It all depends on your perspective.  First, if you have your own eBook, an eBook cover will help sales.  Studies show that having an image of something tangible will boost your sales significantly.  Actually, the qualifier on that is that the image has to look good.  If it looks like garbage, it can hurt sales.  So the first way to profit is if you have your own eBook and you add a cover graphic to your sales page.

The second way is to refer people to my new eBook!  :)  I have recently created an eBook that gives step-by-step instructions on how to create an eBook cover using FREE software.  (Most of the programs out there that make covers require Photoshop, which costs $300…and the programs themselves cost an additional $50 to $100.)  So we compiled a detailed walkthrough on how to use GIMP (free open source graphics software) to create those cool-looking covers.  You can see some examples here: Make eBook Covers.

So how does that help you profit?  Simple!  You can refer people to a product that has its own niche.  (It’s much cheaper than any other solution to get the professional-looking quality.)  And you DON’T need an affiliate account with Clickbank or anywhere else.  All you need is a PayPal address.  Then you can refer people who could use this kind of book to:

http://www.makeebookcovers.com/?e=NAME@PAYPALADDRESS.COM

…only you replace the NAME@PAYPALADDRESS.COM with the email address that you use to receive PayPal payments.  That essentially is your affiliate ID.

I give you 50% of the sales from your affiliate ID. The way it works is this:  For the first purchase made from your ID, you get 100% of the sale.  I get 100% of the second, you get the third, I get the fourth, etc.

There is NO WAITING.  When someone you refer clicks the button to buy, the system determines which of us gets that payment, and it goes directly into your PayPal account when it’s your turn.  No accumulation of sales to a minimum amount and then waiting for a check.    You get the payment right away.

The third way to profit from eBook covers is to design and sell them.  There are lists of folks who are looking for eBook covers who can’t do it themselves and will pay someone else to do it for them.  If you enjoy getting creative with graphics, learn how to make the covers and start selling them.  (Of course, there’s a chapter in the eBook with resources of where to find buyers and sell to them safely.)

So, depending on what your circumstances are, hopefully you can use one of the ways listed above to profit with eBook covers!

http://www.inlineseo.com/dofollowdiver/

This search engine finds blogs that do not use the ‘no-follow’ tags on their comments section.  In addition, this particular search engine finds blogs that use the ‘Top Commentator’ or ‘CommentLuv’ plugins.

So what does this mean for you?

See if you can ‘follow’ this chain of logic.  (insert pun groan here):

1. part of good SEO and ranking is by having related sites link into your site
2. part of good SEO is having those inbound links be about your particular keyword phrase
3. many blogs use a ‘no-follow’ tag on links in their comment section.  That tag prevents search engines from following the link.  In other words, even if you have a link from a comment section of another blog to your site, the Google spider will not find and index your page by crawling it…it ignores the no-follow links.
4. SOME blogs do not use the no-follow tag.
5. ergo, if you post a comment on those particular blogs, you are creating inbound links for the search engines to find and count.
6. In addition, CommentLuv is a Wordpress plugin that will search your blog’s feed when you post a comment on a blog with it installed. It then places a link to your most previous post in the comment you wrote, for some extra link juice to an internal link on your blog.

And even more: Top Commentator is a Wordpress plugin that allows the people who comment the most on a blog within a certain time frame (usually a month), a sitewide link, usually in the sidebar of the blog. This is great not only for great backlinks on every page of a dofollow blog, but also a great, free advertising opportunity.

To take advantage of this, you:

1. enter a search term related to your niche or your website
2. visit the blogs the search engine returns
3. read the post and make a RELEVANT comment
4. USE YOUR KEYWORD PHRASE AS YOUR NAME!! This is very important because it is the anchor text for the inbound link.

That’s it!  Adding a couple of comments on these blogs per day from various blogs creates a nice steady build of inbound links using your anchor text.  In addition, if you are one of the top commentators on a particular site (sometimes with as few as 1-3 posts in a given period of time), you now have site-wide exposure from that blog…that’s many pages, usually, with inbound links.

So, search the list of ‘DoFollow’ blogs, start commenting, and drive traffic to your site!

I was one of the casualties hurt by eBay’s decision.  I had an ebook that had been selling well every month.  For a while it was making me a ton of money.  As more competition crept in, it ended up making me only a small amount.  However, the ebook was loaded with other affiliate links…so I was happy anytime someone took it, even if I was just barely breaking even.

So, when eBay decided that they weren’t going to allow Digital Delivery, I pulled down my auctions, and my ebooks sat on my hard drive.

Until now.

I received an email newsletter the other day with information on a new book about using Kindle to sell ebooks.  Now, I get about half a dozen newsletters a day, usually with some pitch to some product to help me make more money…and I usually pass, since they are nothing new.

But Kindle Secrets was different for me.  It gave me the tools I needed to start selling my ebooks again…with LESS effort than eBay. With eBay I had to go in every two weeks and setup a bunch of auctions.  With Kindle, I set it up one time and I’m done.

Not only does Rebecca teach how to use Kindle to start moving your ebooks (with the power of Amazon and all its affilates behind you!), but she provides some excellent ways to find content for new ebooks!  I’m talking EASY (and FREE!) ways of getting a ton of new content for whatever niche you have.

I’m now taking that tool and creating new ebooks every day!  And I now have a world of blog content using the techniques she shows in her book.

The Kindle Secrets guide is an awesome way to help you create a digital delivery network of your own.  Combining those strategies with some of the other strategies here on this blog, and you can really jumpstart your online revenue stream!  Check out Kindle Secrets!

Video Proof:

If you want to see a really quick video that gives a great overview of how this works, check it out:

Video of the Kindle Secret

Let me share a strategy that I use from time to time. I don’t do it every day, but it only takes a few minutes. So if I have a few spare minutes, I’ll use this to make some money for free, very quickly!

I’m assuming that you have a blog with Adsense. (If you don’t, read the Step-by-Step Profit Guide from the menu at the top. It tells you how to setup a free blog and put Adsense on it.)

So, how do you get a surge of traffic to your site, spending very little time on it?

Three quick steps:

1. Hot Keywords - go to Google Hot Trends
2. Thought Stringing
3. Social Bookmarking

Hot Keywords - Go to Google Hot Trends.  It shows what people are searching for RIGHT NOW…the top 100 phrases by search volume.  (It’s updated every hour or two, and tells when the last update was.)  See any words that look interesting to you?  See anything that is related to a product?  Keep in mind that many of the searches will be of celebrities.  But you can find hot news stories, or hot products that are being searched heavily.  Something got mentioned on CNN or Oprah and everyone’s checking it.  You can click on the keyword phrases Google lists to see what the top news and blog articles are.  (Hint:  you have almost instant content.  Read a few of the articles and restate them in your own words for unique content relevant to a hot topic!)

Thought Stringing - Thought Stringing is the process of connecting related thoughts.  So, if a hot topic is the phrase “Madonna Divorce”, think about a thought that might be related to that phrase, or even use that phrase.  (You usually don’t want to copy that exact phrase because there will be WAAY too much competition for it.)  So, think about related phrases:  “madonna split up”, “madonna break up”, “madonna custody”, or think of a sub-phrase (one that contains the hot phrase.  it won’t get as much traffic, but will pickup some): “madonna divorce settlement”, “madonna divorce terms”, “madonna divorce agreement”, “madonna divorce rumors”…  The point about thought stringing is that you need to think like someone searching for information about the hot topic.  Pretend you just caught a snippet of the story on the news, or over-heard someone talking about the story.  If you wanted to learn more about it, what keywords would YOU use?  Chances are, others will, too.  (Maybe “madonna getting divorced”?) If you are stuck and have a mental block, you can use a tool like Keyword Elite, which lets you plug in a phrase and it comes up with thousands of related phrases very quickly.

Write a blog post on your blog, using your thought-strung keyword phrase as the title.  In addition to making it the title, make sure it appears in the first and last line of the blog post.  I prefer to re-type the title, and enclose it in <h1> header tags at the top. (That tells search engines that your page is primarily about this topic.)  I restate my conclusion at the bottom, using the phrase again, and surround that statement by <b> bold tags.

Almost there!  Now you’ve got good content about a heavily-searched keyword phrase…and a unique phrase that possibly hasn’t appeared on the web before, meaning less competition!

Social Bookmarking Marketing - copy the URL of your specific post (not just the main page of your blog), and head over to SocialMarker, and submit your blog to the major Social Bookmarking sites there.

Even if YOUR page doesn’t get in the top 10 of Google quickly, chances are good that a Propeller page or a Digg or Mixx page will!

It took me longer to type this article than it takes me to enact it.  I can literally check Google Hot Trends, find a keyword phrase I like, thought-string it, post about it, and crank it out through Social Marker in about 10 minutes total.  FREE!  NO COST to me other than that time.

My results from this have varied.  I’m not promising that you’ll get rich doing this all day long.  BUT, I will say that I’ve had hundreds to thousands of visitors hit my site within 30 minutes of me posting a new post, cranking out the Adsense revenue!!  With that volume of visitors, people WILL click some of your ads (assuming you’ve blended them properly, etc.).  AND, the cool thing is that somehow these hot topics have a way of re-surging.  For example, two weeks after I made one of these ‘quickie’ blog posts, after traffic has gone away (because it wasn’t a hot topic any more), all the sudden a bunch of visitors hit my page again.  Some news agency picked up the story in some remote place and re-published it, or it made it into a magazine article that just got delivered or something, and there was another surge.  Once you create that post, it NEVER GOES AWAY, and you own that little piece of virtual real estate.

Keep trying.  You will have varying results depending on how good you are at thought-stringing, keyword competition, value of the Adsense that appears on your blog, etc.  Eventually you will start to ‘fine-tune’ the hot phrases you pick.  You will find that some work easier than others.  You will start to look for phrase combos that likely haven’t appeared before.  For example, if a hot phrase is “Fannie Mae”, because it’s in the news…chances are that there are MILLIONS of pages with almost every conceivable phrase related to Fannie Mae.  But a phrase like “Dillon Suicide” (totally fictional, assuming Dillon is a famous actor), probably hasn’t appeared before, and you can thought-string from there to find a common phrase with little competition.

One final thought…if you are lucky, you will find keyword phrases that you can also tie to an affiliate product. As you are examining the keywords, look for product-based phrases (which is tough…most hot topics are people-oriented, like celebrities). Almost any product can be sold through an affiliate. If you belong to some of the affiliate networks, like Commission Junction or LinkShare, then many times you can add links in your blog posts to your affiliate product. Generally affiliate sales pay more than Adsense, which is why I mention this.

Anyway, I hope you understand this method for making free fast money using hot keywords. It works if you work it!

Short version (for the details behind it, keep reading after the outline):

1. Become eBay affiliate. (Free)
2. Keyword Research on Hot Niches
3. Create Squidoo Lens for your Niched Keyword Phrase. (Also Free)
4. Add an RSS module to the Squidoo lens with the product.
5. Normal traffic-driving methods for the lens.
6. Profit!

First, become an eBay affiliate. eBay wants traffic, and if you drive traffic to their site, they give you a part of their profit (fees) on the completion of any sale. AND they pay $25 for people who signup for eBay if they came from you. Signup for the affiliate program at: http://www.ebaypartnernetwork.com

Next, research a product. Ebay itself can be a great resource for this. Visit the Pulse section of eBay at http://pulse.ebay.com to sift through most popular searches in a given category. Then use the Keyword Research tools like SEOPro and Google from the Tools section of this website to find related keyword phrases with high searches and low competition.  For example, Pulse shows that “webkinz” is a popular search term.  Entering “webkinz sale” into Google’s tool (without synonyms) shows how many searches there are…then hop over to Google for a given phrase (like “webkinz for sale cheap”) to find out how much competition there is for that phrase.  I like to have a thousand searches or more per month, with under 10,000 competition for exact match.

Go over to Squidoo and create a lens with the name of the lens being the keyword phrase.  Use dashes or underscores between words.  Choose “do your own thing” for the type of lens, and use some hot related keywords to start with when asked, based on the research you did.  When setting up your Squidoo lens, haven an Intro paragraph.  Do a quick Google Image search for a picture of what it is your lens is about, save the image to your computer, and upload it to your lens.  Then add a ‘My Favorite Link’ module (with the big arrows), and an RSS module, and a YouTube video module.  Go to eBay’s Partner Network site, login, and use their tools to generate a link for the ‘My Favorite Link’, and the RSS generator to create a feed to display in the RSS module (include all the details).  Have the YouTube module pick a video related to your keyword (helps with visitor likability, Squidoo ranking, and bulks up your content with related keywords).

Do your normal traffic driving methods (social bookmarking, forum posts, blog comments, even other squidoo comments, comments on social bookmarking sites, etc.).  Squidoo gets indexed quickly with Google.  If you have other blogs, etc., make sure you link to your new lens.

Squidoo has built-in traffic tools, so no need for Google Analytics.  (I wish I could, though…GA is better…but still, at least you can do SOME tracking!)  Watch visitors hit the site…then those visitors go to eBay and eventually bid/buy/subscribe, and you get a check from eBay (or direct deposit into your PayPal account).

I know this tutorial was very ‘light’ as far as the details, but I’m thinking that you’ll be able to figure it out from here.  Try it out on a few lenses.  Soon you’ll be able to throw a lens together in about 10 minutes or less, and you can try multiple ones.

I’m all about cheap…this could be one of the methods you use to generate some cash without having to lay any money out.

Note: for an example of what a squidoo lens should look like when you’re done: Webkinz Polar Bear
. Admittedly I could have done better on the keywords (like gone for “Buy Webkinz Polar Bear”), but I only did this while I was typing up the post to provide an example, so I didn’t do all the research I would normally do.

If you’re like me, you login to Clickbank many times a day, checking in on new sales, since you don’t have any way of knowing automatically when you sell something.

In early 2008, Clickbank introduced code that can be used to get email notifications instantly, but it’s a bit tricky.  There’s a tiny bit of ‘coding’ involved.

The functionality is called Instant Notification.  Fortunately, they provide sample code which can be modified to suit your needs.  Here’s how to do it:

First copy the script, insert your Secret Key (an Uppercase letters and numbers string you will enter into your clickbank account in step 8 below) and Email Address to your own in the script, and upload it to your web server, I called mine cb-notification.php. Then

1. Log into your account
2. Click the “Account Settings” tab
3. Click “My Site” in the sub nav
4. Click the small ‘Edit’ link in the upper right of the box with the Security Key and Instant Notification
5. Locate the “Instant Notification” field and click the “Click HERE to request access” hyper link
6. Fill out the form and thoroughly review the terms of use
7. Click the “Submit” button at the bottom of the form
8. Enter a Secret Key (Uppercase letters and numbers only) into the “My Site” Screen
9. Enter the URL of the file you uploaded to your site into the Instant Notification Box
10. Hit Save Changes
11. Click on Test next to the address you entered, and you should get a test email!
    php code:

<?php

function cbValid() {
$key=’YOUR SECURITY CODE HERE’;
$ccustname = $_REQUEST['ccustname'];
$ccustemail = $_REQUEST['ccustemail'];
$ccustcc = $_REQUEST['ccustcc'];
$ccuststate = $_REQUEST['ccuststate'];
$ctransreceipt = $_REQUEST['ctransreceipt'];
$cproditem = $_REQUEST['cproditem'];
$ctransaction = $_REQUEST['ctransaction'];
$ctransaffiliate = $_REQUEST['ctransaffiliate'];
$ctranspublisher = $_REQUEST['ctranspublisher'];
$cprodtype = $_REQUEST['cprodtype'];
$cprodtitle = $_REQUEST['cprodtitle'];
$ctranspaymentmethod = $_REQUEST['ctranspaymentmethod'];
$ctransamount = $_REQUEST['ctransamount'];
$caffitid = $_REQUEST['caffitid'];
$cvendthru = $_REQUEST['cvendthru'];
$cbpop = $_REQUEST['cverify'];

$xxpop = sha1(”$ccustname|$ccustemail|$ccustcc|$ccuststate|$ctransreceipt|$cproditem|$ctransaction|”
.”$ctransaffiliate|$ctranspublisher|$cprodtype|$cprodtitle|$ctranspaymentmethod|$ctransamount|$caffitid|$cvendthru|$key”);
$xxpop=strtoupper(substr($xxpop,0,8));
if ($cbpop==$xxpop) return 1;
else return 0;
}
if (cbValid())
mail(”YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS HERE”, “ClickBank - ” . $_REQUEST['ctransaction'],”Product: ” . $_REQUEST['cprodtitle'] . “\nPublisher: ” . $_REQUEST['ctranspublisher'] . “\nAffiliate: ” . $_REQUEST['ctransaffiliate'] . “\nTransaction: ” . $_REQUEST['ctransaction'] . “\nAmount: ” . $_REQUEST['ctransamount']);
?>

If this is too technical for you, get a friend to help. Make sure, as you copy and paste the code, that you don’t end up with ‘curly quotes’ (PHP can’t read that).

You can use this code exactly as it appears, or you can modify what is sent in the email.

I hope this helps you…hopefully you won’t need to be logging into Clickbank all day long now. Just check your email!

Recently, I decided to give my wife her own blog.  She’s big into gardening, and very knowledgeable about it.  So I bought a domain name, installed WordPress on it, and customized a template that would fit her style/personality well.

I created an introduction post, and a page with some book recommendations (using my Amazon affiliate code and a cool Carousel widget).

When I showed it to her, she was tickled pink!  It took me all of about 20 minutes to teach her how to login and make posts.

I have admin access, so if she writes a post that has content that can be naturally affiliate-linked, I add the links in there.  That way she doesn’t have to do any ‘coding’, or even know HTML.  She just writes posts about her favorite topic!  She’s having fun, and it’s created another income stream for us along the way.

Her blog is a Vegetable and Flower Gardening Tips blog, called Green Thumb Momma.  You can find it at http://www.greenthumbmomma.com.

So if you have loved ones or friends who would enjoy having their very own site to blog on, give them a blog!  Tell them you’ll take care of coding in the background!  It’s a win-win situation!

When I say “child labor” most of the time the immediate image that comes to mind is a sweat shop where poor kids are working in dangerous conditions. But what I’m talking about is legal, ethical, and the kid will probably like it!

“Content is King”, when it comes to Internet Marketing. But usually the folks who are doing Internet Marketing are so busy with the marketing that they don’t have time for the content.

Before you go paying good money for Private Label Rights articles, or paying someone to write blog posts for you, why not leverage some good, free content? Tap the content rolling around in your child’s head!

Children’s opinions matter. They matter because of the marketplace. Most content can be related to a child. Find out what yours thinks and blog about it…or better yet, get them to blog about it if they’re old enough to type in coherent sentences.

Don’t restrict your thinking to content related to Toys. That’s obvious. If you have a niche about toys you can regularly share your child’s opinions about them and have instant content. I’m talking about getting a child’s angle on other niches. Here’s a few examples of what I’m talking about:

• a niche about a hobby - get the child to talk about the hobby, how their parents got them started in it, what they like about it
• a niche about a product - find out what kids at school say about the product, crazy uses for the product (that only a kid could think of), etc.
• philosophical ramblings - explain deep thoughts to a child and get them to summarize it in their words.

Hopefully you could think about your particular niche and figure out your child’s perspective.  Heck, even something like ‘Global Warming’…if you had a blog about enviromental issues and could get your child to offer thoughts about it regularly, that could become a featured item that would draw visitors.  (You can just type it for them, using their exact words.)

It becomes even more useful if they’re old enough to type.  If you’re up for it, register a domain name for them, set up a blog, a cool-looking template, related to something that really interests them.  Put some ads on it (instruct them NOT to click them, ever), maybe create some pages with affiliate links, and let them do the rest.  Let them blog their thoughts, while you build traffic to it.  Then come back and show them while you insert some affiliate products.  Get them to review a product (from a teen’s perspective).

Bingo.  Free child labor.  Good, unique, relevant content.

The search results ads are shown on Google’s page, when someone enters a search. If someone searches a term with a keyword on which you are bidding, your results will show up at the top or along the right side of the results (if you bid high enough). Search result ads are more expensive because they do get good, quality clicks, and because of the competitors bidding for a given set of keywords.

The Content Network are the pages on the internet that are using Google’s Adsense code to display relevant ads. So, for example, a blog about bicycles might have Adsense ads about bikes displaying on the site.

Content Network (CN) traffic is very different than Search traffic. It’s much less targeted, so people clicking are more likely to be ‘browsers’ than ’searchers’. Browsers generally convert less. Content Network traffic is therefore much less expensive. Your bids for keywords on the CN should be much lower than those for search.

In fact, for search, many times Google won’t even activate your keywords unless you bid a minimum amount…and this amount can go up if the search term becomes popular.

But here’s the trick with the Content Network…some people will type in the displayed URL directly, without clicking.

I’ve had two different websites with campaigns running. On BOTH, I noticed an increase of 3% of DIRECT traffic after I started running my CN campaigns, and that was WITHOUT any clicks.

It feels like cheating Google. Google is displaying my URL tens of thousands of times per month, and I’m not paying a penny. Well, sometimes I pay a penny. In fact, my bid on those terms is set at $.01…one penny. So the times that someone does actually click my link means I don’t pay very much.

The point is this: if you are hesitant to pay for Google Adwords ads, start with the Content Network. Keep your bids to one penny. Enter a ton of relevant keywords (and segment your campaigns as much as possible to test which keyword combos are working well). And make sure that your display URL is something that people will want to see. They are more likely to type in a name that is short and directly related to what they are looking for.

So get going with your super-cheap campaigns and take advantage of the free traffic that will come as folks type in the URL directly instead of clicking!

When starting out with paid traffic, one question that arises is, “Do I direct link to the affiliate page or create my own landing page?”

To create a Google ad, you have to put in both a “destination URL” and a “display URL”. The display URL is the one that shows on the ad. The destination URL is the link that the click will actually follow. Google’s Terms of Use state that the domain on which the visitor ultimately sees after clicking should match the display URL. So, for example,

Direct linking is when the URL that your Google Ad points to is the one that belongs to the affiliate themselves. For example, if I were creating an add for the “Top Secret Magic Code” product at Clickbank, I can create the ad with a destination URL of http://makewowg.magiccode.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=MAGAD, but I MUST set the display URL to www.topsecretmagiccode.com, since that’s where the person clicking ends up. This is called direct linking. I’m using my ad to drive traffic directly to the affiliate page.

The main advantage of direct linking is that you don’t need any programming experience to build your own landing page, and don’t need to take the time or invest the cost in creating your own page. For some folks, it’s just easier to create a bunch of ads pointing directly to the affiliate page and let it go.

However, there are three disadvantages of direct linking:

1. ad rotation
2. direct traffic
3. some affiliate products restrict direct linking

Google rotates ads that point to the same display URL. If you and 99 other folks are advertising a specific affiliate product, and are all using direct link, you dilute the number of times your ad will be seen. Google will only return one ad per display URL when a search is performed.

Also, a good number of web users will type in the display URL directly to their browser rather than click an ad. (I have two case studies I’ll talk about in another article that prove this.) I’m not sure all the reasons why they do this, but some users are wary of ads. They figure that if the site is legitimate, typing the URL directly will take them there. That means you’re losing revenue by sending folks directly to the affiliate without ever having your tracking cookie planted.

Lastly, you need to check with the terms for your specific affiliate product. Some don’t let you direct link at all, and others restrict the keywords on which you can bid.

With those factors in mind, Direct Linking is already at a disadvantage over pointing clicks to a landing page of your own. There are several other advantages of using your own landing page which I’ll discuss in another article.