BeatMyAuction.com

The long awaited has happened, finally, the Giant Google reveals their search counts.  Man I can’t wait to see how far this will go.  Now people will know exactly how many times in the last month a certain term has been searched for.

Do you know what this means?

• When you’re looking for a domain name that is keyword targeted so that you get good traffic…you’ll look here to see which one is the most popular
• When you’re looking to invest in domain names…you’ll to see which word has more searches and will make the domain name more valuable
• When you’re looking for a new niche…you’ll look here and compare to how many pages are indexed for the term
• PPC…that will feel these effects
• Everything will change, and those up to the challenge and deep in the game will reap the benefits

Nichebot will also see changes I’m assuming.  I’m stealing their image here, I hope they don’t get mad, but here’s what the new Adwords section looks like, (I know I know, I’ll upload my version of the image as soon as I get a chance, I just wanted to get you this news quick!!!) *Edit: Image Courtesy of Nichebot.com*

And as Nichebot owner and founder, Jim Morris, says on his blog post, expect to see these numbers in nichebot.

Technorati Tags: adsense, google, google search, google serp, make money, niche, nichebot, search, seo

So like I told you before, I’m relatively new to the blogging bit, and I promised I’d update my 6 Top WordPress Plugins as I came across something good.  So it hasn’t been more than a week or two and I’ve already got another biggie.  Its HUGE!  Why?  Because it has to do with making money!

So we already got Google Adsense set up and randomly placed throughout the blog, next we’re going to set up Kontera.  You might have heard some recent news about its work with Microsoft, yadda yadda, but now we get to use it with WordPress.  And quite frankly - its pretty simple.

Take a quick visit to Blog Herald to see their blog post about the plugin, and then headover to Mashable as they talk about the release.  Basically this is big news for some and bad news for others.  As Blog Herald says, the bloggers love it (as they roll in the money from Kontera), and readers kinda hate it because every time they drag a mouse over it the ads pop up.

Lastly, if you do want to take my advice, and use the this great money making and time saving plugin for WordPress, head on over to the Kontera blog as they discuss the plugin in detail and show you how to install it.

Big news here…don’t be the one that doesn’t use it!

Technorati Tags: advertising, blog plugin, blogger, google adsense, Kontera, make money online, plugin, WordPress, wordpress plugin

If you check your gmail spam folder every once in a while like I do, you’ve probably come across this company advertising at some point - ProcessAtHome.com courtesy of Miss Angel Stevens. At this point I’m getting 2-3 emails about their website per day. Because I am curious at what might be the next big thing, I decided to quickly look it over to see if it had a shot in hell at taking the online world by storm - result? Big NO.

Not only was I pissed at having to flip through a novel of a sales page to actually find out what the heck the money making scheme was, I still didn’t get much info. Based on what I read there, and some quick Google searching, I found out what it was, and to be honest, little ole Angel Stevens (the face that greets you to the program) is tricking you with many many lies of omission. She’s not giving you all the info on that sales page, and boy will you be unhappy when you actually learn what she’s not telling you.

Essentially you sign up as an affiliate for a couple of sites, and based on the affiliate commission, you can give people rebates. For example, if product X costs $100, and the company gives you $35 every time you make a sale for them, you can advertise to customers that you can give them a $20 rebate if they buy through you. So this will give you a leg up on the competition because you’re only charging $80 instead of a $100, but the downside is that you’re only making $15 per sale instead of $35. Benefit, if you can give that kind of rebate, you have a big chance of making a ton more sales.

The point I’m trying to make…you don’t need Angel Stevens and ProcessAtHome.com to do this. Maybe she sets you up with a few affiliate sites automatically, and has a pretty little homepage, but honestly you don’t need her junk when you can do it yourself. ClickBank is a start - you can do the same with that, and I have a link somewhere in my email that I saved that is a GREAT GREAT resource for finding reliable affiliate programs. Once I dig that up I’ll post it up here for you guys. I only spent a few minutes looking at the site when I saved it, but it was top notch, and well worth looking into.

Bottom line: avoid ProcessAtHome.com. Its a scam, not worth it, you can easily do it yourself.

Oh and by the way, she has the nerve to charge $197 for this crock of crap!

Technorati Tags: affiliate network, affiliate program, affiliate scam, Angel Stevens, ClickBank, make money affiliate, ProcessAtHome scam, ProcessAtHome.com, scam

I’ve seen quite a few bloggers create and attempt  such challenges on their blogs.  “Watch as I turn $200 into $100 a day” or “Make money with Adsense, follow me as I earn $20 a day with just an investment of $100.”  The list goes on, many have tried, and to be honest most haven’t made it - its hard.  They usually give themselves a timeframe of a couple months, but they end up falling short.

I’ve taken new inspiration from Bob Schmuck as he attempts the same challenge, however, he’s doing it a little bit different. Like I said, its hard, but if you put time into it, and a bit of effort it can be done.  Start small and be reasonable, once you reach the small goals then you can raise the numbers and go for a bigger piece of the pie. Bob has decided to set the goal low - $1 per day.  Once that is met he can go for more.

You can read through for more information, but here’s the basics.

So far he’s spent:

• Domain: mrsasuperbug.info - $1.19
• Content: outsourced articles - $22.10
• More content: another outsourced article - $9.75
• Total: $33.04

Earnings:

• Day 13: $0.35 a day
• Day 24: $0.50 a day
• Day 45: $0.80 a day

I will do a follow up post at a later point to give you a summary of the basic steps you need to do (as he did) to take the website off the ground.  I’ll also go into some more details for where to submit the site, where to get content, article submitting information, etc.

Technorati Tags: google adsense, make blog, make money online, make money with google, make website, website challenge

Just a quick post here, but as I was reading My Journey To Freedom’s post Murdered By Google I realized this is a great tool to tell you guys about.  On this post Lithman talks about how he got the boot from Google search listings for having some poor quality textlinks on his pages.  Mainly, the links for paid for links and were running through Text Link Ads.

Its easy cash, but looks that now its a poor decision if it means losing out on the SERPs.  I’ve considered using this company before - who wouldn’t want a consistant payment each month?  Lithman says he was losing somewhere in the neighborhood of $150 a month by getting rid of those links.  In the long run it’ll pay off because Google search rankings are way more important.

Ok, to prevent these issues, Lithman tells us of a nifty little tool called the Bad Neighborhood Link Checker

Punch in your website address, and it’ll tell you which of your text links are going to cause you trouble.  Let me know how it goes.

Technorati Tags: bad neighborhood link, Google rank, google search, page rank, pagerank, search engine ranking, SERP, text link, textlink

So Time.com recently released their list of the 50 Best Websites in 2008.  Its no surprise that due to recent gas price increases that GasBuddy is the top listed website.  Pretty interesting site, worth a look, maybe you have some cheaper gas than where you normally get it.

Anyways, onto how these top 50 websites make their money.

So Time made the list of their 50 Best Websites of the year, but someone else decided to take a closer look at all the websites on there.  In particular…how those sites made their money.  No surprise, most of the websites used Google Adsense for their income.  Of the 50 sites,  36 of them have advertisements on their pages, and of those, 18 of them use Google Adsense.  I’m not at all surprised at the fact that this is the case, Google’s the giant in this sector, and you see these Adsense ads everywhere.  Main question…why?  Because Adsense ads work, you should see how careful most people are about the Adsense rules.  Losing your Google Adsense account isn’t a joke if you want to make some bills online, especially with a blog or just information filled website.

For comparison, of those 36, only 2 use Yahoo ads and 1 uses Microsoft ads.

Here’s what the top 10 are doing: (by the way the guy who did all this research, and the website where you can find more than just the top 10 is ValleyWag.com)

GasBuddy — uses combination of Google AdSense and display ads
Howcast — no other than our favorite Google Adsense
iliketotallyloveit.com — guess who? Google Adsense
Omiru — Amazon affiliate products (some Bluefly there too)
PsychCentral — no way Google Adsense again?
TripKick — banners from ValueClick
Wikitravel — no surprise - Google Adsense
Yahoo! Answers — Yahoo ads and Yahoo search results - its their own page come on they had to use Yahoo ads (though I bet they wanted Adsense on there)
Zeer — of course Google AdSense
Afrigadget.com — volunteer run (pretty nifty site)

Here’s the link to the Time.com article

So there ya go, 6/10 of the top 10 are using Google Adsense.  Imagine how much GasBuddy must be bringing in, especially after all this new traffic from being listed on Time’s website.  I wish I was that website.

Technorati Tags: 50 Best Websites, cheap gas, find gas, google adsense, make money online, make money website, Time 50 Best, Time.com, Yahoo ads

You’ve probably stumbled upon the Yahoo Answers section while you were searching for something in Google.  Basically someone asks a question, and good Samaritans reply and hopefully help you out.  There’s a ton of people on there looking for answers aka possibility to get traffic is pretty huge.

A little while ago people came across a genius idea, why don’t I reply to people’s questions (be pretty sincere about my answer), but at the same time send them towards a link of my choice.  Not a bad idea, you answer a question, but if the person wants more info, well here ya go, check this place out.  The clever part about it, affiliate links - if they are looking for mortgages then explain some details to them and then hook them up with your affiliate link for a mortgage website.  This works all around, if they want credit cards, credit reports, how to make money, where to buy wholesale, etc - anything people were asking questions about affiliate guru’s were jumping in with answers, a link here and there, and finally cashing out.

Drawbacks were that at times moderators or readers would get annoyed at the quality of the answers, and report the users to Yahoo, thus getting posts removed along with the links.  So people had to be more and more clever to get the job done.

Brand new world out there now, John Waraas has done it again: BuyAnswersLinks.Com Launches

Seems to be that my focus on these last few posts has been blog automatizing - I want to pay a few bucks, install a few plugins, and basically have my money work for me.  That way I can concentrate on writing good content, and expanding to bigger and better things.  Basically BuyAnswersLInks.com fits into my picture - you pay a few bucks, they write answers to questions and drop in your website url or affiliate link into the post.  You site around and the money rolls in.  They worry about all the issues - using different accounts, using different IPs, etc, etc - all that is taken care of.  Seems simple enough for me, I will give it a shot and let you guys know what I think.

Technorati Tags: affiliate, affiliate link, affiliate network, blog automation, blog traffic, traffic, website traffic, Yahoo Answers

Really really random thought here. But do you realize that watermelons with seeds pretty much don’t exist anymore? I mean a few years ago, we had a choice, get the normal watermelon, or get the one without seeds (but lets be honest they were a pretty feeble attempt because there was still a million seeds in there).

Everyone was always wowed by the seedless and thats what they would get, but at least we got to live with the notion that we were eating the better kind of the two watermelons you could buy.  We got to pick, and we chose the one where we didn’t have to work at spitting the seeds out left and right.  I really didn’t want to go here, but it kind of comes down to the ‘its only better because there is a worse to compare to’ aka ‘we only know what good is because there is an evil’.

Do you realize that our kids won’t even know about this?  I mean it isn’t a big deal, but isn’t it an funny thought?  You’ll think of me when right after learning about plants and seeds in bio they’ll ask you, “hey pops, how do you plant watermelons?” “well son, from seeds of course” “but dad, water melons don’t have seeds!” And now you’ll be lucky enough to have to explain the whole process of how they got rid of seeds, and how they are still able to plant them. Don’t get me wrong, I approve of selective breeding/crossing of plants and animals, and I probably even approve of genetically altered animals and plants in many cases. It just feels weird, I remember summers at home sitting around with friends, bored out of our minds, mom brings out a ton of watermelon, and the spitting begins.  There would be sprouts of melon coming out all over the yard where the lawnmower didn’t get to it.  And don’t forget all the spitting competitions…those are gone, but I mean if we had the choice would we really pick spitting seeds for distance over Nintendo Wii?

Whole thing just leaves a funny feeling thats all, seedFULL watermelons are a figment of the past.

Technorati Tags: genetic engineering, genetically altered, seedless watermelon, watermelon, watermelon seeds

Please don’t shoot me, I realize I’ve only been at this for a brief period of time, but I’ve come up with a list of my most essential WordPress plugins.  Due to the fact that I am new to the game, expect a follow-up post that updates how I still feel about these plugins, and any new ones that I find clutch.  However, don’t think I didn’t spend all weekend looking for everyone else’s top lists and favorite WordPress plugins. Trust me, I wasted plenty of time downloading, testing, and deleting plugins, and here’s the 6 plugins I needed to tell you about:

• Favorite one by far has to be Adsense Injection plugin. It creates the Adsense ad, inserts it automatically, and to top it off it does so to every post you have, even old ones that you wrote before you installed the plugin. If you want to change your WordPress theme, or use different blog colors, oh wait, just go into the settings and you can instantly have Adsense ads that match the new colors and theme across the entire site - yep only took 30 seconds to do. Best of all, you don’t even have to worry about the maximum of three Adsense ad blocks rule - Adsense Injection will do all of that for you. You can specify exactly how many you want to show up in the settings.  The way I have it set up now is that it on my homepage there is one Adsense ad block per post (starting from the top obviously) and then when you look at each individual post that page also has three ads. What is also fun, is that Adsense Injection helps to prevent ad blindness.  In case you don’t know what the term means, its when a person gets so used to seeing an ad in a certain part of your blog or website, ie. top left, then he/she will just stop looking there because unconsciously they know that its an ad.  Adsense Injection places your Google Adsense ads all randomly in the text, so its pretty much different each time, hence no ad blindness. So don’t play around, if you want to make money with Google Adsense ads on your WordPress blog, there’s no other way to do it!
• Next, the crucial All In One SEO Pack. Want to get listed in the Google SERPs? Want to get hits and traffic?  Don’t want to do the SEO work by hand?  Here’s your tool.  You’ll quickly see why its probably the most sought after tool out there.  Best of all as you’ll see in my previous post, All In One SEO Pack Plug-In for WordPress Resurrected, the plugin is back under new management!  The creator gave up on the project so someone else took it over and I’m pretty sure we are all glad it worked out that way.  So here’s the gist of what this SEO plugin does, automatically optimizes and creates your meta tags including title, description, and keywords.  You can play around with the settings or just leave the defaults and it works perfectly fine.  A must - get it.
• We all know the importance of Technorati on our blogs, so why not use a tool to automatically create the Technorati tags for us? WP Tags to Technorati does all the work while you go about your regular posting and blogging. It basically takes your WordPress tags and converts those to Technorati tags, and then conveniently places them at the bottom of each of your posts.  As long as you have your WordPress set up to automatically ping the Technorati site, you’re all set. (If you need help having your blog autoping the Technorati site, along with a few other important sites, drop a comment and I’ll type something up for you guys)
• Next in line, Google XML Sitemaps.  Sitemaps may not help your ranking and traffic, at least there’s no positive evidence of it, but why does everyone use it?  Because it makes sure Google sees all your pages, and this makes sure that they have a better shot at getting indexed.  If you aren’t linking to all your pages, a sitemap is important to ensure Google sees it all.  This tool once again automates the entire process for you - creates the sitemap, and then pings Google servers to tell them about your sitemap.  Best part of all?  It updates and repings each time to make a new post.
• Some of you could careless about this next one, but I find its important to watch for trends in your website Ultimate Google Analytics.  There are a few others out there, but this one is simple and does the job, I don’t see why you need much more confusion for this.  It’ll take each post, pop in the Analytics javascript, and bam you’re all set to go.
• Last but not least, unless you aren’t afraid of losing every single post you ever wrote, you’ll need WordPress Database Backup.  No need to elaborate here…BACK UP!

Let me know what I missed, what you liked, and didn’t like.  I’ll update this as I find I need to.  Good luck!