I said in my first post that among other things, I will try to create a website that offers something for free and ask for donations (there are a lot of websites that operate this way).
I chose to offer for free a musical game, which I have already semi-developed in the past.
The concept is that you train your ear whilst playing a game.
So I took the game, fixed it up a bit, created more levels and more creatures and put in on a website, which you can see in this link: MusicGame.
I could have chosen anything to offer for free, I chose the game only because it was half completed (and because I liked it).
I used a free hosting service and wrote the website with pure HTML, which really doesn't require you to know too much (you do need basic HTML knowledge, but the web has plenty of helpful articles).
I used free segments of HTML codes, such as code for the website template, code for the images gallery and code for the guestbook.
I created a sample video of the game using the free software CamStudio, which also gave me html code to show the video on the website.
I uploaded the game files to the server and put a link to download the game, I put a donation button which I got from a free tool by PayPal.
So now that my website was ready, content wise, the next thing in order was to put ads.
I wanted to put different sorts of ads so I could compare between them, and see which ad is the most profitable.
The first ads I chose were Google Adsense, which are by far the most popular at the moment in the web advertising business. Their ads are automatically tuned to be relevant to your website content (context sensitive). You get money when somebody clicks on their ads (with some of the ads, you get money even when somebody views the ads). Also, you can put a custom Google search bar in your website, and you get money if somebody clicks on one of the sponsored ads as a result from a search.
Another major players are AdBrite, you put banners in your website and they select what to put in the banners (you have the ability to refuse specific ads). What I really liked about them is that you can instruct them to use a different ads network for this banner (such as Google Adsense) if the maximum profit they expect you will make is less than a certain amount that you input. There is an agreed measure for expected profit which is named eCPM. Google Adsense updates your eCPM constantly in your account, so you can see your expected profit.
I used this information in the following manner:
First, I put the Google Adsense ads on the website and after a few days I checked the eCPM in my account. I then replaced some of the Google Adsense ads with AdBrite ads, with the instruction to replace those with the Google ads if the AdBrite ads will make less profit than the Google eCPM.
If you'll enter my website, you'll see that for now, the Google Adsense ads are the viewable ads, but this can change if AdBrite will find more profitable ads.
Besides ads that you get paid if anybody views/clicks on them, there are different types of ads that you can put on your website and you will get money only if the person that clicked on the ads ended up buying products from the advertising website. You will get a certain percent commission from that purchase.
In this category, I chose to use Amazon, the famous online store which offers to put their product ads in your website, and if people ending up buying that product, you will get a profit from 4% to 8.5% of that purchase (depends of the number of buyers you referred).
You choose which products to offer on your website, and there is a large variety of products to offer (you also get all the information about the products popularity).
Other ads in this category are ClickBank ads, there is also a large variety of products to choose from and for each one there is a different percentage that you will get for every purchase, and you can easily find products that you will get a 60% and even 70% commission.
Another form of advertising I decided to use (last one), is with UCash, they take your links (the ones that you choose) and turn them to an ad, which you can skip (or wait a few seconds) and only then you will get to the link destination. You can see an example by pressing on this link which will eventually take you to my website. I only used these ads for external links; it seemed too much to use them on internal links.
There are other forms of ads which I chose to avoid using, although they could be more profitable, but I find them too aggressive and I honestly don't like them.
So, as for now, these are the only ads that I put on my website, so the next stage for me is to promote the website in various ways, this is maybe the hardest thing to do in this business, and I will post about my experiments later on. It is definitely a whole new world to explore.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Making money from watching ads online, is it possible?
Ok, I must say, at first it didn't sound reasonable to me at all.
My thought was:
"How can you make money from it? If the website that shows the ads pays the viewers,
and if the advertised websites pay this website, it means that the advertised websites are planning on making more money than the money they paid.
Which means, probably the viewers ate tempted from the ads and they end up buying for more money than they have been paid for, even though these are the same people that want to earn money? It just doesn't add up...."
Well, it's not exactly like that.
After a little research on the subject, I reached the conclusion that the websites that pay for being advertised don't expect to get their profit from the ads viewers themselves, it is just the tactics that they use to get more clicks on their websites, thus increase the traffic in the website, which will do two things:
1. It will improve their position in the search engines, which will bring a lot more people to their website, then they will be able to sell more.
2. By increasing the traffic, the website will earn more from advertising.
And this is how this oiled money machine keeps on working.
Good, now that I am clearer on the concept that potentially maybe I can really get paid, I decided to give it a go and see if it really works. There are many many websites that offer to pay you for clicking on ads (they are called PTC websites), and I did another little research to find out which ones are worth registering into.
And so it turns out there a lot of scams out there (surprise!), there are a lot of websites that promise to pay, but they use several tricks so they don't have to pay, the most common one is that a website exists for a short period of time and after you click on ads for a period of time, before getting your money the website suddenly "disappears", and you have no one to turn to.
Another trick is that when you click on a certain ad, suddenly your account in this website is erased and all the money you earned is gone.
But, there are a lot of websites that do pay, and I registered into websites that are considered as reliable and paying regularly.
The websites are divided mostly into ones that pay you through PayPal, and ones that pay you through AlertPay, that you can register via this link, and is just another internet bank account that is free to use.
Ok, so I registered to these websites, and here is the amount of money I made during the first day from each one (in dollars):
ClixSense- 0.01
BuxOut- 0.04
ClickersUnion- 0.0135
MeansBux- 0.06
PPClix- 0.05
EllaBugClicks- 0.02795
BuxP- 0.113
AdverCash- 0.005
TheClickers- 0.0275
Cash-Harvest- 0.0158
NeoBux- 0.04
BombLogic- 0.06
PerformanceBux- 0.02
NewBux4U- 0.02
ClixOfChange- 0.0048
Hits4Pay- 10
In total it comes to 10.50755$.
However, if remove the sign-up bonuses that some of these websites give, it adds up to about
0.4$, so if I want to calculate my expected income from this, assuming my daily income is 0.4$, my weekly income is 2.8$, and my monthly income is 11.2$.
This income is nice, but if I take into account that PayPal and AlertPay take commissions,
and some of the money will go to taxes (I'm not sure about that, I am planning on researching on it and posting), the practical monthly income will be less than 11.2$, let's say about 9$.
Now, I'm going to take this one step further, and presume that I can perform all of my daily clicks within 30 minutes, it turns out that I'm working 14 hours a month for 9$, which means I get on average less than 1$ per hour, which is less from every other existing job on the market.
So, it means that if this was the end of it, I would honestly say that it's not worth your while unless you're bored, or if you enjoy clicking on ads...
But, the people that make money from this business, claim that most of the money is being made from people that they referred to these websites. All of these websites offer you money for referring people, in the following manner:
For each ad that a person you referred clicked, he gets all the money for this ad and you will get X% for this ad (the X is different for each website).
Now, I can assume that the average of this X% is approximately 40%, which means that if you referred 20 people (for instance, if 20 people will read this blog and click on the links above and register, which means that they will be referred by me), and if these 20 people will do the same amount of work which I did, each of them will get 9$, and you will get your 9$ + the 40% of their profit, which turns out 81$!
I still do the same work (14 hours a month), but now my income for one hour of work is 5.8$, which is nicer...
Theoretically, I can stop clicking at this point and get 72$ a month without working for it at all!
But then, the people who referred me will get less money, and that's not fair....
Now, imagine you can reach 100 referrals (and some people have thousand and more referrals), and it turns out you will make 369$ a month, and the income per hour of work will be 26.4$, which sounds pretty good to me :)
So, theoretically, there is a lot of money to be made in this business, I'm going to try and refer as many people as I can, and we'll see if it really works. I will of course update on this issue in future posts, what I did, how many people I referred (if any at all), and how much money it earned me.
I will also post on other alternatives to making money that I'm trying, or am going to try.
Well, it turned up a bit long, but I had a lot to say...
My thought was:
"How can you make money from it? If the website that shows the ads pays the viewers,
and if the advertised websites pay this website, it means that the advertised websites are planning on making more money than the money they paid.
Which means, probably the viewers ate tempted from the ads and they end up buying for more money than they have been paid for, even though these are the same people that want to earn money? It just doesn't add up...."
Well, it's not exactly like that.
After a little research on the subject, I reached the conclusion that the websites that pay for being advertised don't expect to get their profit from the ads viewers themselves, it is just the tactics that they use to get more clicks on their websites, thus increase the traffic in the website, which will do two things:
1. It will improve their position in the search engines, which will bring a lot more people to their website, then they will be able to sell more.
2. By increasing the traffic, the website will earn more from advertising.
And this is how this oiled money machine keeps on working.
Good, now that I am clearer on the concept that potentially maybe I can really get paid, I decided to give it a go and see if it really works. There are many many websites that offer to pay you for clicking on ads (they are called PTC websites), and I did another little research to find out which ones are worth registering into.
And so it turns out there a lot of scams out there (surprise!), there are a lot of websites that promise to pay, but they use several tricks so they don't have to pay, the most common one is that a website exists for a short period of time and after you click on ads for a period of time, before getting your money the website suddenly "disappears", and you have no one to turn to.
Another trick is that when you click on a certain ad, suddenly your account in this website is erased and all the money you earned is gone.
But, there are a lot of websites that do pay, and I registered into websites that are considered as reliable and paying regularly.
The websites are divided mostly into ones that pay you through PayPal, and ones that pay you through AlertPay, that you can register via this link, and is just another internet bank account that is free to use.
Ok, so I registered to these websites, and here is the amount of money I made during the first day from each one (in dollars):
ClixSense- 0.01
BuxOut- 0.04
ClickersUnion- 0.0135
MeansBux- 0.06
PPClix- 0.05
EllaBugClicks- 0.02795
BuxP- 0.113
AdverCash- 0.005
TheClickers- 0.0275
Cash-Harvest- 0.0158
NeoBux- 0.04
BombLogic- 0.06
PerformanceBux- 0.02
NewBux4U- 0.02
ClixOfChange- 0.0048
Hits4Pay- 10
In total it comes to 10.50755$.
However, if remove the sign-up bonuses that some of these websites give, it adds up to about
0.4$, so if I want to calculate my expected income from this, assuming my daily income is 0.4$, my weekly income is 2.8$, and my monthly income is 11.2$.
This income is nice, but if I take into account that PayPal and AlertPay take commissions,
and some of the money will go to taxes (I'm not sure about that, I am planning on researching on it and posting), the practical monthly income will be less than 11.2$, let's say about 9$.
Now, I'm going to take this one step further, and presume that I can perform all of my daily clicks within 30 minutes, it turns out that I'm working 14 hours a month for 9$, which means I get on average less than 1$ per hour, which is less from every other existing job on the market.
So, it means that if this was the end of it, I would honestly say that it's not worth your while unless you're bored, or if you enjoy clicking on ads...
But, the people that make money from this business, claim that most of the money is being made from people that they referred to these websites. All of these websites offer you money for referring people, in the following manner:
For each ad that a person you referred clicked, he gets all the money for this ad and you will get X% for this ad (the X is different for each website).
Now, I can assume that the average of this X% is approximately 40%, which means that if you referred 20 people (for instance, if 20 people will read this blog and click on the links above and register, which means that they will be referred by me), and if these 20 people will do the same amount of work which I did, each of them will get 9$, and you will get your 9$ + the 40% of their profit, which turns out 81$!
I still do the same work (14 hours a month), but now my income for one hour of work is 5.8$, which is nicer...
Theoretically, I can stop clicking at this point and get 72$ a month without working for it at all!
But then, the people who referred me will get less money, and that's not fair....
Now, imagine you can reach 100 referrals (and some people have thousand and more referrals), and it turns out you will make 369$ a month, and the income per hour of work will be 26.4$, which sounds pretty good to me :)
So, theoretically, there is a lot of money to be made in this business, I'm going to try and refer as many people as I can, and we'll see if it really works. I will of course update on this issue in future posts, what I did, how many people I referred (if any at all), and how much money it earned me.
I will also post on other alternatives to making money that I'm trying, or am going to try.
Well, it turned up a bit long, but I had a lot to say...
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
The journey begins
Welcome!
Due to the recent economical crisis in the world, the company that I worked for (as a programmer) has collapsed...
So now that I have some free time, I decided to use it by trying to get money from the internet.
I intend to document all of my attempts of making money and to write down the exact sums of money I gather from each alternative I try.
This is going to be an interesting experiment for me, and I hope that you will be able to benefit from this as well.
It's important to say that my attempts will be focused on creating a passive income.
For those of you who are not familiarized with the concept, a passive income is an income that you need to put an initial effort in order to achieve it, but once you have it, you will get it on a regular basis without needing to work for it again (except maybe for a small amount of time dedicated to maintenance) . A classic example of a passive income is one that is made by renting apartments.
Ok, now that the purpose of this blog is somewhat clear (I hope), I will review all of the alternatives that I thought of trying in order to make money (some of them I have already started to try), and I will report later on about this options and what I managed to achieve from each of these options:
* Using websites that offer you money for clicking on ads.
* Using websites that offer you money for answering surveys.
* Selling a product (or in my case, software) in a website.
* Offering software for free in a website and asking for a donation.
* Selling software via a third party (such as eBay).
* Writing articles/blogs for money.
* Getting money for advertising in websites.
If I will come up with more stuff, I will add it later on.
If you have an idea, or if you know of another option to make money, please respond and I will consider of trying them also, just note that I intentionally avoided stocks, exchange markets, etc because I want to try only risk-free options.
Well, anyway, all of these options will require the ability to receive money, I did this by opening a PayPal account (for free), you can do this by clicking on this link: https://www.paypal.com/
So that's it, I'm ready to start, and I will report later on.
Wish me luck!
Due to the recent economical crisis in the world, the company that I worked for (as a programmer) has collapsed...
So now that I have some free time, I decided to use it by trying to get money from the internet.
I intend to document all of my attempts of making money and to write down the exact sums of money I gather from each alternative I try.
This is going to be an interesting experiment for me, and I hope that you will be able to benefit from this as well.
It's important to say that my attempts will be focused on creating a passive income.
For those of you who are not familiarized with the concept, a passive income is an income that you need to put an initial effort in order to achieve it, but once you have it, you will get it on a regular basis without needing to work for it again (except maybe for a small amount of time dedicated to maintenance) . A classic example of a passive income is one that is made by renting apartments.
Ok, now that the purpose of this blog is somewhat clear (I hope), I will review all of the alternatives that I thought of trying in order to make money (some of them I have already started to try), and I will report later on about this options and what I managed to achieve from each of these options:
* Using websites that offer you money for clicking on ads.
* Using websites that offer you money for answering surveys.
* Selling a product (or in my case, software) in a website.
* Offering software for free in a website and asking for a donation.
* Selling software via a third party (such as eBay).
* Writing articles/blogs for money.
* Getting money for advertising in websites.
If I will come up with more stuff, I will add it later on.
If you have an idea, or if you know of another option to make money, please respond and I will consider of trying them also, just note that I intentionally avoided stocks, exchange markets, etc because I want to try only risk-free options.
Well, anyway, all of these options will require the ability to receive money, I did this by opening a PayPal account (for free), you can do this by clicking on this link: https://www.paypal.com/
So that's it, I'm ready to start, and I will report later on.
Wish me luck!
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