How To Make Online Money

I’m a big fan of making free, fast money…no paying to get traffic, not a lot of time invested.

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!

I made $100 this week from eBay, and I haven’t sold a thing.

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.

Clickbank automatically emails publishers when an affiliate sells their product.  But they do not provide an easy way to receive notification to affiliates when they sell someone else’s product!

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!