April 2008 Ends, Quick Recap

I did 50 posts this month and this is my 51st post. Could not do an average of 2 posts a day as I was busy with some travels. Again in May I am visiting India and I may not be in the position of doing this number of posts, but I will try my best to do atleast one post a day.

This month I did some posts to related to increasing traffic to your blog, Adsense tips, Traffic Quality, some affiliate programs, Social networking and Adsense Revenue Sharing sites

I will be coming up with more posts next month, please subscribe to my posts so that you do not miss it. One good news is that this blog just at the age of 2 months has got PR 2 in the recent pagerank update.

I will be writing more on my SEO experiences next month and surely some money making tips.

Thank you all for your support and encouragement. I get lots of emails everyday, I try to reply most, but some times I may not be able to or I may not get it also as I use strong spam filters. Please post it as comments rather than sending emails. I will surely reply to the comments and it will be useful for other readers too.

What are my Online source of Income

I have this blog running good and do write on my other blog related to my personal day to day experience. I write about online earning here and I experiment different programs and method of online income.

I work for different affiliate programs as well along with selling ad spaces.

I do earn good and now I have a consistent online income. To achieve this I have been working online for some time and have experience in running my own affiliate program. I do run an excellent money making referral program which is called HomeJob Ref.

My sources of Income

Advertisements - I do sell ad spaces on this blog and have some advertisers right now, but the rates are very competitive. I also use Google Adsense, which is my main and consistent income for this blog

Affiliate Programs - I work for different affiliate programs and run my own referral program which again gives me good earnings.

Paid Post - I do write posts for some other blogs and also on this blog. I get paid good for these paid posts

Other sources of my online income is I do some SEO work for different individuals which fetches me decent revenue. I also do WordPress, Drupal customizations which is again a good income for me.

Adsense Revenue Sharing - I also write for some Google Adsense Revenue sharing website which boosts my Adsense Income

Video Posts - I do earn good from my Videos which I post as Revver. It not only gives me some revenue, but its really giving good boost to my traffic. I see my videos posted in different channels and I get paid for all these.

I do get a lot of quiers for Text links, but I am very much choosy and I do only accept offers which I feel will not effect the quality of my blog.

To summarize, earning through blogging is possible and make have proved it and I have experienced it

How different bloggers earn money from their blog

You know what is a blog and there are many people earning good from their blog. How do they earn so much money and why can’t you earn as they earn. This may the question that might be moving around you. Well, we need to check how do they earn so much of money and can we adopt these techniques or tricks.

Let me give your some clear and common fact these bloggers follow

Time and Age of their blogs

This is something you need to think. How long have you been blogging sincerely? How much time do you spend for your blog. How much posts do you do everyday?

If you are blogging once in a while, forget about earning, If you are busy with your daily work or your full time job and you are not able to make blogging as a high priority task, then its difficult to earn. If you have just started blogging, then hold on and carry on, it takes some time to get good traffic, loyal visitors, improve your bounce rate, improve your search engine ranking, branding yourself, high Google pagerank, good number of subscribers, creating news letters, all these take its own time.

John Chow earns money tell people how much he earns, this is really interesting. He has good number of subscribers, had good pagerank, heavy back links, and he has good number of advertisers. Can you imagine, he charges US$ 500 to write a paid review. He made this happen after he was working hard for some time. His blog is now more than 2 year old.

Darren Rowse says he earned very less from Google Adsense, which was just US$ 400,000. Can you even imagine to earn this from your blog? Yes you can earn, but let me tell you Darren started blogging in 2002, its now about 6 years. So you need to wait to reach some heights. These are the people who made people realize that you can earn money through blogging and you do not need to sell anything.

Amit Agrawal the first Indian Professional blogger earns around US$ 1000 from Google Adsense and he knows how to maximize Google Adsense Revenue. He has a technology blog where he posts information which are really worth reading and you will find all his posts with great information. I read his blog every day. He has been blogging since 2004

All these bloggers generate revenue from different affiliate programs and advertising program. They get paid because they have loyal visitors, good traffic. Traffic is the power which really monetize your blog and for traffic you need good posts, and keep your blog fresh with new posts consistently

My A W Survey Earnings

I joined AW Survey which is showing good earnings. I just logged into the control panel to check what my earnings is after about 10 days of joining this program

Its good for the start. I have earned US$ 62.25 and mostly from referral. Let me tell you that I have not yet received any payment from them. I will keep you all updated with my earnings and the payment. You can join, there is nothing to lose as there is no sign-up fees or you do not need to sell anything.

Join for free

Reducing Bounce Rate of your blog

Bounce rate is expressed in percentage and is calculated on the basis of the visitors coming to your website and leaving the website after visiting that particular page. For example if out of two visitors 1 visitor returned back from your blog without visiting any other page or link on your blog then the bounce rate is 50%.

How to check your blog’s bounce rate?

The best tool will be to use Google Analytics which clearly gives you almost all the information that you need to know about your blog’s traffic and performance. I would suggest to get the following questions answered looking into the Google Analytics report

What is the percentage of your blog’s bounce rate

What is the bounce rate of individual traffic source like search engines, direct traffic, social networking sites, Google Adwords (If you are using or any other advertising programs). I have found in my case the bounce rate of social media traffic is very high and the best being from search engines and direct traffic

Analyze the bounce rate for individual traffic source and find out which is the source with lower bounce rate

How to reduce your blog’s bounce rate?

Proper linking

It will be good if you have the content of your blog linked well. For example the internal linking will be work good for reducing your blog’s bounce rate. Another way will be adding some plugins like related posts will be helpful

Proper designing

Your blog should be designed well with a professional template and using images which will attract or tempt the visitor to visit another page of your blog

Relevant Topics

If you have different topics covered in your blog, the chances of reducing the bounce rate is high.

Keep analyzing your blog’s bounce rate and work accordingly.

Tyroo, Indian Pay per click program

Just thought of writing a small post on Tyroo, which is another pay per click program. Its totally an Indian site and dedicated to Indian websites. I see most of the advertisers are Indian websites and companies. I used this program for few days and just removed it, but the earnings are good. I removed it only because, I was happy with working with Google Adsense. Tyroo shows ads for the category that you select. Its a good one as the earnings are good. Payments are done in Indian rupees and by cheque.

You can try this and check how it works for you.

Ad Review Feature in your Google Adsense

Google adsense has a new feature called the Ad Review Centre, where you can block or allow Placement targeted Ads. To access this feature, login to your Google adsense account and go to Adsense Set up Tab and then to the Ad Review Centre and enable this feature. When an advertiser goes for Placement targeted campaign then these ads will be shown on your web page and you can block these ads.

Its not advised to block these ads as it has negative impact on your earnings. If you block these ads then you need to provide the reason for that and this feedback will be provided to the advertiser by Google.

Blocking ad groups may have a negative revenue impact because ads that are blocked won’t compete in the auction on your site, and therefore won’t drive up potential earnings for that ad space. Also, advertisers whose ads you block may choose not to target your site again in the future.

In addition, waiting to review ads by choosing the “manually review” setting may decrease your revenue. This is because ads that are awaiting review won’t participate in the auction either. Please consider the potential revenue impact before choosing manual review instead of auto-allow.

Monetize your blog with Feedburner

I have been using feedburner to burn my blog feeds and manage subscriptions. One of the features of Feedburner is to monetize your blog using Google Adsense. You can now integrate Google Adsense with Feedburner to serve ads to your blog subscription as you may be aware that Feedburner is acquired by Google

Login to your Feedburner Account

Select the blog for which you would like to display ads

Select the Monetize Tab

If you are using Wordpress, select word press from the drop down menu, you will get a code and the instruction to paste the code to your wordpress template

You are done

Importance of Terms and Conditions

When you join a new affiliate program or sign-up for any account with any program, you will be agreeing to the Terms and Conditions of that program by usually checking the check box before you sign-up. Do you read this before you agree and sign-up for the program? I am sure, more than 90% of us don’t do this. I had faced lots of problems due to this and I sure that you might have also faced such kind of issues.

Every program has its own terms and conditions, FAQ’s which is something we should atleast go through once before we join that program. I had many times got wrong information due to self assumption in many situations and I really regretted for not learning well before joining or spending money for such programs.

So when you next join any program, make sure you go through the FAQ’s as well as the terms and conditions well. If you have any doubts about the program, its advisable to contact the Administrator of the program and get it clarified before you sign-up for the program.

Other thing what you can do is search for the program on Google and read the pages that you get in your search results which will help you in knowing more about the program and different views of different people who have already joined for the program. You cam also search for testimonials of members who are working for the program and if you have their contact details, you can send an email to them and find more about the program and earning opportunities.

Always think well before you leap.

Earning through Commission Junction -CJ

Commission Junction is a place where advertisers and publishers work together and CJ acts as a middle person. If you have a product to sell, you need to sign up as an advertiser and if you have a blog or a website, you can sign up as a publisher and sell the advertisers products at your blog by placing the banners or links which is provided in your control panel.

Commission Junction has good advertisers like Dell, Yahoo, Citibank, Lenovo, Adobe, Staples, Apple, Monster, etc. So you can sell great products if you are an affiliate of CJ, but you need to apply for each advertiser and get the approval before you start selling. Its not sure that you will get approval for all the advertisers, as it depends on your blog and its traffic to get the application approved.

How does Commission Junction work for publishers?

You need to first sign up as a publisher and once your account is created just login and go through the advertisers list. You need to first apply for each advertiser that you would like to work as an affiliate. Once your application is approved, you will be provided with Links and banners which needs to be placed on your blog. Each banner has click tracking system which tracks your sales and you get the commission for that. Different advertisers have different commission system. Some pay for sales, some pay for actions, some pay for clicks and some pay for impressions. You can find all these information before your apply for the advertiser program for each advertiser.

How much can you earn from this program?

This is something which you need to know before you start spending your time. If you are having very low traffic and the kind of traffic which can have some conversions. Basically in CJ, if you make some sales, then you can earn good, as most of the advertisers pay only for action. If you use Google Adsense or other PPC programs like Bidvertiser, etc, you get paid per click, but here very less advertisers pay for click, most of them will pay you only if there is lead or sales, but the revenue is much higher than clicks. Suppose your Adsense ad earns your US$ 0.05 per click, in CJ ,you may get paid US$ 10.00 or more per sale. That is the main difference.

To conclude, if you feel that your blog can have good conversion rate, then you can earn good from this program, but if the conversion is low, you may not earn anything for months. I had signed up for a CJ account more than 2 years back and tried for more than 3 months, but I could not earn anything. There are lots of CJ affiliates who earn good but again it depends on how you market your affiliate program and the nature of traffic that you have.