MangoXL’s Blog

Is it really possible to survive on your $2 per day earning from your blog? Probably not. But the potential is there. You can look at the following image where Jeremy Schoemaker, the internet marketing superstar, was holding a cheque of $132,994.97 from google. There was back in August 2005.

You certainly need an array of very popular sites in order to achieve that status.

If $140K per month is not impressive enough, check this out. PlentyOfFish.com, an online dating site, was reported getting $900K Canadian. Yes, $100K shy from $1,000,000 (One Million Dollars). And Yes, it is an online dating site. See it for yourself in the image below:

Both cheques were from 2005. Here is a cheque from MubinAhmed!

To see more cheques from Google, click here.

Adwords is Google’s keyword-based marketing tool to promote websites. A lot of people buy search keywords in the system so that their websites will be returned and listed along with the search results when doing Google search.

The system works under an auction scheme where the highest bid will get the top placement in the search results. Most Adword users will just pay by their credit cards within the system. But there is a cheaper way and this way sometimes is being used for making money.
Once in a while, Google promotes their Ad system by giving out free credits (ranging from $50-$100) for new users to try. There are couple ways to make money from this.

1) Some will sell the URL to the promotional page. They usually charge around $5-$10 for this information.

2) Another way is that the seller will sign up an account, and then sell the entire account to others. Usually, an account of $100 credit will be available for $25. They pocket $75!!

You can find these sellers on eBay and Digital Point forum.

Our experience tells us that not every adsense ad is created equal. There are couple tricks that can potentially increase your earnings.

1) Location: The Ads in the top half perform the best, as no suprises, they are the first to be shown to your visitors. So make sure you have some ads at the top.

2) Format: The best performing formats are 336×280 Large Rectangle, 300×250 medium rectangle, 160×600 wide skyscraper.

3) Color: Use your website’s background color as the background for your ad. This will blend your ad very well into your web site, which increase the chance of them being clicked.

4) Testing: Keep testing different types of ads on your site.

Nowadays, it is foolish for you to start a business that you need to stock inventories. Stocking up inventory is just too risky. It takes up space, and product cycle now is so short that your product such as MP3 player will be obsolete in 3 months. So in the internet age, what do you do?

The secret is to sell information. Information can be in many forms. A blog such as this is information. You write and publish some articles. You earn incomes by showing ads. The money will be flowing in while you are sleeping. No orders to take, no inventory to stock.

Directing peole to sites that offer products is a form of information selling as well. This is the affiliate model. You do not want to just sell other people’s product, the entry of barrier is just too low. You want to create your own products or services. You can consider to use site such as Cafepress. You can upload an image of your creation to the website, and the image can be added to products such as coffee mug, T-shirt. The site will handle all the transaction for you. All you have to do is marketing, directing traffic to your products.

We really like the internet business model where you create something in a couple hours and that something will start bringing you an income stream without additional works. We dont like to be work slaves. We want to spend time with our family and go travelling to see the world. So investing your time into businesses that have the internet business model instead of the traditional model.

You probably heard about people’s Adsense account getting banned. Google claimed that they have a system to detect fake clicks, and they are very strict on enforcing their policies. Their system makes mistakes sometimes. It is a shame that they disable or cancel your account when your earning reaches an important level, say $100, or even $1000. The strategy to deal with this risk is to use multiple adsense accounts.

When you have multiple adsense accounts, you have more options to spread the risks. If you have a major site that fetches you $200 or more per month, we recommend that you use a different account for 50% of your pages. Note that adsense will pay you only when your account reaches $100 dollars, so you really want to spread your traffics to multiple accounts and each account should still meet the $100 payout requirement.

If you have multiple web sites, you may want to consider to put some risky web services such as proxy into a different account. So you will have an account that holds the legitimate web sites and have another account to hold the grey area services.

We’ve talked about how you spread the risk within a particular ad system. You may also want to consider to use different ad system within the same website. For example, you want to use Adsense and Yahoo’s Publisher network within your site at the same time. The advantage of this is that you will still have income if one of the ad system banned you.

One step further, you may also want to have incomes from different sources. Some incomes from ad, some incomes from affiliate programs, and some incomes referrals. Take a look of this link to see how Problogger diversifies.

We hope you build a good foundation for your online businesses.

A good and income-generating web site is like a good business. It gives you a steady income stream. The goal here is to own enough income streams so that you can retire. You can build your site from the ground up, but there is a lot of risks. Alternatively, you can consider to acquire one.

There are sites that are dedicated for buying and selling web sites. Digital Point has a Buy, Sell or Trade forum where you can find deals. For a complete list, you can access our directory.

Buying a site involves valuation. How much should you pay for a web site? We dont suggest to buy a site that makes no money for the beginners. You should buy something that is already established and have at least 3 month of proved revenue from Adsense or other mechanisms. Now, this kind of site will be less risky, but it will cost more. You can find a site that generates $2 per day or $60 per month. A very general rule is that you pay a multiple (i.e. 10 times is the current market multiple for a general site) of the monthly income. So for a site that makes $60 per month, its price probably will be around $600. Different kind of sites have different multiples. For example, proxy is currently at a multiple of 3.

Once you’ve acquired the site, you need to move the domain, the code, and the data to your own hosting. Sometimes, the seller is willing to do the migration for you. So, ask! After that, you just need to market your site, and grow your stream.

One of the current trend is to make money online by setting proxy services. A proxy service is a web service that allows you to browse the internet without exposing your IP addresses. Normally, if you use a regular browser to visit a website, your IP address will be logged by the website and it can be used to track your online activities. To avoid being tracked, you use a proxy to retrieve the web page for you, and the website can only log the IP address of the proxy service, not yours.

There are 2 free proxy scripts, namely cgi-proxy and php-proxy. Cgi-proxy requires higher system resources but it is more compatible with popular site such as MySpace.com. You can also use service such as Proxy Builder to build custom script.

If you decide to run your proxy service, please make sure you set it up on a dedicated server. A proxy script consumes a lot of CPU cycles and memory.

So how much can you make from a proxy? Well, it depends on how popular your site is. we suggest you install adsense in the main page, and use adversal in the proxified pages. For a proxy with page impression of 350,000 and around 450 clicks, you can earn up to US$40/month from adsense alone. You can easily fetch additional $30 from adversal.

Here are some of our proxies, check them out: YourGlue, NavyDog, IcePacker

OK, once you’ve created your website such as a blog. What’s next? We recommend that you add your site to google’s search engine by going to Add your URL to Google, Add to MSN, and More. We also suggest to add Google analytics javascript to your site so that you can track your visitors and find out which pages are most popular.

You can also consider to use Google’s Adword to get traffic. Don’t buy Adword directly. You can save big by buying Adword credits from eBay or Digital Point’s Vouchers section.

To make money, you need to have either a product or a service. You can create a blog as your product. A blog is an online journal. What you are looking at here is a blog.

A blog can be on different topics. You can pick a topic that you have experience in or you have passion to talk about. The goal here is to build traffic to your blog so that you can monetize on it if you choose to. There are numerous ways to make money once you have a popular blog. You can, for example, participate ad network such as Google’s AdSense as a publisher, and show Ad on your blog. You can easily earn $3 dollars per day from ads. Click the following icon to create an adsense account.

Or, you can join affiliate programs to promote particular products. You can write reviews on them. Some products give up to 80% commission to you on successful transaction. And you can select to feature only the products that you like to market. Commission Junction is one of many affiliate program.

So how do you setup a blog? You can use blogger.com. Or, you can purchase an account in dreamhost, then create a wordpress application. Both solution requires no programming experience. The latter solution requires a bit more works and money, but the flexibility that it gives well worths the cost.

Owing your own product is very critical. Otherwise, you are just selling what everyone else is selling.

Each site on the internet needs a name, a domain name. You can get a domain via a domain registrar such as Godaddy. The process of getting a domain is extremely easy and the price is usually around US$6.95.

Once you bought a domain name, you dont need to know how to set it up or even write a web page. The registrar usually will do and host everything for you. More importantly, it will automatically setup some web pages which sometimes are referred as parking pages.

These parking pages may contain marketing information about products or some links to other sites. Companies, called advertisers, actually paid your registrar for hosting those information using your domain. And your registrar will cut you some commissions and send you a cheque monthly. If you are not satisfied with the domain parking income from your registrar, you can always pick another domain parking providers such as NameDrive, sedo, ParkingSite, Trafficz, Fabulous.

The more traffic your domain brings in, the more money you will receive. This income stream is very passive and you can earn money while sleeping. Earning $5-$30 per domain is very real.