One thing I noticed when I came back from my trip today was news within search results which features twitter as well as new blog posts etc. when a topic is hot enough according to Search Engine Land who recently did an article on the subject, Google will show a news related scroll box which you can pause or just let it keep moving and rotating. Looks a little annoying! Maybe annoying enough for people to look and click on stuff. Instead of going more in depth on this bit I will let you all read that at SEJ.

What this does bring me too is another interesting question. How can that be used to an advantage? Now that Google has made twitter a part of their search that puts a whole new spin on things In the next few days I will be doing more of my own tests on it to see how it can effectively be used if possible to get more search traffic for people interested in various topics. Obviously the idea is to make money with twitter through natural search engine traffic.

Only testing will tell us how well this method could work in future situations. Obviously spending countless hours on twitter is not a good use of time, so automation is key. I will give a follow up on some of the testing if it is worth it. If you don’t hear about it again, then it means that I didn’t get anything great to happen, or that I found something so great that letting too many people in on the idea would spoil it.

Thanks for reading and feel free to join my twitter account. It will definitely help me with some other testing I will be doing with the Whatawookie twitter account which will include some prizes. Just to keep things clear, this blog is ultimately here to show you a thing or 2 about making money online through a viable means. One that can be replicated, and that works for just about anyone that wants to do it. This blog is a make money online site which is geared towards just that. I appreciate your comments, and will do the best to answer questions when I can through email. If you have any, shoot me an email and I will get back with you at some point. Sometimes its fast and other times its slow.

Again, thanks for reading!

I have received some emails from a few people having the same issues. One day you are getting traffic and earning money, and the following day literally nothing for you as far as income.

Why is it hard for you to bring in consistent income is the real question? I’m going to tell you so be ready. You either

A. Do not have the ability to get the type of links you need for the terms you are working to hold your rank.

B. Not properly doing keyword research.

C. Working too tight of a niche with little to no traffic.

A few of you are probably going to fall in almost all those categories. others just one. Is it wrong that you build these sites with inconsistent traffic? Not at all, as a matter of fact I have a few sites that are tightly focused which may earn me some big bucks off adsense when I get a click for them, but they are not my main source of income. I do not depend on them to bring in the same amount of money each day. One day they may make me $20 bucks and another day they may make $1 dollar but once again they are not my main sources for income.

With that being said, if your earners vary hugely day by day with adsense, then you are not targeting and nailing a good niche through and through. For most sites it is a numbers game and a combination of keywords which you have chosen. Pick the wrong ones and you have crappy CTR. Pick the right niche and sometimes you get clicks nonstop. This also has a lot to do with the age group you are targeting which I will get to in another article.

At this point then you should mainly focus on having a handful of consistent earners every day which can bring in $$30-$100 every day. Once you have that established then work the smaller stuff. But make sure you have consistent earners, or you will never have a gauge to what you will make each month. Personally for me, I like knowing what I can bring in each month as far as income from sites. Consistency is key.

So lets say you built a site around “Starwars Chewbacca Legos“. Once you have that main term nailed then what? If the search volume is low then you have a site that is going to be sporadic. Instead wouldn’t it make sense to build an entire site around Star wars legos and target a bunch of terms like “Han Solo Starwars figure“, “Jabba the Hut lego set” etc…? Then you will be bringing in traffic for many more terms than just one or 2 most likely making it more of a consistent earner each day.

This is not really rocket science folks, but there are so many people struggling and not earning money consistently. So if you don’t have a site that is nailing a bunch of keywords get on it. Don’t accumulate a bunch of sites that are all hit or miss. Don’t work niches you can’t get links to rank for properly. If you email me and tell me you are working credit cards, then I am going to tell you to work something easier.

Geez, I just gave you an idea for a niche with the legos, and I am willing to bet some people will start making lego sites based off this post. So why is it people can’t use their noggin a little more and think about things they had as a kid or buy for their kids, or a problem you a person needs medication for, or a household product millions of people use everyday, or places people like to travel.

There are  millions possibilities. Find them and choose them wisely. If you think a term is easy to nail and you don’t want to buy a domain then start a blogger blog and test the waters.

OK, I’m off to nailing more keywords.

Lets talk about how you can make money as an eBay affiliate. I’m sure most of you reading this know what eBay is, and know that you can make some decent money from it by selling stuff that’s been either sitting around in your home, or things you have picked up from garage sales or estate sales. That was one of my favorite money makers back in 1998 when eBay was still relatively undiscovered country. However like many who have stuck around with eBay for many years, I have found that a lot of the products I could easily buy and turn a profit quickly on were not selling like they used to as more and more people crowded the marketplace with rock bottom prices which did not help provide a decent profit for themselves, or the people like me around them who were also trying to sell things.

That’s when I walked away from eBay for a while and realized that it was time to move on. Well it was fun while it lasted. In the last couple years however I had found eBay to be a profitable place again but from a different angle. This was as an affiliate. I soon realized that you could really make money online with eBay if you built lots of websites and threw up some half decent content.

Software which a friend was using which was working quite nicely also started working well for me, but was short lived as Google didn’t like it and soon started not including the sites in its index. For me this meant changing things up. I started setting up blogs with decent content, which displayed eBay ads through the eBay tools provided. This would allow me to easily set up sites quickly, and make some decent money. Although it took more time, the sites lasted and I didn’t worry so much that they would be gone tomorrow if Google decided to kill some affiliate sites based on spammy looks.

Recently however eBay has gone in a new direction with paying its affiliates by clicks instead of commissions like they used too. This method of making money online is not as friendly since you may have gotten eBay a sale which you would normally have been paid $10 on but now you make 10 cents for. It is another way for eBay to cut back on paying those who help them increase sales, and it is also another way for them to weed out people who may have been trying to rig the system to make money the easy way.

From personal experience I can tell you that eBay was once a half decent way to make money, but can now make a person feel ripped off who has been an affiliate with them since before this new change. Obviously it is easy for eBay to decide what they want to pay affiliates because they not only make the rules, but control the numbers. The eBay affiliate system is flawed and will probably not make you that great of money unless you have a ton of traffic to your sites. This is why adsense can be a lot better option. But if building websites and blogs is not your cup of tea, and you love writing, then you may just want to sign up for hubpages which covers it all. Hubpages allows you to not only add eBay ads, Amazon, and Kontera, but also adds the adsense into your articles without you having to know any coding or programming knowledge.

I have tested out hubpages, and it does work. The main thing required of you is to just write quality content. If on the other hand you are still interested in building your own sites and setting up eBay affiliate feeds on them, then you can head over to the eBay partner network. Have fun!

WOW!!!!! All I can say is that I was thoroughly refreshed from my camping trip at the Frio River. We had a blast there swimming, tubing, kayaking, rope swinging and grilling tasty food with friends.

We spent 4 days at a Rio Frio campground called Magers. Below are some pictures I thought I might share. What does this have to do with making money online? Absolutely nothing, other than the fact that when you work from home, you have the freedom to take vacations in the middle of the week whenever you want to.

All the photography except for the first image were done by a friend who loves taking pictures. We are trying to convince her to start making money online with photography. OK, on to the photos!

CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE

The Frio River at Magers River Camp

Having fun with a camera in the dark

Throwing Light Waves

Jumping over the sunrise

Friends sitting on a hilltop watching the sunrise

I want to start a basics series that will cover some of the things newbies should know about internet marketing, and making money online. With that in mind I am kicking it off with an article entitled, “how to make money on the internet“. If this is your first time reading then welcome, if its not and you know me, then you also know that this article may not provide answers to more advanced topics.

As a beginner, you know that making money on the internet is not so easy otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this article. I come across people all the time that have difficulty making cash online because they don’t apply themselves, or are always looking for something magical.

I think some of the most common questions people have when starting out which I hope to answer for you have to do with doubts. Is it possible to make money on the internet? How much money can I make online? What resources will I need to make money online? Are there make money online scams? How much time will it take me to make a lot of money on the internet? How long will it take me to make good money? How much work will I have to do when I start earning money off the internet? How do I get paid from internet money making?

The answers to these questions are relatively simple, but knowing them will not make you money. Following a simple pattern, and paying attention to simple methods will get you there. Everyone has their own thoughts on how to earn cash with a computer. They also like to make it appear complicated so that you the user can’t really see the simplicity of it.

Beginners just starting out always think they need to buy some expensive ebook to teach how to make money online. This is simply not true. Anyone can make good money with a computer and an internet connection.

Now if we get into how much a person can make then this is another story. Money making opportunities are everywhere if you are willing to do the work. So this brings us to the next question, How much time do you have to devote to earning money on the internet? Well if you have a full time job, then spending a few hours a day might be all you can do. Of course this is going to grow your earnings much slower than if you have 8 hours a day to spend.

So where might you spend this time? Blogging is one of the easiest ways to make money, and can be done literally for free if you have the patience, and know how to write and spell. Even if you can’t spell well, you can still get lots of people that come and visit your blog.

One of the best free blogging platforms to use to make this cash is blogger.com. If you haven’t made yourself familiar with it already, then you may want to start by going over and signing up for an account. You will find that it is very easy to setup, and will give you a great testing ground first before you start spending money on hosting and setting up wordpress which would be your next step if you want to have more control over your blogs.

While using blogger is a simple way to make money on the internet, you can’t make any money without first having a form of monetizing something. This is where adsense comes into play. Can you make good money with adsense? Heck yes! How much money can a person make with adsense? My answer simply is, It’s unlimited. How much do I make with adsense you might be wondering? I will simply say, “hundreds every day”. Do you have to be a professional writer in order to make and earn lots of money online? Not at all. What you do have to learn, is how to find things that people search for. For example, you probably found me for something related to how to make money online or some other term related to the making of money with a computer.

One thing you should know is that this is not an easy road. The methods are simple, but you have to apply yourself. You get back what you put into it. If you can use your mind to think like a consumer, then you will be successful with this business, but if you have a narrow mind of just what appears in front of your face, then it is going to be a lot harder for you to have your own make money online business.

So if you are truly interested in making a healthy living with the internet, and you want to know the real secret to making money online then continue to read this blog. I will not only talk more about blogging, but other methods if running blogs isn’t for you.

I want to end this simple article with a request from you as a reader. If you work hard at this, you can make it! Complaining will not get you anywhere. Most people that I see making very little money from blogging, are usually the ones that build a few blogs and hope for miracles. Don’t hope for miracles with this business, make your own miracles happen. I know some of you may have tons of questions. That’s fine. I have a lot more time than I did before to answer them. I can’t guarantee that you will get an answer fast, but I can tell you that as long as the question is legitimate, I can at least help point you in the right direction from one of my other blog posts, or I can give you a direct answer.

For those of you who are just starting to make or try to make and earn a living and legitimate income from the internet, I welcome you to the MMO world, and hope to be of help in any way possible. Below is my email if you have any questions.

chewie(at)whatawookie(dot)com

This post might not teach you what you were hoping to learn about making money on the internet, but it certainly will help you to see why I say that #1 rankings bring home the bacon.

Just like many of you, I have plenty of sites that are not ranked 1st for certain terms. On the other hand, I have quite a few sites that rank number one for the main term I was striving to reach. This past week it really helped me to see why many of you are discouraged about not bringing home the big bucks when I compared the stats of 2 sites which are shown a little further down in this post.

A lot has to do with ranking first in Google to earn money online. I’m going to paint a scenario, and then I want you to tell me if I am right or not.

You build a site, give it some time to get its age and ranking to 3rd or 4th page for your main term(s). You then begin to give it some links to move you up even closer to the first page of Google. After making it to the 1st page you just stop working the site, and feel content with the current rankings.

When you look at your traffic stats you begin to realize that being on the first page for your main keywords is not yielding you much traffic. You then get discouraged, or move on to another niche to work, and just get the occasional $1 or $2 dollars a day on your site because you feel there is no money to be made.

Do you see anything wrong here? I will tell you that the answer is quite simple. You do not hold the first position for your main targeted terms. Getting good rankings in Google is the name of the game.

Getting search traffic to make money is why you built the site right? Then why are you stopping when you have come so close to achieving the top spot? I have heard people tell me, “achieving number one spot is too tough. I’m satisfied with being on page one”.

If that’s your mentality then fine. Keep on making your small change on websites everyday. It works just fine if you have a bunch of them, unless you have some sites with big money clicks in which case its hit or miss.

If you have not started today, I suggest you look back on your sites which are position #3 through 10 in Google and dominate what you set out to dominate.

Here is a final example of why I wrote this post. I have 2 sites which I am targeting the same keyword. One of the sites hold position 1 for the term, and the second site holds position #9 on the first page for the same keyword. Both sites generate 99% of their traffic from this one keyword, but look at the difference in traffic for this month.

I can tell you the second site doesn’t even make close to what the first one holding position 1 does. But when I the the #2 spot then I will have a nice chunk of traffic on the second site as well. Look at the difference below, and don’t give up on those number one rankings.

Below is the stats on traffic for this month. Looks like we still have 5 days to go, so I should be around 14k in unique visitors for the first site by the end of the month.

I would say its time to get some more links wouldn’t you?

Since everyone wants to work at home and make easy money on the internet, I thought I might share with you the results that working from home online can have on a person.

If you are tired of your job and want to change things up a bit, then you probably think that working from your desk at the house is the way to go. Don’t be so fast! Let me tell you over the last 2 years how making money online has been a positive thing and a negative thing for me.

The simple concept of building sites and getting links is just that, simple. Why so many people don’t get it I really don’t know. One thing I do know is that it takes a determination and fire to get up every day and work for weeks and sometimes months without seeing any real results. I should know, I have done this for over 2 years now. Now its a lot easier, but the motivation has really died out. What happened?

the first drive you get from building websites and either monetizing them with adsense or with affiliate products is crazy. I would work for almost 15 hours a day and feel like a hamster running in a wheel. It seemed like the harder I tried the less I got anywhere. Then finally it all started coming together. I was making extra money from home and still working at a full time job, but now I actually had some cash to show for all that hard work. it wasn’t a lot of cash, but it was something. That drove me to just get more excited about making money from home and quitting my day job. Especially when i was having some health issues and missing a lot of work

I finally made that plunge and quit my day job to make money from home. The money was not great so we had to struggle a little with my wife still working hard at her job. It took time, and with her support I finally made it. Things Kept growing and growing, but I was still working so many hours and it seemed so unnecessary.

Working from home was taking its toll on me, and not only was I burned out, but my social life was also suffering. I spent so much time in the digital world that i never spent time speaking with people face to face. I literally had become a recluse, and now I was getting sick more often. One of my hands was having serious problems from working around the clock typing.

Making money online has taken its toll, both physically and emotionally. It still takes its toll everyday in one way or another, and has become a miserable and dreaded job even though its still a passion.

I think I have told people doing what I do to work as hard as you can, and to get as much done as you can. However I failed to mention rest. If you do not rest from this internet money making job you will hurt yourself more than you know.

If I could go back and do it all over again, I would have made a schedule for this stuff. No working for 15 hours straight looking at a screen. No working all night long and well into the next day until my eyes are burning red.

While I have not worked online like this for a long time now, I can truly say that if you want to make a legitimate income from home, you need to think about your family and your health before making money. If you don’t you will be miserable. i just thought it was important to outline the miserable effects from spending 95% of your life in your home without seeing sunlight for 2 years.

You can still make a living from working at home and be happy, just make a schedule, and get plenty of exercise. Go to the gym, and go walking to clear your head or you can drive yourself mad, believe me, I know.

Lets talk about something that is fairly important. I have been asked in the past in order to make money online with blogs, does it matter if my keywords are in the domain. I used to say not really. But until more recently have I been using exact keyword domains and ranking in top 3 spots with 0 inlinks in Google. I am able to make money faster than ever with new domains. First off, I know what I have told some of you. Yes I did say buy preowned domains. I still say to do that, but I also know that if done properly, You can immediately rank in the top of Google right from the get go.

What that means is that I am making money at a faster rate than ever with less work. Does it take work to make money online? Of course it does! Don’t think that are easy ways to make money on the internet with little to no work unless you want to lose your butt on PPC campaigns. Thats another story, but the fact of the matter is, keyword research still proves so valuable with this method as well.

Now that leads us to this MMO site. Would WhataWookie Be ranking better in Google for the term Make Money Online and even Make Money Online free if Make money online was in the name of the domain? Yes it would. While I have gone after branding this site more than being concerned with the words make money online in my domain name, I probably would have done things a little differently, and went ahead and registered a name with those keywords in it.

I really am not worried at this point though because the site already ranks for plenty of MMO keywords, and it also is being found in Google for things like Make Money Wookie and Make Money Online Wookie. This tells me that the branding part is working. Now let me ask you a question folks. If you are building a site to make money with, do you build it to brand the site, or do you build it to rank in Google?

Organic traffic is the most important traffic a site can ever have. While I will probably sell this site down the road, and for that purpose I have branded it, branding is the least important thing when monetizing a site, unless you have an ecommerce site where you are hoping for return buyers.

Let me repeat this to everyone that has a social blog, or trys to make money with twitter and other social sites. Organic traffic is the best traffic for adsense and other types of ad placements for a blog or even a static html site. If you are trying to make money with social traffic then i’m sorry, I don’t have tips for you.

Can you make money online with forums is the question? Obviously you can make money online with just about anything. The question is how much time will you invest, and how much maintenance is required. You have to ask yourself what are you willing to put into a forum, just like anything else.

Over the last few weeks I have gotten into one of the laziest slumps I have ever been in. Several factors in my life have caused this, and I have gotten into a rather slow manner of getting things done. This kind of made me think about the upkeep of a forum, and if how my business was based on forums I would be so behind unless I had a solid group of moderators.

Forums can make money no doubt, but use of bandwidth, finding advertisers, and getting members seems like a lot of work. I see forums with thousands of members sell on sites like Sitepoint for so much less than it seems they should be selling for. Then I see a blog which has had very little done to it with very little upkeep sell for the same or more.

If you are someone like me, sometimes it is a challenge to supress ideas. If you have an idea it is really important you weigh the time to manage it and build it, and decide whether the payoff is great enough. For me running a forum is not in my interest.

I think this is so important for new people looking for ways to make money online. because making money blogging is not the only option to take, you really have to decide if it is in your business model to do or not do something. Something I will tell anyone that plans on building something for profit is not to jump in and figure out whether its worth it later. Do the math from the start. Going half the distance only to find that you are investing more work than you wanted is just setting you up for failure, unless your plan was to sell your site whether it be a forum, blog, or some other type of online project.

So for those of you planning to make money on  forum, just be willing to put in lots of time and effort until it takes off. Even then there is no guarantee you will have a very popular forum. It will just take tons of work to find out.

I have been in and around the hosting industry now for several years now, and I can tell you there is a lot of money to be made. There can also be a lot of headaches to be made if you don’t get a solid game plan if you are wanting to scale the income. haven’t you ever wondered why they call hosting plans a reseller hosting package? it’s because you can do just that. Resell the hosting.

I have seen quite a few people make some really good money building around this business model. HostGator is by far the most reliable hosting company you will find. Every hosting company has its positives and negatives, but if you are looking for good hosting support, and 24 hour around the clock service then HostGator is the way to go.

OK so I know a lot of you are already saying, “Hosting is way too competitive. How would I get business?” I can answer that with a question. When you created your first website or blog, did you have any idea what hosting company to go with? You sure didn’t, and neither did I.

If you want to be successful and make money online with hosting, you are going to need to think on a local level. Would businesses in your area tend to trust you or the internet? Obviously they would feel more comfortable talking with someone in their town or city.

If you are a go getter, and you want to make some money online then you are going to talk to people everywhere you go. Create business cards, and add the things you are good at on them. This might incude blog setup, hosting, and if you know how to build html websites you might even put web design on there. Make sure you do have knowledge of these things or you might get yourself in way over your head.

The more you pass out your cards, the more word will get around of what you do. Makes sure to drop them off whenever you go to business establishments and get people talking about what you do. You should then be able to slowly start getting some business from people who would like to host their site with you. There are a bunch of factors that you will need to consider which I am not going to go into right now including support, ticket systems, and autobilling as well as account creations. If you have questions about these because you are serious about setting up your own reseller hosting business then just shoot me an email and I will do my bet to get back with you on your questions.

If you want to still make money online with hosting, but are a little unsure of your abilities with all the duties of hosting peoples sites, then you can still just direct people to Hosting affiliates. Just setup a comparison site for people where you show the positives and weaknesses for several different companies. Have a business card and/or a flyer made to pass out, or post up at colleges or other places.

Just for the heck of it I will be doing a case study to see how many people I can get to signup for products through several aspects of marketing. I will go into detail in a future post. Until then, know that you can make money online with a reseller hosting account. It just takes some time and effort like anything else.