Many webmasters, especially beginners, ask themselves, what should they do to monetize their sites. It’s not an easy decision and often you never really know what works for you unless you try, because some networks are more productive for one site, and never perform as good on another website or even page. Here, I decided to write a small overview of what I use and have personal positive experience with, but remember it does not mean you will get similar results, your site can do worse or better, but since all the links below will lead to networks that do pay and are respectable, I hope this will at least be of use and help you to avoid fraud.

• 1. Google Adsense.

I run this network on most of my websites, and the results vary, depending on niche, ads placement, ads’ color and traffic. You can generate revenue easily from even a tiny site, however the disadvantage is that ads take up a lot of space and many believe (myself included) that it spoils the clean look and feel of the layout. From some sites I generate 150+ USD, from others 1 dollar, but this is by far the best contextual ads network and highly recommended to implement. Payment Form: EST (direct bank transfer) or Check sent by standard, or secure delivery (secure delivery cost you 29$). Minimum Payout: 100$.

• 2. Text Link Ads.

When you sign up with TLA (Text Link Ads), have two options of generating revenue; first - if your site has been approved, by selling text links, and the second - by referring other members to Text Links Ads network. Advocating someone to sign up for free and make money is not hard, I never promoted TLA aggressively (like many others), but still managed to gather 4 referrals.

Selling text links ads is a lil` tricky, but can go easily if you work out a good strategy of sales. After a few months of been listed in their database I managed to sell links on all the sites I offered and the good part is, the links are added automatically yet are fully customizable, which means they do not look like adverts at all and take up minimum space. Besides, you get paid even if the links has never been clicked.

As you can see from the screenshot above, this blog is grossly undervalued at TLA marketplace but I look at it philosophically - overall it’s at least extra 100$ a month, and I am sure I can find some good use for them. Payment Form: PayPal or Check sent by airmail (extra cost, deducted from your payment). Minimum Payout: For PayPal - none, for checks - 25$.

• 3. Pay Per Post.

This network is for bloggers only and it compensate writers for blogging about particular products and sites. Ideally, if you have several blogs (like myself) you can occasionally take opportunities without having to fill (or rather overfill) one blog with irrelevant sponsored posts. Mine are spread across 3 blogs and therefore I managed to collect over 400$ in about 35 days, out of which only 2-3 reviews with sponsored links fell is this blog and hopefully did not irritate the readers too much…

You choose what to blog about and you are never obliged to accept one task or another, which means it’s very flexible and convenient. Payment Form: PayPal. Minimum Payout: No minimum, you get paid 30 days after completing each task separately.

Of course these are not the only networks who pay fairly (and fairly well), however, I tried these ones myself and I recommend them based *solemnly* on personal experience. I do use other sources that help me to monetize my websites, but I find these 3 sources to be the most easy-to-use and suitable. While Adsense and TLA are a very ‘passive’ sources of revenue, which require minimum maintenance (if at all), Pay Per Post gives you full freedom to earn as much as possible at your spare time (of course, higher rank blogs earn significantly more).

I hope this pours some light on Text link ads, Adsense and Pay Per Post as I know many webmasters hesitate to sign up thinking it could be fraud. I myself wasted a lot of precious time not giving anything beside Adsense a try, out of fear this is yet another scam program but one day I realized it’s far easier to multiply revenue sources, rather than Adsense clicks.

I am delighted to announce that now you can get a shopping cart script FREE. These are great news for all those who maintain e-commerce sites or any other sort of php based website though which purchases are made. I just found it today and and thought it’s worth sharing.

Shop-Script PHP shopping cart software offers you the ability to build a search engine friendly online store with a lot of e-commerce features and establish a professionally looking online store that is both functional and profitable.

There is a lot of contradiction and difference in opinions between publishers and advertisers who chose to implement Pay Per Click networks and those site owners who are strongly against it. Sometimes the problem is just lack of knowledge and information about PPC and how it works. It’s pretty hard to explain all the advantages and disadvantages of the Pay-Per-Click management, so I decided to look up on the internet a find a good article I can share with my readers.

The best website that covers all the aspects is probably acsseo.com, who’s guidance for beginners who decide to use Pay Per Click discusses all the aspects of this techniques. I’d strongly recommend to read their article for better understanding of the subject.

Feed stats counter, is basically like a website counter, only it doesn’t show aggregate data of all the visitors of all times, only the live subscribers who bookmarked the website or visited it through feed today, which means - your daily returning and subscribing visitors. It’s a really good way to show off your website’s success to other. Let’s say you visit a blog, it looks like a good and interesting content, then you take a look at the feed counter - 15 subscribers. Eh? Guess it’s not too popular. It can do a lot of damage when you come to sell links or promote your website, people would misjudge your website’s popularity by the feed burner. So, let’s see how can we improve the situation…

1. Forum’s last posts. Most vBulletin based forums has the ability of displaying your last blog’s post though a feed. Here comes the trick, paste your Feed Burner’s URL in that field of your profile in all the forums you participate at. Did it in 10 forums? Good, now you have 10 “subscribers” more. Cheap trick, but works perfect.
2. Offer ads free version. If your blog is showered with annoying ads such as interstitials and inline ads, you can offer to read your blog through the feed, without ads at all. You won’t lose much money from it unless your blog has 10,000 visitors a day out of which 7,000 will subscribe. Don’t worry, not many will subscribe anyway. In this case, however, you have to offer a full feed.
3. Put the RSS button above. As obvious as it sounds, put the RSS feed button in the upper part of your blog, and make sure the button is visible on all resolutions, and your design does not “swallow” it in any browser. This is important, remember - virtual visitors are a lazy nation, they want to have everything under their nose, so the bigger and more visible is your button, the better are your chances to get a subscription. Don’t forget, link the feed button to your feed burner’s url, and not “just” your regular feed generated by the blog. Ever since I replaced the tiny orange button at the lower part of my sidebar with the juicy, glossy big button you see this blog has at the beginning of the sidebar - the amount of my subscriptions raised from 55+ to 65+. Worth it, ain’t it?
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Since Lorelei Web Design is still under construction, I decided to offer a several of my recent designs on this blog.

How To Purchase?
You can purchase online using Credit Card via PayPal or direct PayPal payment.
Each logo’s cost is $ 25 USD, if you decided to purchase any of these, please click on the “buy now” button. Once you have made the payment, please email me to lorelei@loreleiweb.com with the number of logo you purchased and email address (paypal) you used for the payment, as well as name of the company and tagline for your logo. Please note that because of continuous rip offs of my work I do not provide .PSD files, however if you need any modifications of the logotype, I will provide them during 12 months after the purchase.

Please note: If you have not heard from me 3 days after the payment, please email me again or leave a comment on this thread, because your email could have been filtered to spambox!

1.

Price: $ 25

2.

Price: $ 25

3.

Price: $ 25

No, there is no catch or competition, and this is not even a sponsored post, but for those of you who are looking to get some “quality backlinks” (from high PageRank sites, without having to provide a reciprocal), I have good news: You just stumbled across a golden mine! I am going to show you a tricky way to get a bunch of backlinks from PR5 sites. However, before you start clicking the urls below, please take a minute to read the intro and understand how is this going to work.

Below you will find a list of blogs, which I carefully selected. All of them are PR5, and have “nofollow” ref deactivated, which means leaving a comment in their blog gives you genuine links love. I am planning to make occasional posts of this nature, every time with a batch of links to blogs that “follow”, and have a certain PR (including PR6, if I will find more than a few), so if you want to stay up-to-date with the newly released “free backlinks lists”, please consider subscribing to my feed or digging this post. Actually, consider it anyway, if you want to make the author *cough* happy.

Back to topic. I will only post a maximum of 20 links at a time, but not because I want you to come back frequently, but rather because posting too many links at once on one page, considering that this blog already has a lot of external links, may have a bad effect for me with SE’s, so I’d prefer to keep the bunches short. Remember, good things come in small packages!

Also, please don’t spam these blogs. Some of them will not be related to the topics you like, so don’t leave a useless comment just for the sake of a link, as some of these blogs belong to friends of mine and I don’t want to get slammed for advocating to spam their websites. So just for the record, you got my official warning.

Having said that, how to spam the right away? You don’t need to leave your link in the body of the comment itself, in fact don’t do it at all, because it will either be filtered as spam or disaproved by the site owner for same reason. Inputing your link in the “website” field is enough, and then enter the desired anchor text in the “name” field. That’s all, the blogging software will do the rest of the work for you, and the link will be genuine, perfectly beneficial for both PageRank and Technorati Rank. And now, let’s get the party started…

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Most people say that a blog without comments is like a forum without posts. That’s not true, at least for me as I run a few blogs and a few forums and can say with full confidence that you can keep blogging away even if no one comments or even visits, however, forum where no one posts automatically turns into a dead ground, on which no one wants to step in.

TopTut.com has a decent traffic and rather small amount of comments made weekly, some of which are even negative, nonetheless I do not implement any of the tactics I am going to reveal here, simply because I don’t care how many comments this blog gathers. I know I share useful info, I know people do read, I know visitors return, and that’s pretty much enough for me. But anyway, since most of you do want to see an annoyingly long list of comments below each post, here are a few basic tips.

1. Deactivate the “nofollow” ref. This is probably the fastest and easiest way to get comments from a big amount of readers (including accidental guests) daily without any hassle. All you need to do is download the Nofollow Case by Case plug-in, install it, and put a badge or write in big letters somewhere on the most visible position, that this blog “follows” or something similar, which will let the visitors know that leaving a comment in your blog will count towards their website’s ranking. Basically, this plug-in removes the default “nofollow” ref from each external link in the comment, and therefore allow every commentators to get some links love off your blog. I implemented this technique on my other blog, Now G Net (which is PR3 and I assumed people would want to get some PR3 backlinks) and ever since the plug in installation I get a few comments daily.

The disadvantage of this tactic is that you end up with tons of irrelevant comments; for instance I happened to visit a blog that “follows” in which the admin posted how bad she felt today, describing her rather crucial health problems… with a comment bellow “Very useful info, I enjoyed reading, thanks for sharing! I bookmarked your blog for further visits”. Oh? Well, bear in mind that no matter what you will post, 50% of your comments will be of that nature (if not this exact text), be it your funeral announcement or SEO essay.
2. Give top commentators a sidewide link. This strategy requires more hassle on visitors part, and continuous participation, while the top ten commentators get a featured link on the sidebar / footer of your blog. If your blog is still small, the upside is that people can easily post a few comments and make it to the top 10, while the downside is - after a few comments they won’t bother to maintain the activity, knowing that the blog is not very popular and their comments count won’t be massively beaten any soon.
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Yes, you are saying ‘what the f…’ now, seeing this post nicely embedded in Google Adsense (biggest contextual ads network) from all sides and Kontera in between, yet I come and advice you not to use it? You got me wrong then, I will not advice you not to sign up with Adsense, Yahoo Publisher Network or MSN (I actually do advocate it in general) and most definitely I will not advice you to get rid of your existing account, but, I want to bring to your attention some down sides of monetizing your website with contextual ads.

First of all, what are contextual ads? These are just link to other websites on the body of your pages, related to site’s content, and since you get payed per click (PPC model) you have to place the ads on so-called prime positions of your website and spare a lot of space for them, otherwise they might not be noticed. And all this you are doing to… to make people leave your site. Did you think about it? You get paid for loosing visitors. If contextual ads are your only way to make money off the site, and you really don’t give a damn if your content will be read / viewed, - then it’s perfect. But what if you have other ways of income, such as affiliate sells, subscriptions, donations? Once your visitor left, the chance of him coming back and continue bring you revenue from other sources or clicking other ads is very slim, and I am sure you do realize it. So think about it, you get a few cents compensation for every visitor you wave good bye to.

Secondly, niche plays a significant factor. Some relevant keywords pay a few dollars per single click, while others (and actually many of them) pay a few cents for a click. This means, if your website is targeted to low paying keywords (or better said - created for the niche, where ads are paying low and the competition is small), you can’t possibly make much, unless you have really crazy traffic. This, however, does not mean your content is bad or not interesting or not worthy, it can still potentially make a lot of money (from donations, subscriptions, affiliate marketing, direct ads sales etc), but not from contextual ads.

Lastly, PageRank does not matter when it comes to contextual advertising. PR8 sites that choose to place PPC ads can still get 1 cents off each leaving visitor, while another PR0 websites can easily generate a few dollars per click… Having said that, contextual ads are better for beginners who can’t sell direct ads to advertisers yet (due to low traffic or lack / low PR), while the sharks out there, with high PR’s, are practically wasting space. Just imagine how many text links you can sell directly to advertisers in the place where your skycrapper is located, and how much can you earn monthly…and does your PPC network cover it..?

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