Should You Make Money by Paid Survey Leads

Paid survey is a great way for those who don’t have any technical background and want to make some money online. I also have tried this way when the first day I think I need to make more money. And when I get to know all the secrets about affiliate network and internet marketing, I started to build my first web site to guide people on how to make money from paid survey, and list out all the top paid survey companies there to generate the lead.

Thing goes perfect at the beginning, very soon, I start to see the money in, and it quickly goes up to more than $1000 per month. But 1 year later, I eventually decided to give up. And below are some thought from me.

• Maintenance cost is high. Doesn’t like the other product companies, most of the paid survey companies work with some relatively small affiliate networks, and they might deactive their affiliate relationship with that network at any time, and active again couple months later. It’s really time-consuming task for me verify which affiliate relationship are still active and remove the link again or put link back.
• “Paid survey” is a hot key word, it’s hard to maintain that position if you don’t promote that key word regularly. I have once been in the first page in Google for key word “Paid Survey”, but as I put more focus on my another business such as “web hosting”, “Internet Marketing”, the site in the search result drop down progressively, and now it’s in page 5, and I don’t where it would be if I don’t promote it again. Compared with the cost and earning between all my business, I decide not to run it again.

So, from the long term perspective, paid survey leads is not a good way for you to make money from. But if you just start your online business, it probably could be a good niche to start with.

Will Coupon Code Increase Your Affiliate Sales?

Today, I read Almed’s post about “What People Don’t Use Coupon“, and I finally find someone has the same thought as me that people actually don’t use coupon a lot.

When the first time I started running my web site and affiliate some web host offers there, I created a pretty comprehensive web hosting tutorials and start making some commission from my visitors. I found some of my competitors providing the coupon code, I thought some coupon code probably can help generating more sales, so I started to compile a list of web hosting coupon code and put them in my site.

The result was amazing, I saw the sales is going down significantly. Since it’s the only change I have made to my site, after 1 month drop in the earning, I remove the “web hosting coupon” page, and the earning is going back.

So, coupon actually doesn’t help on my sale, and below are some reasons I can think about:

• When people find a coupon code, if they want to use it to get a discount, in most case, they will start to search more coupon code in Google to find a best one, if your page doesn’t rank high in Google on that Key Word(such as “HP coupon”), your sale will be stolen by the other web site.
• Sometime, people just doesn’t trust you when you provide them with coupon code or discount, they will double on your introduction about the product.

So, I think the coupon code actually won’t contribute a lot to your affiliate sale, actually, it might hurt you if you are not doing good job on the SEO for the related key word.

Make $10 for Joining Pepperjam Network

Pepperjam network is a fast growing affilate network nowaday. According to a recent Marketing Sherpa article, Pepperjam Network is recognized as one of the top 5 major affiliate networks in the United States. In less than 5 months Pepperjam Network has already acquired an amazing 17.7% of the market and continues to grow. In the first quarter of 2008 Pepperjam Network launched 175 new advertisers, making it by far the fastest growing affiliate network in the United States.

This chart shows that most serious affiliate marketers use at least four out of five top networks. What’s interesting about this chart is the rapid growth of the 5-month old Pepperjam Network.

17.5% of the surveyed marketers already use the infant network. And eBay recently signed on to work with Pepperjam – leaving behind the recognized leader, Commission Junction. That development occurred *after* the survey was conducted – an indication that the network’s quick rise may accelerate even more.

Join Pepperjam Network and Receive $10 Bonus

Today they are offering you $10 as a signup bonus for becoming one of their publishers.

If you want to earn money by recommending products from companies like eBay, Cartoon Network, StarTrek.com, Jelly Belly, Sesame Street, Net Shops, SEOMoz, igourmet and many more (they seem to add new ones every day or two) then PepperJam is a network that you’ll want to test run whether you get the signup bonus or not because they are one of the fastest growing online marketing networks going around

$50 Blogger Incentive Program

If you join Pepperjam Network this month, not only will receive $10 just for signing up, but you can make up to $50 per month by blogging about them. See detail on how to make it from this Pepperjam network Post.

Pepperjam is a great affiliate network you should not miss. If it can keep the current growing pace, I can see them moving up to 3rd or 4th position in the affiliate network ranking in this year.

Join Pepperjam Network and Make $10

How to Select an Online Business to Start

Starting a business online is very close to initiating a traditional “offline” business, they share the same rules which can lead to success. Before you rush into action, you will need to sit down and think about why you start it, what’s your goal, and what you plan to do to make it a profitable online business. All those will determine the ways

Identify your reasons and goals

This is an important step which will guide you as you start and develop your online small business. Below are some question will help you understand it:

• Why do you want to start an online business?
• Do you want the business to eventually replace your job’s salary?
• Do you just want to earn some extra cash

Write down all the reasons and objects that you want to achieve with your online small business. It is important that you focus on these goals all the time – they will keep you motivated and focused. Depending on what you enjoy, decide on the online home based business model that suits you. There are so many options, and that is a different topic that warrants an article to cover just that.

Determine Your Business Domain Area

You can start online business in all kinds of possible domain areas, they could be Freebies, Online Shoes Store, Online Sports News, Beauty, technology, etc. Almost everything you can think about, you always can find some ways to make money from. And the key point is that the business you want to start is what you like and you can feel happy from doing it. And that’s the reason you can run this online business well, and your customer can feel like it.

Once you can maintain a high quality web site, and win some loyal customers, you are not far away from profiting your web site.

Determine Your Business Model

For an online business, you will have to figure out how to make money from it. And this will help creating a business plan, Some common options include:

• Sell the product online. This could be an extension of your existing “offline” business. But you can sell the product of the other companies online via the affiliate program.
• Sell the information, there are a lot of these kinds of web site online, and
• Sell advertising. This has been the best way to make money from for most of the portal web site.

You will need to consider your competitive advantage, and you can leverage more than one method listed in above. For most small business web site or personal blog, selling advertising and affiliate product online have been the most common method to make money from.

What Kinds of Traffic will Bring Your Blog Money

Today, I read a post Why Doesn’t Your Traffic Convert Into Money?. I fully agree with what the author says there, and this is the exact practice I have used for this Blog.

The targeted readers of Centeurlife is the website owners who want to be successful in their online small business. Its very hard to profit from from them since they are unlikely to click the advertise or signup the offers or product I have introduced in the Blog. So, in general, I can make nothing for them. But that’s fine, since I really want to share something in this blog to help the others to make money online.

But this blog still can bring me very significant earning monthly. So, who I make the money from? The answer is the traffic from Search engines. Those visitors are very clear about what kinds of information they want to and also would like pay for what can help them out. My blog provides really good online business knowledge to them, and they are more willing to follow my guide to purchase/try the product I have recommended.

So, as a blogger, what’s the most important thing is not to write Blog regularly to retain your subscribers but to write very high quality content and promote it to be high in SERPs. I have followed so called best practice before such as writing at least one post every day, but which make me very tired and even cannot promise the quality of the articles. When I change my mindset some days, I don’t see any drop in my earning.

But, it doesn’t mean the traffic from your subscribers is not important. Even you cannot make direct money from them, you still can find a way to make significant indirect money such as leave a block in your web site for advertisement. A lot of companies would like to pay to place the advertisement in the popular blogs. If you pay attention to the monthly earning from Johnchow.com(Blog Income Report - June 2008), you will see that around 50% percent of earning from his blog comes from displaying the advertising.

Will Affiliate Marketing Die

Today, I found an interesting articles about affiliate technology - Is Affiliate Marketing At Death’s Door? - which describes the impart on the affiliate market if the tracking cookies are disabled by the spyware utitlities.

I have to admitted that the bad news descibed in that articles is true because  tracking cookies has been so widely used in the affiliate network to track the sales. I have a communication with CJ about what if the cookies has been disable by Browser, the answer is that the sale will not been tracked correctly, and the consequent resut is that you will not be able to earn the commission in this situation.

But is the affiliate network at death’s door? My answer is not although I know there are a lot of work to do to improve our sale tracking skills. And actually, not all the affiliate network or program use cookies to track the sales, such as Clickbank. But cookies issue will really be a bad news to some other affiliate network leaders such as CJ, Linkshares, which use cookies as the main tracking technology in their affiliate system. But I believe they will find out their solution for it.

I would like to say, no matter what, affiliate market will still be there. Look at the big influence and revenue from affiliate marketing , no one want it to die. Don’t forget that even the Spyware or Microsoft, they all leverage the power of affiliate network to sell their products. Do you want affiliate marketing die and then they die as well?

Make Money from Google Adsense Referral System Become Harder

This mght no be news. On 8th of January 2008, Google has made some changes to its Adsense referral program. And this will bring some impacts to those who works with Google Adsense and refer them the new publishers. Unfortunately, this impact is not positive to them, mojarity of the web master will encounter an drop in revenues. Now, let’s see what’s the changes

Basically, Google have decided to scrap the referral system for those of you who are based outside of Latin America, North America, and Japan. This hardly seems fair that someone should be favoured based on their geographical position, but that’s the stance that Google has taken.

If you do live in Latin America, North America or Japan, then congratulations. However, there is still some bad news for you. Google will be reducing the payment structure to that of previous years. You will now only be earning $100 when your referrals earn $100. Obviously this is quite a drop from the previous system, but at least you can still earn from the referral system. A lot of people will be forced to remove their Adsense referral units from their websites and will probably end up resorting to promoting other advertising programs, too.

Obviously, this won’t affect everyone. Not all people will have Adsense referral units on their websites, just like me. I build the advertisement system by myself. For those still have found a real alternative to Google Adsense, and suffered a drop in revenue from their website, I would like high recommend to join some affiliate program and start your own advertising compaign now.