Well I've been fiddling around with Click Bank, and trying out the Google Adwords method to try for sales. However its not going soo well. I think I need to spend a little more time researching products to sell instead of jumping straight in thinking I'll make some quick money back. I do admit though that jumping into the Adwords/Affliate method is some good education for me though I wish I read up a little more first. I was able to grasp the concept of getting those cheap 4 cent clicks in a few days, getting nice 8% click through rates on the keywords I selected. However the products I picked showed no success. Whats the newbie affiliate PPC lessons I learned from all this?

  • Landing page is everything - You can bring in millions of people via an advertisement, but if the page you bring them to doesn't sell then all that targeted traffic is wasted.
  • You don't need to be the #1 - My click through rates with the highest % was actually in the #7-8 position. People who are shopping online will browse different choices instead of buying the first thing they see. However your product/page better be pretty convincing since this customer is comparing you to the other 6 people he/she has already seen.
  • Use Different Tracking codes - Check out which ad is giving you the best click rates. Test different ads with different codes to get the most efficient sets for each keyword group.
  • Product research - If your serious about selling something try and get an evaluation copy or buy the product. Is this something you would use? How about your friends or family? If the answer is no then rethink about marketing it.
  • Set a reasonable budget - Test the waters out, and don't set an excessive budget right off the bat. You're trying to optimize your ads, and see if the product your marketing is going to be returning some dough. If you don't see any sales after the first 100-200 clicks then you might want to check out whats up.
There is a lot more I picked up from all of this, but if you are new to affiliate marketing go do some homework first before you get started. A good place to start would be the Digital Point Forums. They have a lot of information that you can read up on before you get started about pay per click advertising, Adwords, Clickbank, etc. If you're new to forum browsing, find the search button first =). Anyways I'll be spending the next couple weeks looking through the Clickbank marketplace for products to try and sell.

In the mean time I've resorted back to spending about an hour a day on World of Warcraft earning some gold to go and sell on Sparter again. I guess I can't pass up the $10-20/hr for playing 7 hours a week. At least until I can find a good product on Clickbank to market. One point of advice someone brought up to me is that I should market something that I have some knowledge of, or experience with. I guess I'll try out a WoW gold making review campaign this week, and report back in with how I did.

Tuesday, September 4, 2007

MediaDollarz Review

Here goes the first trial in making money online that I have gotten to so far. Unfortunately for me it was not a very good experience. After seeing some good reviews about MediaDollarz.com I decided to try them out. Its a program similar to CashCrate in which you fill out surveys or apply for promotional offers to get money. The good points that brought me there from other people's reviews was that you could get your money within 24hrs via pay pal. However the first thing upon signing up was the message stating that due to recent activities the payouts have now been changed to monthly.

Well maybe they are just having a tough month with program abusers. So thinking nothing of this I went on to verify my cell phone. This is a required step to so that you are able to withdraw your earnings via Paypal. Once I entered my number I was promptly called by an automated message server which gave me my verification number. I entered this in, and so far still no verification e-mail, however my paypal withdraw area is no longer grayed out. So assuming the best of it I go on to the member offers area to start earning some money!

The members area is easy to navigate with filters for different categories (free offers, technology, trials, etc). I checked in under free offers, and looked up the section $4+ free offers! Easy pickings I thought to myself as I browsed through some of the offers. Some of the offers returned up to $45 dollars, BUT those are the ones that you have to shell out your own money first, and stay subscribed. As I didn't want to order satellite feeds or purchase weight loss products (even though I might need it), I clicked the ignore button to search through other offers. After sifting through the $4+ I found that I didn't want to sign up for anything in the $4 or even $3 dollar range (though people who want a new credit card may get one).

I moved on to the $2+ free offers range, and started seeing some things I might be able to get some money on. free survey service sign ups. Hurray I can make some cash!. So I signed up with one offer which had me go through, and fill in a 5 minute looping survey that kept asking me if I wanted to sign up for other survey sites about 6 times in a row. 6 minutes later after saying "No I don't have Diabetes" for the 10th time I get to the end of the survey only to find out my time has been wasted. To finish the survey I needed to sign up for a silver, gold and 2 platinum offers to complete. All of which costs money AND are products that I'm pretty sure I clicked 'NO' to in the previous 6 minutes of my life. Seeing no way to complete the survey without spending my own money I closed my browser, and went back to the Mediadollarz member page to find another offer. (maybe just my bad luck, and I'll give them the benefit of the doubt)

Anyways 50 minutes later, after a couple similar survey links, dead links, and dozens of satellite dish offers, foreclosure offers, psychic reading offers I finally found another lead. This one wasn't as spam filled as the other one, and the survey actually ended with only 1 e-mail. I thought I'd end the night on a good note, and logged off to check in to see how much credit I was going to get filling in various items for about an hour.

Next day came by, and I checked my account. I still have earned a whopping $0.00. I've read a couple reviews saying that Cashcrate paid out a little better than MediaDollarz. One of the places I read had done a review on CashCrate saying he made "$3.50/hour". Well the other reviews were right, $3.50/hour is definitely more than $0.00/hour.

Sorry for the long winded post, but a little annoyed at how little I got back for the amount of effort I put in(not to mention amount of spam e-mail I got). If you are looking to make some money online, I would look elsewhere.

Sunday, September 2, 2007

Welcome to My Money News

Blogger sure has improved since the last time I have used it some 5 years ago. I was able to get this thing setup in a few minutes. Originally I was going to link this to my site Money News to try and give it a little more traffic, but I had put the site onto domain parking so I can't add a subdomain anymore. Just a quick introduction to who I am, and why I'm putting up a blog.

My name is Mitch from the beautiful island of Maui, Hawaii. Born and raised here, and well rather bored since all we got is beaches, oceans, and alot of tourists. I'm a father, a whole sale sales person, and an avid video gamer. I'm starting up this blog as a means to try and stop wasting my time gaming, and start earning some extra cash online. So as the very first thing for me to do to get myself out of a game, that I have been playing for the past 4 odd years I've decided to sell my World of Warcraft (WoW) gold.

Playing a game for 4 years lets you amass quite a bit of fortunes. You do hear of people successfully making money even while playing (Forbes Article). Anyways my goal was to liquidate my items in the game. As it happens that very week I decided to do this, Slashdot posted up an article about a player to player site called Sparter where I could sell my gold. The last 2 months have been me slowly liquidating my WoW gold into cold hard cash. So for anyone who says gaming doesn't pay. You can check out how much I made from it on the side there.

Only downside to Sparter is that they will charge you 10% on each sale you make. However you are able to set your own prices to compensate. You don't need to spam forums or have to accept a cheap price from one of the many WoW gold sites that only give you half or 1/4 value of what your product is worth. Payment system on sparter is very nice. Sparter will act as an escrow for the 2 players. All buyers must pay ahead of time, and sellers will get their money from sparter once the transactions are done. My preferred payment is paypal, and sparter pays out nightly(24hr after a confirmed delivery) even on weekends.

I'll be keeping track of my earnings from different things from now on so wish me luck on my project. =)