How I made $88 in the last week of July?

July 2009 has been the most exciting and the best month of my life. I never took this 'writing' thing seriously(because I have other career options too!), so always overlooked the potential of this industry and how to make money from home via this industry.
Digital Point Forums is a webmasters forum where all the webmasters big and small, discuss, share tips, tricks, etc. I had joined Digital Point, just because I was interested in the promotion of this little blog. So, I even tried to sell the ad space here, but nobody was interested at all(one reason being that Blogspot blogs have less credibility!) and all my time given to this blog went futile as there was Zero income!
Just when I was frequenting the buy,sell and trade section of DP, I came across a thread where a member was selling content for $2 for 250 words. I then thought that I should give something similar a shot and decided to do it the next day.
The next day I came up with an idea to promote both my blog and my writing too so I started a thread

I am selling 125x125 ad spots on my blog http://junkamania.blogspot.com for $5/mth. There are 6 spots available.
The header banner is also $5/mth. One spot.
Anyone interested? contact me at boneysharaon@gmail.com or PM me.
I am in need of money.
I can write an article of 300 words for you for $5 on any topic you ask(I will research a lot and come up with one very unique article).
If you want to place a text link in one of my posts, then contact me and place a bid via email...Bid starts at $5(This will be permanent)

Please contact soon.

You can have a look at my thread http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1422743

Obviously $5 did not work, and I had to consider something else.
So, I decided to write a better thread and try to give better than anyone else.
So, here was my new thread http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1424745
This thread started my writing career actually. I decided that I will let someone review my work and hence kept the price as low as $0.30 for 250 words for the review copy. Nevertheless to say, it gained a huge response and I sold my two review articles for $0.30 to two members, out of whom just one reviewed. It did not matter as within that day, I got 5 bulk orders and 7 single article orders. But sad to say, I am a human so I rejected most of them as I could not keep them waiting.
The first day I could only make 10 dollars.
The second day I made 5 dollars.
Then I made a new thread with my revised rates and offered a 250 words article for $1.80 and I received two articles to write and that was that. No more sales on that.
The next day I decided to create another thread, this time offering a 300 words article for $1.50 and there was a boom in sales. Here I earned my 51 dollars writing and spinning the articles. I spun an article for a client almost 20 times! I then used my signature to promote my thread and there are new orders everyday, which I could hardly manage, and so I decided to take less orders. Check the thread http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1433911.
This all happened for the last 8 days and my Paypal got $88 in just 8 days. I was happy but few questions came to my mind;

1. Is the income passive?
2. What happened to my sold articles?
3. What will be in store for the long term?
4. Will I be continuing this?
   

The answer to the first question is definitely a big NO!! The work to be done was so large scale, that I had to wake up till 3 am in the morning to complete the orders. All the $88 were the sweat of my brow and my hard work.
The answer to the second question is that after I handed over the articles to my clients, they were no longer mine. They were theirs. All my ideas and my content was not 'mine'. It was 'theirs'.
The answer to the third question is, As for now, I cannot see a bright future in this career as I can see the money coming, but only if I work continually. The industry offers lucrative money. So, in the short term you can make a lot of money, but no long term passive money is involved.

Will I be continuing this? Yes! I will be continuing this for the next few years till I make a good amount which I can invest in an online business or anything like that which can earn me some passive income at least $0.5 a day. This might look foolish, but when I take to write those articles, I have to research on the topic(15-20 minutes), write down the article(15-20) minutes and I get just $1.5 for writing 250 words and I have no rights over them. While, investing money on my blog and cashing on Adsense for at least $0.5 a day, will become $15 a month and $180 an year which is not a very big amount, but is passive money. In the long term we got to consider passive options(I am 20 and I want to retire by 40!)

Hope this helps to all who are still struggling to earn online. If you feel that you can write then go for it. Don't hesitate! The most wanted thing today without which no online business can stand is CONTENT! So GO FOR IT! I have seen many of them charge anywhere from $50 to $200/article, which is way too much than what I offered my services for. You can be one of them who can earn that much. Then for you that will be a good profession!

Email marketing-Is it worth the money invested in it???

Many of the web companies spend a hundreds of dollars on this cheap mode of marketing, i.e. Email marketing. They are mostly ad agencies who cunningly get email addresses of common web surfers through their websites often promising something very promising things.
But, as day by day, the common internet surfer has become very alert against spam, he/she has almost finished an era of this cheap marketing service.

Now why this once very popular type of marketing is turning into failure? One thing that has made that a failure is that many email providers restrict to affect their clients. To my observations many such emails go straight into the Junk or Spam folder, thus not convincing the clients to read those emails. Another reason to the failure of email marketing is the unwillingness of the people to read emails from unknown senders. Moreover stricter laws like a US law disallowing sending of more than 200 mails an hour or the sender may land in jail! Thus, those good old days are gone(you are in 2009!).

Bottomline is that DONT SPEND A DIME ON EMAIL MARKETING. Instead use services like Google Adwords to get targeted buyers and visitors.
Give me your 2 cents on this..

Get paid per click

I've just joined

1. Chitika
2. Adbrite
3. Bidvertiser
4. Infolinks
   

The first three are the most legitimate PPC ad networks and are the main alternatives to Google Adsense. Infolinks is a new one. Though I called them alternatives, that hardly means that they can not be used with Adsense. Yes! I can put all the 4 adverts on my blogs and hence generate more revenue. But putting all the codes on one blog might look ugly and many readers dislike this, thus increasing the blog's bounce rates. So, I have decided to test all the above adverts' performance on my newly created TechDynamite blog.
Now lets have an overview at what the above four have to offer;

1. Chitika: Started in 2007, it now already has a network of 50,000 publishers and many loyal advertisers. Many publishers have experienced putting the Chitika code along with Adsense, generates more revenue and does not have effect on the number of clicks on G-ads. These guys have many ad layouts and I used their 468x60 eminimalls banner for my Techdynamite blog. They pay $10 via Paypal and $50 via check. They do have a referral program(the link to Chitika is not my affiliate link). I will keep you all updated with how Chitika perform on my blog.
2. Adbrite: Adbrite is better for any blog and for those blogs who have a decent traffic, as they pay both for clicks and impressions(impressions only for banner ads). They pay $10 via Paypal and $50 via Check. The only thing that seems to be frustating is that most of the time they don't have relevant ads to show and while setting up zones on the site, each time you need to fill out the description forms for your site.
   
3. Bidvertiser: This is similar to Google adsense and seem to have almost the same types of advertisements Google have to offer for their publishers. They pay $10 via Paypal which is not the case with Adsense or they pay $50 via Check. (Update 19 July, 2009: Today Bidvertiser emailed me saying that they have launched a new referral program which is very lucrative. You can now get commissions to sign up people under you. Here's a quote from the email

   When a user signs as an advertiser and first spends $10, we'll credit your account with $5. When that same advertiser spends $50, you will be credited with an additional $20.
   
   When a user signs as a publisher and first earns $10, we'll credit your account with $10. When that same publisher earns $50, you will be credited with an additional $40.

   )
   
4. Infolinks: This new contextual advertisement service called Infolinks offers ads similar to Konterra. They claim to give away 70% of the advertising revenue back to publishers. The infolinks ads on my Techdynamite site are the ones with the texts double underlined.

There are many other such Adsense alternatives available like Digxa and Konterra, but its about the space that matters that they take on your sites. One solution to it is create multiple sites and try these income streams on them, again it is painful and costs you a lot of time.
I will keep you updated with how these monetization programs work for me and my blogs. So, it will be best if you subscribe to my RSS feed. That is how you will make money from home.

Get paid to upload Files

Oh! I am sorry that there could not be a post here for almost a week. I was actually working on my new blog TechDynamite and was busy writing content for it.
Today, I am going to mention some sites where you get to upload files and actually get paid when someone downloads those files.

Sharecash:
ShareCash offers unbelievable commission rate for every valid downloaded file. You can get between $0.30 - $0.60 per download from US and UK. You can increase your earnings by recruiting other people to join ShareCash using your unique referral ID.
Referral system:The referral program is lucrative and can get you 10% of your referral's money. (The link is not my referral link)
Payment: $10 via PayPal, ePassporte, Check
Pros: Good commission rates.
Cons:Only those people can download who answer their survey(Maybe they earn their income from these surveys) which comes in a popup without which you cannot download the file. So its only for US and UK citizens.

Ziddu:
I mentioned Ziddu in a post last month. They pay $10 for 10000 downloads of the file you upload.
Referral system:Ziddu rewards you with $0.10 per referral once they upload their first file on Ziddu. (The link is not my referral link)
Payment: $10 via PayPal, Moneybookers
Pros: Valid for all countries. All individuals can experience the premium benefits such as parallel downloads and zero waiting time limit for free
Cons: Very low commission rates.

Hotfile:
HotFile pays according to the size of the file you upload for downloading. The program is available worldwide and you get $0.005(5-50Mb), $0.007(50-100Mb) and $0.01(100-400Mb) per file download.
Referral systemHotfile pays you 20% of referral earnings (The link is not my referral link)
Payment: $15 via ePassporte, Paypal
Pros: Valid for all countries. Commission rates are decent.
Cons: Haven't yet found any.

Other similar types of programs are Bizhat.com, netload.in and Uploadjockey.com
I have uploaded my files to some of these sites and yet am waiting for the results. Stay updated with Junkamania as I will be sharing with you the results.

10 cool large size RSS icons

Since the day I have put a large RSS icon in my sidebar linking to my feed, my feed subscribers have increased. Today I am sharing with you 10 of the best large size RSS icons which I found around the web along with the sites of the artists. Enjoy these icons and feel free to share yours with the Junkamania readers here.



From 0at.org



This is the Smashy Alien RSS icon from Smashingmagazine. The Alien is a li'l shy to show his face.

<----ideal for music blogs



Look at the size of this superb 3D RSS icon.


These were 10 best large RSS icons around the web. If you want to share a link to more such RSS icons or want to share your work then feel free to do it via a comment.

Around the web in 80 seconds!!!

Oh!Well, well, well!!!
I have finally got rid of that all white The last 84 template and have come to this really cool and my personal favorite ads-blogger theme. This template is a three column template with a header banner and 3 125x125 boxes(I am selling them...Anyone interested???). But I got all my widgets back here; the Related Posts Widget, the Sexy Bookmark widget and yeah, the comment form...The footer looks messy but yes, will fix it soon.
Now, I have decided to mention, atleast once a week, what has happened in the Blogosphere, what have my fellow bloggers posted and stuff like that.
Well, this week, Sarah came up with a list of some free music offering sites. I should say, three cheers! Atleast, now we can listen to something not crap for free! Good job, Sarah.
Yaro Starak on his enterpreneurs-journey.com blog came with a lesson how the niche 'Making money' is risky and what are its cons, and concluded that the bloggers should first make money and then teach others to make money.
Henry Blodget of businessinsider.com blogs that internet giant Google is gonna launch an OS attacking Microsoft and Apple inc.
Well thats all for today, will post something nice tomorrow. Stay tuned. Bye..

Top 15 highest paying adsense keywords to make you money from home

Hello my dear readers! I have been working very hard for this very blog now and results are showing well. I have 8 RSS readers now(too less) and 12 Twitter followers. So, for me traffic thing is happening and I am getting it from various streams. From my recent surfing and searching all over the internet, I have found out some best paying Adsense keywords which can help you to make money from home. I posted a list of 10 at DP forums and they simply liked it. Here I am giving a list of 15 highest paying Adsense keywords.
Enjoy the list..

1. shop car insurance
2. loan consolidation student loans
3. online life assurance quotes
4. accident no win no fee
5. secured loans
6. insurance auto
7. get auto insurance online
8. cheap life assurance quote
9. tax attorneys los angeles
10. claim for whiplash
11. buy car insurance on line
12. scottsdale dui lawyer
13. tampa dui lawyers
14. dui phoenix arizona
15. claim solicitors
    

All these keywords have CPC higher than $50. That means you have got a chance to earn anything between $5-15 per click if you use these keywords wisely in your blog. Of course there is a fierce competition for these keywords...But hey!!!....if there is no competition, there is no fun. So, try these keywords to make maximum money from home through Google Adsense.

I have got many others on my hard drive, but I think of giving them in my first ebook. Hey! You don't have to worry. Its gonna be free. Remember??? I had also promised, I will give a list of 25 dofollow blogs with deep stats(PR, Alexa rank, etc.). I promise you that it will be worth reading. Plus, I am going to update you with my progress with it. So, to not miss that, PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO THE FEED!! I will personally send you another list of 5 dofollow blogs if you subcribe to email updates with your verified email. The Junkamania adventure has just begun.
Cheers!!!

15 PR4+ Free Web Directories where you should submit your blog to get one way backlinks

What I have learnt in this few days of blogging is that submission to various web directories is very important in Linkbuilding. While my dofollow blog commenting campaign for one way back links is on, I am also submitting my blog to various web directories for more one way links to this blog. So far I have submitted my site to over 30 web directories, but have included just PR4+ sites here. Enjoy!

1. dmoz.org PR8
2. lii.org PR8
3. geniousfind.com PR6
4. ezilon.com PR6
5. busybits.com PR6
6. netinsert.com PR5
7. jayde.com PR5
8. gimpsy.com PR5
9. info-listings.com PR5
10. canlinks.net PR5
11. skoobe.biz PR5
12. abilogic.com PR5
13. epooch.com PR5
14. zeezo.com PR4
15. cluboo.com PR4
    

Feel free to suggest more free web directories via commenting.

Give freebies to your readers

After writing a post on the importance of dofollow blog commenting in SEO, and checking forums and googling a lot, I have come to a conclusion that many of the webmasters are paying for dofollow blog lists. I even visited a thread in DP where a person(well settled in SEO business) was offering a list of 25 high pageranked dofollow blogs for a fee of 5 dollars.
That means that a dofollow blog list is in high demand for linkbuilding and the quest for a good pagerank.
Well, I have got an idea, which you can take as a tip, give freebies to your readers. Well, in the coming days I will be creating my first free ebook to thank all those who visit this new blog. It will contain a list of dofollow blogs with stats(pageranks and alexa and other stats) which you can then use for your linkbuilding campaign. Thats the way I can thank you all. Hope this little hardwork from my side will reap me some traffic.

How to make money from home by commenting on dofollow blogs

For the past few days, in order to boost the How to make money from home adventure, I have been studying Search Engine Optimisation and Link Building and many other things related to SEO.
One such thing related to SEO is 'dofollow' and 'nofollow'.
Actually these two terms are important when it comes to search engine rankings.
You must have read on many blogs that 'This blog is dofollow' or 'You DO I FOLLOW!' Now when they mean that their blogs are 'dofollow'? They actually mean that you, as a visitor and your blog can gain some link love from their blogs. In other words 'One way back linking'. One way back links are very important as far as Search Engine rankings are concerned and helps in traffic growth thus helping to make money from home.

How does your blog benefit from dofollow blogs?
Simple! The search engine spiders(robots) crawl each day for some new content on blogs and when they crawl such dofollow blogs(I assume them to be indexed well in the search engines), they crawl through the comments too. If the comments contain your blog links, then the bots obviously crawls through your links and thus you get some page rank juice from the dofollow blogs.

But, if it is gonna be one way linking, then why do such blogs do follow your blog?
The answer is that this encourages visitors like you to stop by and comment on the posts of those blogs. To avoid spamming they mostly enable Comment moderation.

Why do some of them use 'nofollow'?
Now as you know, many of the high page rank blogs offer to place text links in their blogs for some fee. These links are also called 'Paid links'. Google discourages selling text links. The reason for this is that bots of search engines like Google crawl through such links, thus helping them rank higher in search engines. Hence Google encourages the use of nofollow tags in the hyperlinking.

How to make your blog 'dofollow'?
For bloggers who use blogspot.com, to make your blog a dofollow blog you need to remove the nofollow attribute.

• Go to your blogger Dashboard.
• Under the Layout tab, go to Edit HTML
• Check 'Expand widgets'
• Search for the following code

  rel='nofollow'

• Remove this code however times you search it in your template.
  
• Save your template.

Now your blog is a 'dofollow' blog. I would recommend to enable Comment moderation so that your Comments don't get spammed by spammers.
Best of Luck for your Link Building mission and making money from home and don't forget to comment here. This blog is dofollow. You will get a link back from this blog if you do so.

How to make money from home by placing google ads under the post title and in the post footer

I have seen many websites where Google ads are placed somewhere down the site, into the footer or some isolated place in the sidebar or somewhere in the header and so on. Such sites have a low CTR(click through rate) and hence they don't earn the money that they deserve for their hard work.
The most visible areas of a site, mainly blogs are its contents or posts. So how will it be if the google ads are placed right beneath the title and above the content or in the post footer?- yes! These are the most visible places and many of them have experienced high click through rates after placing the ads in these positions and learnt an easy way of how to make money from home.
I have been playing with my template for the past few days and in the process learnt many things. Today I am going to share with you how to place your ads, may it be your Google ads or your Chitika ads or Adbrite or any other ads in such places which are more visible to your visitors.
This tutorial is going to teach you how to place your google ads right beneath your post title and above the contents of the post.

For this you need the following tools:
1)Computer(kidding!hehe!)
2)Online Code converter

Now do the following:

1. Login to your Adsense account and go for ad setup, set up your ad according to your like, I recommend the large rectangle layout(336x280) for ads as it contains 4 links. I also recommend you to design the colors of the ad as it will match your template colors.
   
2. Once your ad is setup and ready for use click to get the code for it.
3. Use the code Converter tool at eblogtemplates to convert your code to XML format which can be easily parsed by Blogger templates. The reason is that the code generated by Google adsense is in the Javascript format.
   

Now backup your existing template by clicking on 'Download Full Template' since if you mess with it you can revert to it any time later.


Now in your "Edit HTML' under 'Layout', check 'expand widgets'.
The next thing you will do is search for the following code in your template. You can use CTRL+F.

<div class='post-header-line-1'/>

beneath this line paste your converted code you got from the Code Converter.
Now save the template and check your blog.

After I did the above I saw the following on my blog.

You can see the ads between the title and the post content.

Now because according to Adsense TOS, you can place only 3 google ad codes on your blog, only 3 of your posts will be having the ads on your homepage, the rest of the posts will show a white space between the title and the content. But as mostly, the search engines send your visitors to your internal pages, so I don't think there's going to be a problem. Remember you can place 3 ad links too on your blog along with the 3 ad boxes.

Another visible place where you can get more clicks for your google ads is between the post content and the comment form or the comments, in other words, at the end of your articles or in more simple words 'the post footer'.

This can be achieved by the same method above. You just need to find the following code in your template.

<div class='post-footer'/>

And then paste the google ad code you converted by the Code Converter right beneath this code.
Your ad will appear beneath the post content but above the Comments.

My suggestion is that to maximise your earnings and to cope up with the Google adsense limit of 3 ad boxes, you can place Chitika or Adbrite advertisements(or any other ad code which can be simultaneously placed with Adsense ads) in the post footer.

Feel free to ask questions and I will also appreciate feedback from you my dear readers.
Hope you learnt another way of how to make money from home.

How to make money from home-An Experiment in SEO

Your site is ranked on top search engines according to the volume of keywords repeated on your site. If you stuff those keywords between 15-20% of your total content there is a high chance of ranking higher for those keywords.
I read someone mentioning this and thought how can it help this site. As you all know that I am competing for the keywords 'how to make money from home' and from the above screenshot you can see that there are already 171,000,000 competitors for this keyword, more than those competing for 'how to make money online'. Now to rank higher for this keyword, I need to stuff up my posts(in other words 'optimize') with this keyword, stuff it up with my titles and so on, which is surely going to trouble my reader's experiences but will increase my rankings on Google. 15-20% is surely going to kill my reader's experience. But I think that repeating the keywords just twice in a post can also help my search engine rankings. So, I won't fill 20% of my posts with the words 'how to make money from home', but will repeat it just twice in every post. Surely, it will be an experiment to check whether such efforts can take this site to the first page or not.

When I searched for this keyword on Google, I could not find any of the sites, at least on the first page , containing the keyword on their sites. So from now on my every post will contain this phrase-'how to make money from home' for which I have a good chance. What do you say?

Get paid to post at Postparker and Ezihippo

Today I was searching for more income streams for boosting my earnings, where I came across some paying sites.
The first one which I am going to introduce to you is Postparker which is a simple paid to post forum still in its initial stages. The admin of the forum promises to pay 1 to 7 cents per post according to the quality of the postings you make to the discussions. Postparker is a sure competitor to Mylot in earnings but lacks entertainment quality which only Mylot can offer. The payment is done through paypal with the payout being $10. They are going to pay through Moneybookers soon. The best thing about Postparker is the referral system, where 30% of your referral earnings are paid to you. That means if your referral reaches his payout of $10, you get $3 in your account...passive income! The forum is new and has only an odd 2500 members right now, so chances are that you may get many referrals from now on, supplementing your income.
The banner below is my referral banner and clicking it will sign you up under me. So, if you want to help Junkamania, then please join by clicking the banner.

Another site which is a social networking site and seems to be a competitor to MyLot is Ezihippo, which pays to you to actively participate in their discussions, uploading pictures, rating pictures, etc. It is by some people rated better than MyLot due to their even better entertainment quality and better payments. I am a member there but not an active one, so I don't yet think of promoting it unless I am part of it. You can check the site http://ezihippo.com.

June summary of Junkamania

It is the begining of a new month and its sad to tell you that June was a bit slow and this blog was not updated like it should have been. For that thing I do apologize and look forward to do regular updates from now on.
The past month was a special month for me as well as my blog.
For this blog:
1)Quality posts.
2)Two authorities from Technorati
3)A guest post to a friend's blog with a backlink to this blog
4)Technorati ranking jump by 3,00,000 spaces(still can't believe it!)
For me:
1)Got my B.Sc. degree in Mahematics(not related to this blog!hehe!)
2)Gave a shot to writing at Triond and Bukisa.
3)More sources of income found for this blog.
There were some bad things though like the contest started a few days ago did not have a success so I had to remove the widget. That might be because of the following reasons:
1)Site is indexed but not ranked.
2)There was no prize money.

Though this post should have been more of my income summary, I however cannot post any progress in my income from this blog, but should tell you that earned anywhere around $2.00 which is not a good amount I know!
However looking forward for your participation and support.
Cheers!