Like any PayPerPost.com “postie”, I was promoting their blogging service, because each referral brings in between 15$ and 25$. After 3 posts made on nowg.net, where I objectively described the advantages of signing up with them, I gathered 9 referrals and my pending earnings are as shown below.

All are still pending. The first person I referred signed up back in 07-23-2007, and yet still I guess none of them got paid yet..? I would assume I am just being unlucky with referring people who don’t make it to the finish line, BUT…

After I read this post, by Hyder (yes, that guy who made JohnCow.com’s new design) and after reading this forum post, published on PayPerPost official support forum, I got a feeling I am not the only one who is being “unfortunate” here.
Read More from "The Enigma Behind PeyPerPost Referrals Program"

One of my favorite and sneakiest bloggers, Kumiko Suzuki, published a post on her blog, teaching webmasters how to make $1000 in 24 hours. At first it looked like a brilliant plan to me, but in theory, not everything will work, not for everyone — for sure.

Announce paid review prices will increase to $200 - I usually receive one or two review requests per week. With an announcement that prices will increase drastically, I predict that I could pull at least five orders at the current $80 rate. Money made: $400

This is only good for blogs with high traffic of advertisers, who will get to read, within these few hours about the prices increase AND get a review. Not only this, but you ought to have people ordering you on a weekly basis, PR, traffic — which narrows down the options to minimum. The chances of an average blogger to make $400 off this announcement are slim. Next..

Sell ten lifetime links - If I can sell ten monthly links for $15 each, it should be easy to sell fifteen lifetime links for $20 each. Money made: $300

This is the only trick that is easy to implement into reality, but again, traffic, readers and PR would be good to have. “Lifetime links” sounds bad though. How long is a “life time”? 40 years? Or 3 months, until the domain you sold it on , expires? It would be more realistic to sell annual links for a slightly cheaper price, so yes, $20 for annual link on PR 3 blog with 200+ daily visitors is realistic, but the question is, will you find 15 advertisers in 24 hours and will YOU be willing to add 15 links to your sidebar? Next…

Pimp out my banner ads for a year - CashQuests currently has seven banner ad placements that start at $60 per month. I predict that they’d be gone in a few hours if I offered them at $30 for the rest of the year. Money made: $210

Again, would doubtlessly work for CashQuest, but won’t work for a less popular blog. Next…

Open up the footer - You’d buy able to buy my entire footer for life to put anything you like in there. That’s got to be worth at least $50. Money made: $50

$50 for having your footer totally screwed up for the rest of your life is just does not worth it, if you ask me.

Feedvertising - I haven’t done it on CashQuests yet, but looking at current market rates it would be a bargain to advertise in my feed for $40 for the rest of the year. Money made: $40

Okay, let’s be practical. The Internet mogul John Chow has made in August almost 18,000$, out of which, feedvertising was only 50$. Bearing in mind that many advertisers pulled away from Text Link Ads because of their issues with Google, the chances that you will make 40$ off your feed are… damn small, especially in a 24 hours time frame.

Conclusion?

In reality, you can make $1000 online in 24 hours, and even more, but you need a very very popular blog for this purpose, and if you already have a very popular blog, it’s practically mindless to sell lifetime links and footers, when you know you can generate significantly bigger revenue in a slightly longer time frame.

No, this is not a fraud offer, it’s a real competition, which is very easy to enter and moreover, even easier to win! Hostbidder.com, the well  known forum that rewards its members with free domain names and cash for participation, holds this new contest — Win 250$! This place has a great reputation and you can see from the testimonials section that hundreds of dollars were paid (in cash or domains’ value) to members only recently.

All you need to do is, if you have a PR1 (or higher) blog, place a link on the home page of your site or make a post on your blog with a link to http://www.hostbidder.com. Register at Hostbidder.com and reply to the contest thread and you can win $250 via PayPal or Amazon Vouchers. The winner will be chosen randomly, so you need not put any extra effort into it. Good luck!

If you think Google does it out of purely noble intention, giving everyone an equal chance to rank high, regarding the capital you invested in buying links — you are wrong. Google does not really care weather you pay or not, however, they care WHO you pay to. Ideally, pay them, and advertise via Adwords.

Let’s see how it started the past months

First Matt Cutts writes openly in his blog, calling webmasters to report paid links. Following that, we see some ranking collapse, best and most well known example is John Chow not only not ranking for the term “make money online”, but it looks like Google kicked him out even for the term “John Chow“. Same happens to Text Link Ads, that no longer rank anywhere for “text link ads” and many other sad examples.

PageRank Apocalypse

The hysteria continues when all the top bloggers and top ranking sharks lost -1, and even -2 of their toolbar candy, and that is, with PR Q3 not even being finalized. Unofficially, Google confirms the penalty being rolled out and case by case websites and advertisers get kicked out of top ranking as well as now pay for their criminal past of buying link with live, green, vivid PR.

Google’s message to webmasters: Don’t sell PageRank, your site will lose ranking.

Google message to advertisers: Don’t buy PageRank, your site will lose ranking.

…And, the aftermath?

Naturally, advertisers are afraid to buy links via semi-banned and penalized Text Link Ads. They afraid to do it in some other networks as well for same reason. Naturally webmasters removed the “buy links here” text, they don’t offer it openly in forums anymore and as a result, link sales slowed down. Webmasters report that their  Text Link Ads revenue collapsed, with all the advertisers pulling back. But, who did win here? Of course Google. If you want to make sure you advertise and 100% comply with Google’s strict ranking policy, you can advertise via Google Adsense. This brings traffic, not links (since the script is Java-based, however, if you need to keep promoting, you will take this option.

Links sales revenue collapsed, Adsense revenue raised. Many webmasters had seen the obvious increase in Adsense revenue, and no wonder. Bottom line, it all came down to monopolizing the whole buy-and-sell-and-publish-links and search-and-rank industry.

However, if Google takes it case by case, looks like there is still plenty of work to do…

I am excited to let you know about the new feature we are now offering in my Lorelei Web Forum. We are giving away blogs for free. What does it mean “blogs for free”? In exchange for your participation in the forum, we want to reward the members with blog accounts, which will be hosted on LWblogs.com subdomain.

WordPress blogs is the most popular CMS for websites nowadays, easiest for making money online and unbelievably simple to maintain and use as a publishing platform, as well as secure, reliable and easy to customize for your needs.

• The Free blog account includes:

» Free UNLIMITED Disk Space Your Blog (including UNLIMITED uploads facility)
» Free UNLIMITED Traffic (Bandwidth)
» Latest Version of WordPress 2.3, PHP5, MySQL 5 Reliable Database
» Free Sub-domain Hosting
» Instant Account Set Up
» Private and Commercial Blogs are Welcome
» Easy to use WordPress Control Panel
» Stable Hosting Platform
» Ultra Fast Servers with 99.9% Uptime
» No Hidden Fees or Charges
» Publish Your Own Monetizing Methods, Ads and Banners
» NO FORCED BANNER ADS, FRAMES OR ADVERTS FROM US!

• Total Cost - $0.00 Forever.
  

How free is “free”?

As said above, the blog accounts are given away in exchange for our member’s valued participation in the forum, hence we accept applications from members with minimum of 50 posts and in order to maintain your blog online you need to make around 30 posts in each calendar month once your blog is provided.

• What are the benefits for You?

1. Extra Exposure. LWblogs.com are aggressively promoted on many blogs and sites, and once you set up your account, you will be featured in LWBlogs.com official blog.
2. Infinitely Free. No need to pay for domain and hosting!
3. Free Uploads and Thumbnail generator. You can upload as many images as you want and hotlink them to other servers and forums.
4. Highest Quality Servers — 99,9% Uptime. You are going to be hosted on the save server as toptut.com (this blog), therefore you will enjoy maintaining your fast loading blog that doesn’t go offline like most free hosts do.
5. Pay 0.00$, and Make Money! While the service offered absolutely free, you are allowed to display your own ads of any kind (as long as it’s legal) and make money with ZERO initial investment.
6. NO ADS. No frames, no pop-ups, no Adsense, no ads whatsoever.

• Okay, why is it free then?

It may sound too good to be true for some, but this offer, since we already have a huge hosting plan for our own websites, does not drag us into any additional fees and except domain expenses, promotion and time, we do not investment anything that has to be covered, hence we don’t need to place ads or offer additional services at a cost to cover our own expenses.

Moreover, your participation in Lorelei Web Forum is what we value and seek to encourage, therefore as you can see, it’s your form of paying back for the service.

First of all, I want to say that I don’t have any “negative” experience with Kontera, they did not ban me or anything nasty like that, which you might think has trigger me to write badly about them. What I am going to say deals only with my personal experience after running their ads on this website and by no means suggest it won’t work better for you.

If you are not aware, Kontera is a contextual ads network, only unlike Adsense, they don’t display independent adverts on additional (and especially spared) space on your website, but outlines specific targeted keywords inside your site’s pages, double underlines them and you get paid once visitor clicks on these in-context ads. However, when you roll your mouse over the keyword, a small bubble with additional info / picture / video pops out, which I personally find to be very annoying and distracting while reading. Not only be, but it’s in fact one of the most annoying advertising methods you can irritate your readers with.

Those bloggers who also monetize their sites by taking sponsored reviews, know that you must not have third party links inside a sponsored review. There is a special code Kontera provides which stops ads from appearing at a certain area or, you can choose a specific area where ads will be displayed in the first place, however when using a dynamic content site such as blog it’s not very convenient. The issue starts when you decide to prevent the ads from displaying inside a certain post and add the special “spans” around the area which you want to “save” from the adverts. Problem is, it doesn’t always work, since spans are getting auto re-formatted by WordPress, you have to work in the ‘code’ tab, and publish it without switching to preview version, moreover if you publish and edit later it will get re-formated as well. As a result, Kontera manages to spread itself over the entire page. This is against any sponsored reviews program and if you want to make money blogging, you have to choose either Kontera (and loads of extra hassle) or blogging for green.

So, what pays out better?

I made a very basic calculation. TopTut.com is a high traffic site, with no less than 1-2 thousands of impressions daily. I displayed Kontera’s adverts (on this blog only) from 05/14/2007 to 06/22/2007. Over this period I managed to put $11.13 in my porcelain piggie through Kontera (though since I abandoned my account I am not going to ever receive these money). It means, average of $0.5 a day for inconvenience of thousands of visitors daily, as well as slightly slower loading time as it takes a while to the script to crawl the site in real time and display the inline ads. During this period these popping bubbles really irritated me, and I believe made the site look cheaper in many people’s eyes, especially since I always advocate the “less is more” ads strategy.

Now, if I decide to take one sponsored review and publish it on this website, which would not cost anywhere below 35$ (and normally reviews on toptut.com cost between 50$ and 100$) this single review surely won’t annoy any visitor, and will pay out at least 3 times more. Not to mention that bloggers who review sponsored products on a daily basis will sure make bigger income.

This was the short spring love story between toptut.com and kontera.com. Good thing is, we stayed friends with no hard feelings.

Those of us who often sell and purchase domains, know that once the site is established, has some incoming links, traffic and PageRank, the price raises significantly, though we are unable to really estimate the domain’s worth ourselves. Many factors play a role here and if you are planning a high-price sale or purchase, it’s always better to turn to experts who will apraise it for you

In my quest for a decent Domain Name Appraisal company, I discovered dndynamics.com, and after comparison to other companies in this industry I found them to be the best. First of all, they have a money back guaranteed policy, which no other domain appraisal company offers. Secondly, if you are in a rush (for instance, want to bid on auction for a certain domain, but not sure if it really worth the investment) — you can get an express, 24-hour or less appraisal (standard express appraisal is only 10$ extra). Lastly, they offer the highest paying affiliate program in the domain appraisals industry, that brings you 40% off every referral’s payment (the prices vary, depending on appraisals type). It’s absolutely free to join, however, the 40% is a limited time offer, so hurry if you want to grab a big piece of pie before everyone else.

As I said already, there are a few types of appraisals; some involve human analysis of 2 or more people, others are done by one person (which is, of course, cheaper), and all of them give you an accurate minimum-maximum price range.

Moreover, there is a blog attached to their website, in which you will find a lot of freely posted useful information about the news in domains industry, new registry extension launches, tips on protecting your domain and more.

So the question is, do you need an appraisal? Of course if you purchase a domain for 30$ (or sell one) I’d say paying 29$ extra for appraisal is silly. However, when we come to sell an established domain for xxx$+, what if it in fact costs much more and you are losing thousands of dollars? On the other hand, what if you decide to buy a great name for a four figures sum, which seller “guarantees” to be the best investment, while in reality it’s a dropped domain with fake PageRank and some other downsides you might not even think about, however, experts easily pick up? After all, the domain appraisal that DnDynamics offer is cheap and risk free, so better save than sorry.

There is a lot of speculation around the Alexa ranking. Some, like me, believe that Alexa ranking is useless, while others see it as a good traffic measure unit. The problem is, when you make money online, some advertising networks such as my favorite Text Link Ads and PayPerPost use Alexa rank as a criteria, and adjust your payout per link in according to your Alexa rank, assuming it says something about your visitors count.

While Alexa rank only measures traffic based on those who use Alexa toolbar (which is, less than half of the surfers, I believe), we all would agree that its inaccurate. However, in order to generate better revenue we need to have as low rank as possible (the lower — the better), so let’s see how we can do that, without increasing the actual traffic.

1. Using Alexa redirects. It means, instead of link in htp://www.toptut.com format, you should use - http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?http://www.toptut.com. This will send the users though Alexa’s site, redirecting to your URL and this way, the traffic coming through the redirect will count towards your ranking. Disadvantages: If you implement this technique, the link loses its Google PageRank value (which is much more important when it comes to making money online), because the link points to Alexa’s site (and they benefit). Another disadvantage is the speed loss, as redirect takes up to a few seconds to load on fast connection and you might not be eager on losing visitor due to slow loading time.

2. Using Alexa Widget. This technique is far better and I heard from a few friends of mine that is it’s way more helpful. All you need to do is go to this page, and choose a widget for your URL, then add it sitewide to your site or blog. Once the widget is up and running, every visitor who enters your website, will count towards your traffic ranking as having the script installed works like a stats counter for Alexa. This way, your traffic rank will be much more accurate and will “catch” every visitor, be it someone who enters though his bookmarks, feed or a link in Google. Disadvantages: You have to bear with the small Alexa banner on your site, and display your ranking to public, even if it’s nothing impressive yet.

That’s it, these are the only “legitimate” methods. Sure there are plenty of ways to game your ranking by displaying a tiny iFramed image pointing to your Alexa redirect. I very much doubt it’s acceptable by Alexa’s TOS, but there will always be faked PageRanks, Faked Alexa’s and even Fake Technorati Ranks… Still and all, there is nothing like genuine PR7 site with Alexa rank below 1000… So better start working on your rank right now!