How to make money online?

[OzzyKP]

Re: How to make money online?

Originally posted by VetLegion
I'm prepared for the usual onslaught of witty remarks , but this is a serious topic.

Day in and day out I see sites using the wonderful Google ad technology to make a buck. I've recently begun to read about it and it really seems to work. I'm not talking about buying a Ferrari BTW., but what's wrong with an extra couple hundred of dollars a month from a site? At the moment I'm trying to figure out what kind of site would attract enough traffic for this to work.

Then, there is the other type of online business: coming up not with new content but a new product or technology. I've been reading up on this too. AJAX seems to be the buzzword, and lots of applications using it are in the making. I have an idea for an app too, maybe I'll start writing it tonight.

Some of those things are so simple and, frankly, idiotic, that they can't but inspire. I'm thinking del.icio.us. It's a way to store bookmarks online. Some company recently bought the site for some millions of dollars. What?? If you can sell that, you can sell anything.

The world of making money online begins to fascinate me, and I'm pretty sure I want a peace of the cake. What do you think?

Well I was going to make a big announcement, but I'll screw up my chance for glory by mentioning it here first. After many years of just barely scraping by, wondering where my next rent check was coming from (heck where my next meal was coming from) I just inked a deal with an ad firm that should allow me to live comfortably (for me) for a while.

NYRA had experimented with putting ads on its forums for the last 3 months. It led to a bit of a discussion to determine whether or not the community would be ok with ads (we actually ask first) as long as they were on the forums and not the main page, and most people were quite supportive so we went ahead. We got Google ads but so far have been disappointed. No matter how many times we tried to ban it they kept showing banner ads and advertising for groups we are morally opposed to (i.e. camps that abuse teens).

Worse yet they weren't even paying out all that much. Since the Google Adsense pays per click it required a lot of attention by the community to make them effective. The first few days were incredible, but then it sputtered out after that. Figures. But two other, much smaller, text ads on the forums were paying a flat fee of $50 a month each.

I decided to seek out more of these small text ads, since they don't care about clicks and pay a flat fee. Plus they take up less space than the Google ones. So I found a company that offered us $45 per ad, and we could place a maximum of 20 ads.

$900 a month.

I inquired about my personal blog, and they offered the same deal, but $40 per ad. Even so....

$800 a month.

I signed the contract and am waiting for them to send me the ads and my first check.

Between the two that's $1700 a month, not bad for a guy struggling to make half of that before. This is an amazing breakthrough both for me personally and for the organization.

I the Internet.

[VetLegion]

OzzyKP

That's quite a decent sum if you ask me

BTW., do they pay you independent of number of visitors you have?

[VetLegion]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger


No offence, myspace looks like an online meat market to me...

Frankly, I have no idea. I'm not a member of it, or any other social networking site, so I don't know the exact revenue model. They were probably ad-funded unti they got bought by Yahoo!(for 508 million $, no less). A big company like that can continue with ordinary ads, but just think of the marketing potential of a site with a couple of million users sharing intimate stuff about themselves, their hobbies, their needs and so on. It can be used for unprecedented targeted advertising, for example.

[VetLegion]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger A website with lots of people is useless unless a percentage of those people actually buy.

It's good if they buy, but it's enough if they click. Clickthrough rates are about 1% of visitors or somewhere in that range I think (forgot where I read it), so if you have many users, you get many of them clicking on ads (some by accident, surely, but the software can't know that), and that's revenue. They don't need to actually buy things.

[OzzyKP]

Actually it was NewsCorp that bought MySpace.

And the ads pay based on your pagerank rating. For example go to this site and type in a URL: http://www.google-pagerank.net/

That'll display the page rank on a scale from 0-10. 10 being the best. My blog is a 5.

As far as I can tell it takes advantage of the Google formula involving links and such. So while my blog may not have a very high amount of traffic (its not bad, but not great either) I suppose a lot of pages link to it, so the links seem to be the main determiner. The text ads don't really care if you click on them or not, or if anyone even reads them, they seem to be there just for the Google spiders. If you've got a high pagerank and link to these other pages, then it will raise their page rank and thus they will show up higher when someone searches for "vacuum cleaners" or whatever in Google.

Its a lot easier way of making money than Google ads or other traditional ads that rely on clickthrough rates.

[Urban Ranger]

Vet,

I was thinking, you could do something local. IIRC, you're in Croatia, so, why don't you do the website in your own native language? This way it is going to draw a lot more locals than any similar site in English.

This is the same way in the PRC. The big sites are all in Chinese. When Google came here, they had to switch to Chinese. Same with Yahoo!

So, you could do something like myspace, but in Croatian. Whatever idea you come up with, you should leverage the strength of localisation.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by OzzyKP
Actually it was NewsCorp that bought MySpace.

Murdoch? Now that's surprising.

[VetLegion]

UR, I'm thinking about translating/porting something. It's not excluded... but it's kind of uninspiring, so I'm not really itching to do something like that. Maybe if I smell a lot of money in it

BTW., I just got an email from the Mechanical Turk! I visited it the other day. It says:

Greetings from Amazon Mechanical Turk,

The following is a summary of your Amazon Mechanical Turk activity for the
week ending Mar 25, 2006.

Weekly HIT Activity
- Number of HITs accepted: 3
- Number of HITs returned: 0
- Number of HITs abandoned: 0
- Number of HITs submitted: 3
- Number of HITs approved: 1
- Number of HITs rejected: 0
- Amount earned this week: $0.01

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by VetLegion
UR, I'm thinking about translating/porting something. It's not excluded... but it's kind of uninspiring, so I'm not really itching to do something like that. Maybe if I smell a lot of money in it

I think translation can be a side job, a moonlighting kinda thing. If you have a personal website you can put a section up there. I don't think you'll find translating to Croatian jobs that often, but if they need it they will pay $$$ for it.

The local government pays big bucks for translation and interpretation for obscure languages

Speaking of which, something such as myspace, but in Chinese, isn't such a bad idea.