Category Archives: make money online

Tips For Content Writers Looking For Work

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This week I posted an ad at the DP Forums looking for a news-writer.  This is the second time in two years I’ve made such a post and since the type of responses I got were nearly identical both times I feel that I owe it to the world of potential content writers out there to give some tips on getting work:

  1. READ THE FUCKING AD!!  If the ad says “send me a private message”, don’t reply with a public question.  If the ad says “I DO NOT WANT XYZ TYPE OF A WRITER” do not send me a PM (or worse, post publicly) that you a very good “XYZ” writer and ask me how much I’m going to pay you for all your great XYZ writing!
  2. Don’t bother me if based on the very few requirements in the ad, you are not even close to being qualified!  If the ad says “you must be able to write in near grammatically perfect English” don’t send me a message written in Pidgeon English at the grammar level of a 7 year old asking how much I am going to pay you
  3. When sending an example of your work, make sure it is your BEST work!  And OMFG, if that is your best work, please refer to #2
  4. Don’t send a clearly ‘canned’ response that really has nothing to do with the ad/request that I posted.  You are supposed to be a professional writer, right?  At least put in some effort and WRITE a response.. and for God’s sake, don’t send something that has been re-written by some kind of 10 year old “keyword rewriting” program
  5. Don’t make ME work – Don’t make me go searching some spam-farm looking for  your samples of work, or make me beg multiple times over multiple emails to see examples of your work.
  6. If you can’t read, can’t speak/write english, have the IQ less than 9 year old encephalitic, or worse, all of these things combined, then please, leave me alone and just keep writing for eHow.com – you two will go well together.

Fortunately out of the 100 or so responses I received, there were 2 or 3 that actually met my requirements and will have some work waiting for them should they choose.

 

Earn Money The Easy Way!

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Our newest Advertising Network, IDG Tech has three easy ways to generate income:

  1. CPM Ads: As I posted a few weeks ago, IDG Tech’s CPM ads have been doing fantastic, and still are – my two test units are still earning over 10x better than Adsense units ever earned in the same locations.  I again recommend at least trying the IDG Tech CPM units if your website qualifies.
  2. If you are part of IDG Tech Network, they also offer referral payments for sign-ups to their IDG Tech Panel which pays members to take surveys related to the IDG Tech Advertisers.  If you are already an IDG Tech Network member (publisher), ask your account manager about how you can sign up or contact me and I will forward the name and email address of the program manager.
  3. As part of #2, anyone can generate money and/or rewards by completing the IDG Tech Panel surveys.   Normally I would not recommend online-surveys to make money, but knowing that many of my readers are looking for any way to generate a few dollars – and after signing-up myself, doing a few surveys, making a few dollars, and seeing how easy it is, I’ve realized that someone with a few minutes on their hands every day could actually make more than just gas or beer-money each week.  If you want to give it a try, you can sign up for your (free) account and start making some extra cash:  Click Here To Join IDGTech Panel

How Much Would You Sell Your Website For?

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I’ve recently been in talks with a media company that has expressed interest in purchasing GrownUpGeek.com.  I made it clear to them up front that I was not really interested in selling, but I would listen to what they had to offer.

What is the real value of a website? The standard way to valuate a website is to take it’s average yearly earnings and multiply that by 1 year, or 3 years, or even 5 years.  This would put the estimated sale value of Grownupgeek.com somewhere in the neighborhood of $300,000.  Of course, if the buyer is more interested in just the domain name because it matched a new product or service, the value to the buyer could be much more, but sadly I have no such luck.

Going into the talks I knew/assumed that the company would already have an idea of the “standard” value of GrownUpGeek.com ($200,000 – $300,000) and I was already prepared to turn down an offer of that amount.  WHY?  Because the website will generate that much money in 4 to 5 years.  If I sell the website today for say, $300,000 then subtract taxes, escrow fees, attorney’s fees, and whatever other fee’s that come up, I would actually be losing money as opposed to holding on to the site for 3-5 years.  This does not even take into account the emotional attachments to “my baby” – I have spent the majority of the last 5 years of my life tending to, feeding, & caring for the website.  It’s my hobby, it’s my LIFE!  What the heck would I do without it?  Sure, I would have a couple of hundred thousand dollars in my pocket – but I will have that anyway over the course of the next few years.

So when asked by the big media company “what kind of number did you have in mind Mr. Brown?“  I responded with something closer to 2.5 times higher than “standard” value.   (I could hear the gasp in the room)..  Some kind of bargaining technique?  NO – It’s just worth more to me than a few hundred thousand dollars that I will most likely see anyway in the next few years.  Unfortunately the media company does not assign the same emotional value to a website that I do, and as expected, they thanked me for my time.

How much is your website worth to you?  Do you assign any sentimental or emotional value to it?  Even if it’s “just a business” to you, could you walk away from it for only 3-5 years worth of your current earnings?  Am I just a sentimental fool?

Kontera Earnings UP For The Holidays

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It’s probably just a seasonal high, but for the last few weeks Kontera earnings have been trending up, and for most days in December have exceeded my Adsense earnings.

Kontera Earnings

If you have a Kontera account that you’ve stopped using because because you weren’t happy with it’s performance, NOW might be the time to blow the dust off and throw it back on your site to see how it does.  If you don’t have a Kontera account you can sign up HERE, but it might be too late to cash-in on the seasonal-high.  And don’t forget – you CAN use Kontera with Adsense.

Affiliate Links: This post contains affiliate links.  If you hate affiliate links you can go directly to www.kontera.com the hard way.

YES – Kontera still makes money

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It’s been a while since I’ve done a new post about Kontera so I thought I would write a quick round-up and update of my experiences and success with Kontera.

Back when I started GrownUpGeek.Com back in 2006 our only real source of monetization was Google Adsense.  We also dabbled a bit in affiliate sales but that didn’t start generating any real income for at least a year and even now affiliate sales only generates a few hundred dollars per month.  Of course there was income generated from my ebook sales (~$10k or so) back in 2006- 2007 (now the ebook is free here in the blog), and later, another $90k or so generated in premium content sales.  But that first year or so, Adsense was the primary way that we generated income and paid the bills.

Even though we experienced great success with Adsense, and in particular the old Adsense Firefox Referral program (so much success that Google published GrownUpGeek.Com as a Google Success Story) I knew that having all of our eggs in one basket was not a good long term strategy and that we could generate even better earnings by properly diversifying our advertiser networks.  The trick was to not cannibalize our Adsense earnings or drive visitors away by lowering our standards and looking spammy by jamming in too many ads.

Enter Kontera: Back in early 2007 I started testing Kontera’s In-Text PPC ad system.  Kontera allowed us to virtually double our earnings overnight while not consuming any space on our pages and not looking “spammy”.  Also, because Kontera’s In-Text ads look & feel totally different from Adsense text-units or image-ads, I think they appeal to a different type of visitors that may have become ‘ad blind’ to regular banner ads or text units.  This allows us to generate additional income with Kontera without significantly reducing our Adsense income (as proven in testing and statistical analysis).  And to answer the question: Can you use Adsense and Kontera together? YES, you can use Kontera with Adsense without any worry of violating the current Adsense Terms Of Service.

Over the last 2.5 years with Kontera we’ve seen both Adsense and Kontera earnings fluctuate up and fluctuate down, but virtually the whole time Kontera has earned right up with with, and sometimes better than Adsense.  Kontera has also performed better than other In-Text ad networks I have tested over the years.   Those solid earnings combined with my own dedicated Kontera account manager that answers my questions and deals with any problems that arise (something you won’t get from Adsense) has kept Kontera on my “Best ad network” list.  But, don’t take MY word for it – I always recommend that you test all of your options and use what works best for you on your site, and REtest at least once per year.

Now that we have begun a full shift from premium content sales being our main source of income and are focusing on a long term strategy of advertiser income based on free content,  the future looks good.  As long as we can continue to generate quality (user generated) content we expect traffic and earnings to continue to grow.

Affiliate links: You can try Kontera at www.Kontera.com. Other links in the post may also contain affiliate links. If you hate aff-links, you can go direct to www.kontera.com.

Make Money by Giving Your Stuff Away for Free

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Those of you that follow this blog know that in the past, premium membership sales were a huge earner for us.  Between 2007 and 2008 premium membership sales alone amounted to over $90,000.  Several months alone premium membership sales generated upwards of $10k.

But in order to successfully generate long-term (lasting) income with premium content sales you must have content that a customer/member is willing to pay for.  Generally this means content that cannot be found anywhere else and is of real value.  If you can’t provide that high-quality content, you’re basically ripping people off, and/or reduced to tricking them into purchasing your ‘premium’ content which is not good for business and opens a whole other can-of-worms to deal with (refunds, complaints, etc).  For a long time GrownUpGeek.com had that certain type of content that could not be found anywhere else, namely tweaks and loopholes that allowed Myspace users to view the content of other Myspace member’s pages that were marked as ‘private’ or un-readable.  But as far back as 2007 I began to realize that because one day Myspace would no-doubt make this no longer possible, I would need to come up with a better long-term earnings strategy.  I could not continue taking people’s money in good-faith knowing that I did not (or soon would not) have anything of value to give in return.  Also, seeing the amount of ‘copy cat’ sites popping up faster than SwineFlu cases as well as the amount of “stolen” information copied and pasted from our site to other sites made it even more clear that this just was not going to work in the long-term.

At the end of 2008 after seeing premium content sales steadily drop, after constant problems with PayPal and GoogleCheckout, after growing tired of customers that were unable to read the agreement they were agreeing-to when purchasing a premium membership or just outright lying for refunds, after getting sick of other websites copying & pasting our premium content, or worse making sad (and sometimes humorously lame) attempts at copying/ripping-off the entire site (if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery then we must be doing good!), and seeing the amount of new good, premium content steadily drop, I came to the conclusion that for long-term success we had to focus on FREE advertiser supported content.  After realizing these truths, we stopped accepting premium memberships, stopped focusing on our ‘premium’ forum content and started focusing on building content in our free/open forum areas.  Sadly, shorty after all these ‘executive decisions’ of mine the economy tanked, along with advertiser ePC/eCPM (and overall earnings), but traffic has continued in an upward trend and finally in the last few months eCPM (earnings) are creeping back up to pre-economy-bust levels.

IMHO, free, advertiser supported content is where the future is.  Actually, it’s where the past is.  Most websites (the vast, vast majority) generate income from advertisers, some generate income by selling products or services, and only a tiny fraction of websites actually generate income by ‘selling’ content.   Television learned this decades ago – you CAN make money by giving away your content if it’s tastefully sprinkled with advertising.  Sure, there will always be HBO and Showtime, but unless you can sustain a high volume of high-quality content like HBO and Showtime, ‘free’ is the way to go.   So for the last year we have gotten back to our roots and generate income the old-fashioned way:  placing a limited amount of advertising on pages viewed by anonymous visitors (once someone becomes a free member, virtually no ads are displayed).

Concentrating on building good content or providing a good, free service (aka Facebook, Twitter, etc), not going overboard with the popups or ads (you’ll just piss-off people), giving visitors a reason to come back, and building traffic will generate steady income. Taking money from someone without giving true value in return cannot result in long-term success.