Tag Archive for 'Content'

The Easiest Money-Earning Sites

Published
by
darcy
on July 8, 2008
in Other and Web Design
. 1 Comment

As you probably know, to earn money with most sites (or blogs) you have to put in quite a lot of work (or money) to get anything substantial back. But! It doesn’t have to be like that. There are a few types of sites that involve nearly no effort at all on your part and can rake in a tonne of money at the same time. The two types of sites i’m talking about a proxy sites and what i like to call “piggy back” sites.

Most of you will probably know what a proxy site is, but for those that don’t I’ll explain. A proxy site is a site that people go to to get to sites that are blocked or they otherwise can’t access. For example, if you’re school blocks myspace.com, then you could go to a proxy site and use that proxy site to visit myspace.com without any hassels! Great stuff, isn’t it? Now this means that the owner of that proxy site will get quite a lot of hits when the kids at school start catching on and using it to visit their favourite sites that they can’t otherwise. The problem is that when it starts getting really popular, the proxy site its self is going to get blocked and your user-base will drop substantially.

If you want to set up a proxy site, we advise that you have a Private or Dedicated Server, because proxies can use up a LOT of bandwidth and resources (especially if you get really popular). You should be able to find a proxy script by searching google. After that, it usually only takes ten minutes or so to install, and then you’re up and running! But you’ll still need to get people to use it. Start by telling all your school- or college-aged friends about it, then try marketing through myspace. Set up a myspace account and start adding every single person you can. After a few days (once you’ve added lots of people and they’ve had time to accept) send a few bulletins, or even private messeges (but don’t spam) telling them about your site and how it will let them go to myspace at school.

Now, “piggy back” sites, as i like to call them, are something completely different. The only real similarity is that you don’t need to write any of your own content, you just piggy back off other people’s content :D There are a few ways to go about this. The easiest way is simply to set up an “autoblog”. This means you set up a blog that automatically posts content from other blogs from their RSS feed. Whilst it is theoretically possible to earn money this way, it generally isn’t very successful (and annoys the shiz out of me when people start posting my content).

The best way to set up a “piggy back” site involves a bit of work. If you know php, mysql and html (and maybe javascript and css) then you can use an API from another site to create your own. For example, you can use twitter’s API to find a unique, interesting or convenient way of posting or reading tweets. For example, you could create a twitter (web) application for the iPhone. Or you could use Flickr’s API to help users find photos that were taken near to their current location (with help from flickr’s geotagging and maybe some GPS magic from the iPhone, etc).

Now for most of you, those two last paragraphs may not have made much sense, but that doesn’t matter. The point is, it doesn’t take a lot of hard work to make a few bucks online.Nor do you need to write all of your own content. Piggy back off someone else’s content!

How To Come Up With Post Ideas

Published
by
darcy
on May 19, 2008
in Blogging and writing
. 1 Comment

One of the hardest things, for some bloggers, is coming up with new things to post about. Sometimes you find yourself with writers block, or sometimes you think you’ve run out of topics you could possibly talk about, but that isn’t the case! Read on to discover how to come up with more post ideas than you can keep up with…

First thing to do is look at what your blog is about. For this example, we’ll pretend we’re blogging about “places to travel in Asia”, but it doesn’t matter whatever you’re writing about, the first thing you should do is google it. But don’t just google “Places to travel in Asia”, try other similar phrases as well. For this example, we tried:

  1. “Places to travel in Asia”
  2. “Top destinations in Asia”
  3. “Asia Destinations”
  4. “Travel Asia”
  5. “Travel In Asia”
  6. “Sights and Activities in Asia”
  7. “Asia Holiday”

The list could go on, but you get the picture. Now, if we take a look at a page of google search results for “Travel Asia” we get this:


As you can see from this image, I’ve highlighted just a few of the sponsored results. You’ll notice some keywords in their like GAP Adventures, Tours, Flights and Malaysia (as well as “Travel Asia”). This means that people are paying google to show ads whenever people search for the keywords “Travel” and “Asia” or both together, so if you can write about these subjects, you’ll hopefully get those same ads on your site, which can earn you some money (if you’re using AdSense). Now, we can use these keywords to come up with a list of possible things to write about:

  1. GAP Year Adventures in Asia
  2. Tours in Asia
  3. Tours in (Asian Country/City)
  4. Holidays To Malaysia
  5. Cheapest Flights To Asia (Maybe a weekly/monthly feature)

As you can see I’ve already come up with 5 different ideas. I could even do separate articles for different tours of Asia, and do separate articles for tours in each country or city, and I could even turn “Cheapest Flights To Asia” into a weekly or monthly series. On top of that, I could write about the cheapest flights from the UK, UK and Australia, as these are the countries people are most likely to be flying from, OR i could analyze my traffic and write about the cheapest flights to Asia from the countries that most of my visitors come from.

The next thing I’ll want to do is have a look at my incoming searches. This means having a look at the terms people were searching for when they ended up at my site. If you are running Wordpress, which chances are you are, I suggest you install the stat-monitoring plugin called Statpress. It will automatically track all your statistics for you, including the latest Search Terms used to find your site.

Now, take a look at the top results on all of the search results you’ve looked at. Look at the content of these pages. What are they doing that you aren’t? What content do they have that you don’t? You can write about anything that is even slightly related to your site.

Another place to find articles ideas is from the news. Look at, for example, your local news site, or even cnn or the bbc. Look for any news about the subject your blogging about. For example, I could blog about the recent Earth quakes in China or the Tsunami in Myanmar (Burma) because they would effect travel in Asia. Remember to credit any sources of information though. Finally, you can also try looking at similar blogs. If your blog’s “niche” is quite a crowded niche, why not try doing a best-of-the-week type post? Summarize all the best posts of the week in your niche, so then visitors can go to your blog not only for your own original content, but also to have the best related posts served up once a week with no effort at all.

So through just a few easy methods, you can come up with dozens, or potentially hundreds, of new posting ideas.

Done.

Learn From Barack Obama’s Campaign

Published
by
darcy
on April 23, 2008
in Advertising and Other
. 1 Comment

Having a good website in a good niche with good content isn’t everything. Because there are often tens or hundreds of people in the same niche as you, with equally good content. Look at the Make Money Online (MMO) niche, for example. Johnchow, Johncow, Tylercruz, Problogger - there all the same, for the most part. But what blogs in this niche have you been hearing about recently? And what blogs stand out?


Well, I’m sure you heard a fair bit about winning the web recently. Was it because the content over there is better? He has some secret to give away that the others don’t? No! Of course not! What is different though, is he gave his site a twist. He had a new perspective and a new way of getting visitors. He hosted one of the biggest contests the MMO niche has ever seen.

This is very similar to certain US Presidential candidate you may have heard a whisper or two about. Barack Obama doesn’t have any earth-shattering ideas, but the way he presents them is new. As you probably know, politicians are usually lying scum, promising what you want to hear to buy your votes and then more often than not, never delivering on those promises. Some even drive your country further down hill by starting wars and the like (I wonder who that is?). But Barack has been promising the truth. Most of all, Barack has been promising to fix the mistakes of the past. The Iraq war, for example, is seen by many as a big mistake. President Bush and the Republican party have been slowly leading America downhill - their politics is becoming stale.

This is very similar to how certain niches become stale. The video games niche became very boring for a while. Every games site or blog offered pretty much all the same things, maybe with a slight twist or localization. But then two people decided to set up destructoid.com as a gimmick to get themselves into the “press-only” event E3. They didn’t even intend to continue with the blog, but now it has become a major name in the games media, with nearly 6,000 subscribers to their RSS feed, hundreds of thousands of visitors and even a network of other blogs to their name. And how did they do this? They were original. They didn’t start blogging to make money. They started blogging simply to get into an event that they enjoyed, and people enjoyed it. I, for one, thought it was funny and interesting and am now a regular visitor over at destructoid.

This is what Barack Obama is doing. Whether you think it’s a gimmick or not, you can’t deny it’s working. He’s being original and appealing to an audience of intelligent voters who have grown stale of the same old politics. The same way the people grow stale of the same old content, or the same old perspective.

So I guess the message behind this little rant is: If you want to be successful, try to be original and appeal to what people want. But whatever you do, don’t become stale and just regurgitate the same things every else does. I don’t want to read another article about twitter and how it can be a good marketing tool, sorry.