MoneyMakin’Guru.com

Hey guys, Fuser over at digital point sent me these banners for free.

So which, of all three do you like the most? Please let me know, because the one with the most votes will be the one I use.

Thanks,

Zach

Hey! I hope you guys like the idea of this whole week. It is going to be dedicated to getting traffic to your site. Today I am going to go over one of my favorite sources of traffic, EntreCard. If you are not familiar with EntreCard feel free to go to their website and join, it is free. I have written 10 tips to get traffic from Entrecard. Enjoy!

1.DROP! Well, I guess you could have guessed that, but did you know there are actually some tips inside the tip. First, use a credit generator, like this one. This will help you make over 300 credits in 5 minutes. It is very helpful considering it would usually take me around half an hour to complete 300 drops. Next, make sure you are dropping on active users of EntreCard. Also drop on new users, they will see that you are active, and they will drop on your blog.

2.Advertise! Not as obvious as the last one, but still pretty basic. After doing the step above you should have over 300 credits. 300 credits should be enough for you to buy roughly 50 ad spaces in your niche. I usually spend half the credits on the cheapest blogs, and the other 150 credits on a more popular blog. You may be surprised to see that some of the cheapest blogs have over 500 subscribers, and a large PageRank.

3.Get a sexy ad. Ok, this one is the lest obvious so far. I have a question for all of my male readers out there. When you see a good looking lady, do you A.Stare at her B.Ignore her or C.Take a look at her. Ding Ding Ding! C was the right answer, of course you take a look at her. So why would that not be the same when it comes to EntreCard? I am not suggesting you put a good looking lady on your widget but more or less saying it should be original, and it should draw attention.

4.Make sure your widget is near the top of the page. When a potential advertiser sees your widget at the top of the page he will most likely buy it, but if he saw the widget at the bottom of the page he probally wouldn’t buy it. Also keeping your widget at the top of the page helps when people drop their cards, they don’t have to look around your blog to find it.

5.Get involved. The community forum is a great place to get to know the community, and earn major credits. In the marketing section of the forum there is a daily reedit/Digg exchange. Where everyone that submits there link to Digg and or Reedit gets there post Dugg/Reed. Also many people post things like “50 credits for a Digg.” Doing simple things like this will build up your credits.

6.Thank your advertisers for advertising on your blog. This is one of the nicest things you can do. Telling them you appreciate them spending their credits to advertise on your blog. This means a lot to people not only through EntreCard.

7.Watch your statistics. find out which ads are working and which ads are not. If your ad on JohnChow.com is working well continue advertising there. But if your ad on jermey789456.blogspot.com is not working don’t continure buying it.

8. Write a post about EntreCard. This in return will make “droppers” stop and read about the post. This means a lower bounce rate, and more returning traffic, if they like the article. Writing about EntreCard will make EntreCard grow, which, in return will bring you more and more credits, via new “droppers”.

9.Join contests. Not only can contests give you lots of credits, they also bring you exposure. There are a lot of people on the EntreCard forums looking to get you to join their contests.

Go do all the steps I said above, and tonight when you look in analytics you will be happy to see over 50 visitors from EntreCard. Look forward to my post tomorrow about Gaining traffic via offline advertising.

Hey guys, just got this baby whipped up for $12. Let me know your opinion.

So what do you think?

Now onto the real deal. Where to advertise, I am thinking of spending $20 a week for this whole month, but I am willing to spend extra. Next week I am going to buy a 1 month ad space on the net kid. From then on I am lost on were to advertise. Any suggestions are appreciated, and yes, BlogBadly.com is one of the blogs I am considering.

Thanks,
Zach

Hey guys, sorry for not writing yesterday, I was just supper busy with other things. It happens. Anyway today I am going to go over private ad sales.

Selling ads on Digital Point is one of my favorite things to do, but many people really don’t know how to sell their ad space.

Determining a price:

When you look at your website you have to chose how much it is worth to you. When I first started this blog I valued it at my hosting and domain name cost. This happened to be around $70. So I said to myself what is the least amount of money I can sell my ad spaces for, $.20 a week. This meant if I sold out all 3 spaces I would make $.60 a week. Not much at all. But the spaces did sell, and the site grew, and so did the advertising prices.

Tips on how to sell:

Now you see how I raised prices, but how do you find someone to sell it to. My favorite place to sell my ad space is Digital Point. On DP make a thread in the Buy Sell Trade section. Make it something catchy like Cheap advertising on a great site with 15k unique visitors a month. Something that will drive attention. Make the prices higher then you would normally sell the space for and then once you get some potential buyers lower the price for them and say it is a special deal. Small things like that should increase ad sales. Another thing ad buyers like are non rotational ads. This means that there ad will not be rotated between other ads for the same spot.

Hopefully you can use what I have taught you to sell some of your ad space.

Thanks,

Zach

About 3 days ago I changed some of my ads around. I got rid of the top banner, some Adsense underneath the header, a few 125×125 banner ads, and I moved my banner ad position. But the big thing that has turned out to make me the most money was putting my Adsense ads where my banner ads used to be. Doing this has brought me over $9.00 in 2 days. Which, is very good for me. Consider this, when I had Adsense ads underneath the header I was making $.20 a day. Now I am making 20 times that. This is a great thing for the site, this means I will cover costs without using payed posts, or any other annoying thing like that.

A boost in subscribers.

I have been working hard at gaining subscribers, and finally they are coming. For the first time Money Makin Guru has over 20 subscribers. I am looking forward to seeing this number skyrocket in the coming days. I really hope you guys enjoy what I am posting, and if you don’t just post a comment saying what you want me to write about.

First Adsense Check + others.

At the end of this month I should be receiving two or three checks. One is from Google for $12 and one is from AdToll, I think for $4.50. Not very happy with how AdToll is working, but I have started doing their affiliate program, and that could bring in some nice money.

Well guys, hope you liked the update. Talk to you guys later. Also go check out my new Adsense blog.(the $500 challenge blog.) To make it more interesting I am only going to use videos, it should be pretty hard, but fun. Go check it out here.

Have you ever seen that show, Flip this House? I have. If you haven’t seen the show it is about different investors who buy houses, redo them, and then sell them. They buy the house at a price they are willing to pay, then they restore the house without going over budget, (most of the time the budget is $45k) then they resell the house for much more than what they spent to buy and redo the house. This technique of making money can also be used on the internet. Today I am going to go through the 3 steps to flipping a website.

1. Go to Digital Point Forums, or any other large webmaster forum and buy a website. Remember, do not go over budget. Find a website that has potential to be something. Do not just choose the first offer you get inside your budget. When you are buying your site disregard the fact that the site doesn’t have traffic, that doesn’t come into play.

2. Once you have your site you should get straight to work. First you should go install the plugin, XdForum, XdForum is a forum plugin that will give your blog a forum. This ads value to the website. This should only take a matter of seconds, maybe minutes, but seconds for me. Then you should get find a cool, fresh Wordpress theme. One of my favorite places to get WP themes is Wordpress Theme Designer. You can get cool templates to put on your site. Next put up some Google Adsense, maybe even a private ad, and maybe, if your in the mood one original article. ( you should preferably buy a site that has 2+ articles.)

3. Go back to Digital Point, or any other webmaster forum and sell your site. When you go to sell your site make sure the title is catchy, not dull. Even BS, say the site will be able to re-sell again for a much higher prices, something like that. Then start the thread, but don’t start the bidding at $15, start it at $.01. This will attract a lot of visitors, and it will keep your thread near the top of the forum because many people are bidding. And one last tip, make sure you sell the site for more than you bought it for!

Some other tips about flipping sites are, make sure your reserve is double or even triple what you bought the site for. Post the auction on many different forums to get more eyes on it. If someone offers you $35 and your reserve is $40 do not accept his offer, even if you would be making a profit. Never underestimate the value of your website, becasue some one out there is willing to pay what you want them to pay.

Thanks,

Zach

Today marks the first day of my challenge to make $500 with a blogger blog. I am doing this challenge to see if blogger blogs can actually make money. I am not 100% what niche I am going to chose, but I think it make have something to do with gasoline. I wonder why? Anyway, I am only going to try to make the money with Google Adsense. This may or may not work. But if I can get an average of $2.50 a day I would be very happy. I will update you guys everyday, or every other day. Look forward to another post later were I will go into how I will make the money. But right now I am very busy.

Thanks,

Zach

Whenever you see a contest you always look at the prizes. Then you look at what you have to do to enter. Have you ever thought if the contest was worth entering?

Most contest require you to subscribe via e-mail, other contest require you to write a post on your site about it. Subscribing via e-mail is nothing. But writing a post linked to the contest page is worth something. On my site it is worth $7.50, on Tyler Cruz it is worth $140. So is the contest worth entering if you have to write a post about it? For me yes, unless the prize is valued at less than $7.50. But for Tyler Cruz it may not be worth entering. Say the prize is an I Pod. ( not trying to say that my prize is.) The I Pod is worth $225. Tyler Cruz’s post is worth $140 so he is making $85, if he wins. Money Makin Guru’s post is worth $7.50 so he is making $217.50, if he wins. ( and no I did not use a calculator to do the math.) The risk for me is not much, $7.50. But the risk for a bigger blog, Tyler Cruz is fairly large considering that he doesn’t have a great chance to win.

You should always consider what you put into the contest before you enter. Because sometimes you could be the one losing money.

Yesterday you hit your all time high in visitors, now you are thinking how do I sustain these numbers for ever. For this post we are going to be using my statistics, and my strategy on how to keep those high statistics forever.

Over the 2 and a half months I have been blogging here on MoneyMakinGuru the highest number of visitors in one day is 189. Most of the bigger blogs sustain numbers over 189, but most of the smaller blogs, like mine, cannot sustain large amounts of visitors. Here are three ways I sustained my statistics.

1. Look for a source, when I got 189 visitors a lot of them were from digital point. So I looked back on digital point and noticed I had a fairly popular thread. This lead to numerous people clicking on the link to MoneyMakinGuru in my signature. I also noticed a lot of traffic came from Teen Business Forum. The day before my traffic boost I signed up for Teen Business Forum, signing up and posting with my signature lead to more visitors.

2. Keeping the content fresh, back at the beginning of MMG I was posting every other day. I soon realized that the days I wasn’t posting articles, I was posting all time lows in traffic. So writing everyday was the only way to go. I for one check blogs numerous times a day to look for new content, but most blogs write every other day. Posting everyday will help you sustain a large amount of traffic because readers will come back to see what is fresh everyday.

3. Making sure the word is out, at the very beginning of MMG I was commenting on other blogs. This lead to back links, and more visitors. On the day I had 189 visitors a large portion of them came from a comment on Shoemoney. The comment just so happened to be first, so many people got to see the comment, plus the link to my site. That day I had around 35 visitors just from Shoemoney. Commenting on other blogs is worthwhile, it may be tedious but it is one of the most effective ways to keep great traffic stats.

Thanks,

Zach

This is something that for a long time I thought didn’t go into play. But yesterday I realized that many people think it is cool, or even amazing about what I am doing with this website. So I thought to myself why not exploit the fact that I am 12. (1 1/2 months until I am 13!) Why not show my readers and visitors the stuff that I do at a young age? This is a good idea, maybe even a great one, but how in hell do you accomplish this?

1. Keywords, in every keyword have it somewhere say young, or kid, and money. This will help my search engine rankings for different key words.

2. Social bookmarking, like twitter, which I just started. (go follow me here!)  Also Blog Catalog, and Digg drive moderate amounts of traffic to the site. Hopefully now that I am going to be using my age more, more traffic will come from Blog Catalog. (Age doesn’t matter as much on Digg because people are just looking for quality articles.)

3. Directories, submitting to hundreds of hundreds of directories may not bring you traffic, but it will build back links. Another thing Directories do is expose you blog, and help you with various keywords. Technorati is a blog directory that helps drive traffic to the site, you can become a fan of my blog on Technorati here.

4. Forums, on all forums you have a signature. In my signature I have a link to the site. But instead of just my link I am going to have a link that says “A 12 year olds quest to becoming the money makin guru” Hopefully something like this will drive more traffic to the site.

5. Advertising, when I first drew out my ad I just wanted it to say MoneyMakinGuru.com in cool font. Now, after some re-thinking with my grandfather and father I have drawn up an ad that is catchy and interesting that again draws peoples attention because of my age. The main idea of the ad is now my age, then the site. Not the site, and then my age. Doing something like this will surely draw more attention then just having the blog url.

You guys should be looking out for me. Because I am coming, full speed, and I am not going to slow down any time soon.