TimeForBlogging » Making Money Online

An Alternative E-Commerce Shopping Cart Solution: E-Junkie?

Joshua Dorkin — Mon, 14 May 2007 23:15:35 +0000

While I’ve already begun to set up my e-commerce website (not even close to being complete, BTW) using OSCommerce, I’m still not 100% convinced that I’ve made the right decision. One of my ecommerce mentors Dave Pitlyuk (he doesn’t even know it yet) has suggested that I use ZenCart instead, but that has made the indecision even worse here. With that in mind, I continue looking for quality ecommerce shopping cart solutions while SLOWLY building the framework of my shopping site.

Introducing E-Junkie “Fat-Free” Shopping Cart

I don’t actually know much about E-Junkie other than what I’ve seen on their site and a few other resources, but their technology looks very promising. Essentially, you can add their shopping cart to any site, including blogs, myspace, etc. Their service provides a pop-up-like cart that is not really a pop-up, which integrates with Paypal and Google checkout. It looks like it is really easy to use and it could make setting up an ecommerce site quite simple. In fact, it seems like it only takes minutes to get things up and running, and to be honest, I am quite tempted to really try it out.

The problem for me is, however, that I haven’t heard very much about the company. In addition, I cannot find any real contact information on the website. Seems like a company offering this kind of service would go out of their way to publicize a phone number or real address. I guess I’d like to see a few more websites using their shopping cart solution.

If anyone out there knows anything about E-Junkie, please let me know. I’ll add any resources regarding the company to this page in an effort to inform other out there who are curious. Here are a few that I’ve been able to scrounge up:

E-Junkie Articles and Reviews

E-Junkie in Action: Some sites Using the Cart

Again, please let me know if you have anything to say about this company, good or bad. Thanks!

Selected Useful Reads from the Problogger Group Writing Project (Filtered for your reading pleasure)

Joshua Dorkin — Sun, 13 May 2007 15:48:40 +0000

It is hard to go very far without running into a site with entries in Darren Rowse’s latest group writing project; it was a huge hit with close to 900 entries. While it is great that people are linking to one another from this thing, it seems that many involved in the project are simply linking to the entire list of submissions. While I did participate (on another blog) and don’t ever mind new backlinks, I’m a bit disappointed that people haven’t really broken this thing down a bit.

Why link to every post? While many were good, there were some really bad posts in that batch. Do you really want to link to (and give your support to) blogs that don’t make the cut? I went through the entire list a few times to pull out posts that I thought would be interesting or helpful for the readers of this blog.

Here are a few that I felt were actually useful and worth a read (yes, I actually read every internet related post on the list!):

AdSense

What I thought was most impressive was that many of these great posts were written by fairly unknown bloggers. This is another sign that there will always be great new talents emerging in the blogging world and you must keep exploring to find them!

I make it a habit to support my fellow bloggers through both socializing their posts and visiting their advertisers when appropriate. Make sure you do the same! While linking is great, these things are just as important!

Finally, I’d like to mention that many of the blogs I went through were still using Blogger or some other hosted blog solution, and many others were making some of the most basic blogging mistakes. If you haven’t already, read the The Top 77 Mistakes New Bloggers Make so you’re not out there making some of these yourself!

The Proliferation of Blogs About Nothing aka The Vicious Cycle of Blogs About Making Money Online

Joshua Dorkin — Sun, 06 May 2007 17:34:04 +0000

We’ve all seen them . . . new blogs with ads at every turn, with nothing to say other then “I make money online” and “I blog about my blog.” Typically, when I come across a site like this I leave and do not return. I realize that these sites offer nothing useful to me or anyone else . . . The sad fact is that thanks to different gimmicks out there, sites like these seem to becoming more and more popular every day.

You can’t really go through more than a handful of blogs these days without reading about making money online using Adsense, Chitika, BlogAds, AuctionAds, Text Link Ads, etc. The purpose of these sites is to push affiliate programs and ad networks without offering anything concrete to anyone except how they are becoming more popular by doing nothing. It seems like we’re in some kind of vicious cycle now:

The Vicious Cycle Started by Bloggers who Blog About Nothing But How to Make Money Online

Person sees that others are “making money online” with their blog (most fail to provide any proof and likely don’t make any money at all)
Person wants to make money with a blog of their own
Person sets up blog and claims to be a “money making” blogger
Person monetizes their blog as soon as possible, throwing up as many ads as possible
Person starts joining every blog train, meme, link exchange, favorite exchange, etc. to start building up their Technorati ranking, PR, feed subscribers, etc.
Person starts to blog about the same crap as every other blog about making money online (typically nothing . . . many of these sites just blog about the ads that they just put on their site and then just fill their site with all the crap mentioned in #5)
Person sees their site begin to become “popular” and starts to tell all their friends about their “success”. They then encourage their friends to start blogging. Amazed by how easy it sounds, these friends go to #1.
Note: The site has actually not become popular at all. It is just another site that other sites have used to grow their own useless sites through blogging gimmicks. All the people who have added it as a favorite, as a subscribed feed, or as any other kind of “friend” fail to come back because the site really has nothing to offer, just like their own sites. A network of useless “popular” blogs begin to climb the charts with nothing to contribute to anything but their own existence.
Person realizes that they have nothing to offer the world other than a bunch of crap that has been repeated a thousand times before, yet continue to offer that crap because they are now actually making a few bucks a month.
Person begins to be seen as an authority by other newbies and actually begins to get real traction, despite having nothing to offer but the popularity of their site that has nothing to offer.
Sadly, eventually that person really begins to believe their own hype. Many times, this person still knows nothing about anything, yet offers their advice to others who are too green to know any better.
Bad advice follows bad advice and the internet becomes overwhealmed by people following the one guy with nothing to offer but a bunch of bad advice.
People who actually do have something to offer others, for some reason, start to follow the path set by these know nothing “authorities” and make their advice even more popular.
The entire internet goes down in flames as 1 billion people around the world are all doing the same thing trying to make money by doing nothing but blogging about blogging about making money online by saying a whole lot of nothing!

Pretty Scary, huh?!?

Affiliate Sales Model or Guaranteed Ad Purchase: Which to Choose?

Joshua Dorkin — Fri, 04 May 2007 00:56:04 +0000

I was approached this afternoon by someone who was interested in promoting their real estate-related program to my site’s users. This advertiser wanted me to promote an online webinar and was willing to give me a commission for any sale made from people who went through the seminar and purchased their service. While the commission was fairly good, we felt that the odds of someone actually going through their entire webinar and then purchasing their product were not phenominal.

Choosing Between a Guaranteed Return and a Potential Greater One

We considered proposing a PPL (pay per lead) model to them, but felt that by doing so we were providing this company with tons of free branding for little in return. As a result, we decided that we would only work with them as pure advertises. They were welcome to advertise their program on our site, but would have to pay our full rates. If they generated any sales or leads, that depended on the users of our site.

What would you have done?

Do you go with the guaranteed advertising buy or do you provide free branding for someone on the remote chance that someone will go through all the steps (sign-up, webinar, sale) and buy their product?

In the best case scenario, we’d be able to charge for advertising and also get an affiliate payment per sale, but that isn’t ever going to happen. I tried to negotiate a few deals like that years ago and was simply laughed at. Was worth a shot, though!

Affiliate Link Cloaking: Free Tools, Tutorials & Discussions

Joshua Dorkin — Tue, 01 May 2007 17:04:47 +0000

Every heard of affiliate link cloaking? It is basically the practice of hiding affiliate links so your users don’t bypass them, and deprive you of a commission. Some people will argue that affiliate link cloaking is deceptive or unethical, but I’m still unconvinced either way. I thought it would be useful to dedicate a post to the subject and I hope you all find this to be helpful!

How to Hide Affiliate Links

There are now free services out there that do all the work for you, like AddMe’s Link Cloaker (which happens to be broken) or this one, and there are plenty of other guides and tutorials to help you hide your links. Last week, even the ~~famous~~ infamous John Chow gave a primer on hiding affiliate links. Another good post, called Cloaking and Ranking Your Affiliate Links can be found over at the Earner’s Blog. This post discusses one technique in particular that you can use to hide those affiliate links you’ve got on your website.

Is link cloaking ethical?

Should we tell everyone which links on our sites are affiliate links? I believe that most internet users aren’t very aware of affiliate linking, and probably wouldn’t care much either way. I look at affiliate links like parked domains. The majority of internet users don’t know what domain parking is and likely could care less, but will go to a parked site and click on a link regardless. I think the only way this will stop is if either the government or a major player like Google begins to clamp down on the practice.

Don’t Just Teach Your Friends to Make Money Online. Partner with Them!

Joshua Dorkin — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 17:24:48 +0000

I recently read a webmaster forum post from a guy whose friends keep asking him to teach them how to make money online. There are a few approaches to take in this situation:

Three Approaches to Dealing With a Friend Who Wants Free Advice on Making Money Online

Tell him to piss off and figure it out himself
Be a good friend and actually help him out
Scare him off by telling him how hard it is

The Fourth and Only Approach to Take In This Situation: Create a Partnership

While I’d typically reccommend the second approach listed above, there is actually a better route to take here. Instead of just giving away all the pearls of wisdom that you spent your hard time learning, do like they do in 24 . . . cut a deal!

How To Create An Online Partnership

Convince your friend of your know-how and let them know that you can relpicate your previous successes
Let them know that while you’d love to just give them all the knowledge you’ve gained, it would be easier if you partnered up
Cut a deal. In exchange for you helping them create a successful online money-making website, you absolutely deserve a cut. It is up to you to negotiate your share based on your ongoing participation in the site, the work you put in to get them started, etc. For example, I’ve partnered with a friend on a blog site, where I am responsible for the setup of the site, maintenance, monetization, and publicity; he is responsible for content. We have come to a 50/50 arangement.
Put everything in writing. Working with friends can lead to problems if expectations are not clear. In creating a contract for this partnership, consider the following questions (this is by no means comprehensive):
- What will each partner’s role be in the day to day care of the website? (consider little things like who wants to be woken up at 3 AM if the is a problem with the site)
- Do you want to create a company, which will own the site, or will it be in your names
- Who will be the registrant of record?
- Who will finance the site’s startup costs?
- How will expenses be covered?
- How will any income/profits be split?
- If sold, how will the proceeds be split?
Once you’ve got everything in writing, be sure there is absolutely no debate over any of the expectations.
Sign your partnership agreement and start making money!

If the online business is a success, you will both benefit. If the partnered site(s) is(are) better then any of your personal sites, then you won’t be kicking yourself in a jealous rage . . . you’ll be laughing all the way to the bank!

9 Steps To Growing Your Business Using Forum Marketing

Joshua Dorkin — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 01:53:07 +0000

9 Steps To Successfully Market to a Forum Community
In a previous post The Direct and Indirect Approaches to Forum Marketing we talked about the two approaches to forum marketing. I’d like to share the 9 steps you will want to follow to forum marketing success; this is basically a primer on indirect forum marketing (the only approach I fully endorse).

Find a forum in the niche you want to market to
Check to be sure the site allows you to create a forum signature with a link to your business
Set up an account
Create a forum signature that includes the following information: your name, website/business name, web address, contact info (if any), description of the website/business (DO NOT USE A SALES PITCH – e.g. The Best Car Parts Shop Around – that stuff is useless). Be descriptive!
Find the forum introductions section (most good forums will have one) and tell people about yourself. Talk about your business, but don’t just drop a sales pitch. Let people know what your interests are in the topic beyond your business.
PARTICIPATE! Become an active member of the forums. Help others on the site. Get involved in the debate. POST, POST, POST! In time, the members will see you as an expert in the topic. With more posts, your site/business will have more exposure, and you will see results.
If the forum has an area for members to advertise in, use it. (if not, don’t post ads on the site; just use your forum signature and your knowledge to do the selling for you)
Volunteer to become a moderator on the site (forum administrators will often be willing to trade advertising for good moderators). In addition to the opportunity of getting more exposure, moderators are typically given more respect and looked at with even more authority then other members. With this comes more clicks and more business!
Find other forums in the same area of interest and repeat steps 1-8.

Not only have I used these techniques, but I see others use them every day on my site! It is a proven formula. Give it a try and I know you won’t be disappointed!

The Two Models of Online Advertising & How to Deal with Potential Advertisers

Joshua Dorkin — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 22:20:48 +0000

You can apply one of only two models when it comes to dealing with online advertisers.

Establish a high set of standards and eliminate anyone who does not fall in that set.
Keep your standards lax and let pretty much anyone advertise with you.

MODEL 1: Keep High Standards
Those people who use the first set of guidelines usually do so because they want to be perceived as a site that people can trust. If you are someone who uses these guidelines to deal with potential advertisers, this may create a moral dilemma at times. When you operate a website that becomes successful, more and more people will want to advertise with you. The problem is that people want to throw money at you, and if you have standards, you will have to reject more people then you accept. That can potentially be a LOT of money!

Over the past month, I’ve personally rejected hundreds of dollars in potential ad revenues through various ad networks I participate in and from direct ad sales. I don’t know about you, but that creates a real quandry:

Do I take the money (we all really love money!) offered by advertisers, or do I uphold my standards and not let just anyone advertise?

MODEL 2: Allow Anyone to Advertise on Site
By allowing just anyone to advertise, your site can quickly become a marketplace for schlock. At first you will definitely make your money, but I think there are long term implications for doing so. Larger, more reputable advertisers will not want to be represented on a site overloaded with non-targeted garbage sites. The longer you allow these advertisers on your site, the more you dilute your perceived quality and eventually the actual quality of your site.

High standards are what made Starbucks, WalMart, McDonalds, etc. into the successful companies they are today.

What do you think?

Text Link Ads Needs to Make a Change

Joshua Dorkin — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 02:15:55 +0000

I’ve been using Text Link Ads (aff.) for some time now, and I have to say that I’ve been extremely happy with the service. I do have some suggestions, though.

As it stands, publishers can choose to approve individual advertisers on their site through the network. The problem I have is that there is no time horizon for which these ads will run on your site. Essentially, your advertisers have a permanent place on your website.

Text Link Ads Needs to Change!

No rational publisher would sign an indefinite contract with an advertiser. It just makes no sense!

The Text Link Ads platform needs to allow publishers to have an out. If an advertiser is no longer welcome on a site, publishers should be able to log in to their account and terminate the agreement. The relationship should not stop immediately, but should continue until the end of the billing cycle or 30 days, whichever is longer.

I realize that I am just a lone blogger making this suggestion, but I believe that it is in the long term interest of the company to do something about this issue. I guess I just wanted to put it out there and get some feedback from the rest of the blogosphere.

Thoughts?

Reasons Why You Should Explore Alternates to Adsense

Joshua Dorkin — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 07:12:19 +0000

While the king of internet publishing advertising networks remains Google’s AdSense, there are other ad networks that can make you more money. You should not only optimize the design of your ads, but also the network serving them.

You should test and retest different advertising networks (like AdBrite, Adsense, YPN, etc.) until you find that you have optimized your EPC (earnings per click). Once you’ve done that, test and retest again. Don’t just assume that you are going to make the most money using AdSense . . .

Use YPN if Your Audience is from the USA

YPN is still not paying publishers for clicks outside the US, so if your site concentrates on an international audience, it is probably not the network for you. If you do have a sizable concentration of viewers in the United States, I highly suggest trying it out.

Here’s one reason why:

This weekend I removed my AdSense ads from one of my blogs and replaced it with YPN ads. Although traffic was slow (happens on the holidays), my advertising revenue for the blog was over twice that of an average day while I served AdSense. I have many months of data to review, but the numbers speak for themselves. I’m going to obviously continue to watch the blog and see how things continue.

My Complaint with YPN

The only problem I’m having with YPN, and one of the reasons why I believe the network is not respected by the online world yet is that there still seems to be a lack of advertisers. I’ve noticed the same 5 ads running on site each time I’ve visited. This can certainly get old to our viewers. I hope that Yahoo can get their act together and start competing with Google; right now, they are not even in the same league. I think it is time for a radical restructuring; Yahoo needs to target publishers and give them a reason to switch over, or they should consider selling off their ad network to someone who can come up with some fresh ideas to compete with Google. At this rate, sadly, it looks like they are going nowhere and fast.

Why AdSense?

Like I mentioned earlier, while my Google ads are not paying as much as YPN ads, there is a much greater inventory. I have a feeling that the increase in revenue I’m seeing from YPN will be short-lived. As my readers find that the ads have grown stale, they will stop visiting them. The benefits of greater inventory, in my mind, will prevail over the long term for this reason.

Giant List of Website Advertising Networks – Make Money Online

Joshua Dorkin — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 19:09:17 +0000

Making money with your website is easy, provided you’ve got good content and some traffic. I wanted to create a list of the various advertising networks you can use to generate some cash from your site or blog.

Top-Tier Pay Per Click – PPC

Google AdSense
Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN)
Microsoft AdCenter – Advertisers only???

Blog Advertising Networks

Broad Networks

Blue Lithium – CPM, CPC, CPA – Top Rated Network

Advertising Inventory Management Platforms

Interactive Product Merchandising Networks

Text Link Ad Networks

Top Tier Cost Per Mille Networks – CPM

In-Text Advertising Networks

Affiliate Advertising Programs – Cost Per Action (CPA)

Amazon
Azoogle
Commission Junction – One of the best and most reputable
IncentaClick
LinkShare
ShareASale

Secondary PPC Networks

Pulse 360 – formerly Kanoodle
Miva – formerly FindWhat.com

Additional Ad Networks – Untested and Unknown

BidVertiser – bidding based ad marketplace
BlueFN – CPA Network for Finance-Related sites
Clicksor – contextual CPC network
Directa Network – ads for Latin & Hispanic Marketplace
eType USA – “premium” ad network
ExpoActive – ad management network – CPC, CPM
FluxAds – CPA (cost per action) a.k.a. affiliate network
HyperBidder – Advertising trading marketplace
– PPC contextual & trargeted
InterClick – CPM ad model
Mirago – PPC contextual – Based in Britain
Oxado – Contextual ads – based in Paris
Quigo – Seems to work with large publishers only
Real Tech Network – CPM & PPC
RevenuePilot – PPC & PFP (pay per performance)
RightMedia – “transparent ad exchange” network
SearchFeed.com – PPC
TargetPoint – PPC – contextual ads
TMP Express

If you’ve got any more, let me know. I’ll try and keep the list updated as new ones come around.

The Four Phases of Web Success

Joshua Dorkin — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 21:55:46 +0000

Internet people use measures of success that are somewhat different then those of common-folk. We’re not concerned about having the biggest house or the fanciest car in the neighborhood. We think about things like bandwidth, unique users, page views, reach, AdSense revenues, and other mundane things like number of servers we’ve got.

I’ve broken down web success into four phases. Where do you stand?

Phase One: Shared Hosting – ROOKIE PUNK

Most webmasters start out by using a shared hosting plan. They have the joy of worrying if one of the other several hundred sites will have a traffic spike, causing their own sites to go down. You are probably asking other webmasters to link to you with some generic form email, and you want to know when you’re going to get out of that damn Google Sandbox. Most respectable webmasters don’t really take you too seriously, and don’t consider you a threat.

If you’re actually serious about building a money making website and are committed, you will likely feel the pain that shared-hosting plans cause. Good luck! If you can make it to the next phase, things get a lot easier.

Chances of Failure – Extremely High

Consider that there are millions of websites out there and most of them are useless failures. These sites for the most part, reside on shared servers. The person starting the site probably thought it would be a cinch to make some cash online, and is now realizing that retirement will not come as quickly as they thought. On the other hand, a select few will rise above the rest and will get past the shared hosting doldrums.

Phase Two: Dedicated Server – YOU’RE COOLER THEN YOUR NEIGHBOR NOW!

Once you’ve been told by your host that you are causing too many problems, or that your site is a drain on their servers, it is time to move on. Congrats! Not only have you pissed off your host, but you are now emerging as a serious webmaster. I’m guessing that you are now in the top 10th percentile of all websites.

This is always a big move, and usually marks the beginning of “web-success.” Doing so means that you’re operating a popular website or sites, and that you’re probably starting to make some decent money with that/those sites. You’ve probably started to gain some respect from others online, and webmasters in your niche will certainly take notice of you.

For the average guy, moving to a dedicated server can be very scary. You need to worry about things outside the scope of your site itself, like maintaining your server. You’ll quickly learn that it is not that big a deal. There is a certain freedom that comes with having your own box, and it should make you feel pretty good that you are officially cooler then your neighbor now!

Chances of Failure – Nominal

If you’ve made it this far, odds are that you will continue on your path to the top. Website mis-management, loss of focus/interest, or random acts of violence are your biggest threats. You can now officially show up at that high-school reunion and hold your head up high!

Phase Three: Upgraded Server – HARDCORE WEB GENIUS!

The next phase of web success is typically moving up to a better box with faster drives and more memory. Sites that are resource intensive will drain a slower machine and will start to drag when the load gets to be too great. You are now running a power box – you’re kicking ass and are taking names! Money is no longer an issue, and you’ve probably quit your job to run your web business full time. Other webmasters have begun to notice your prowess and regularly email you for advice. It is a rough ride getting to phase three, but the trials and tribulations you’ve gone through have shaped you into the hardcore web genius that you are today. There is only one direction you’re going, and that is to the very top!

Chances of Failure – If You Fail Now, Move to Siberia, Dummy!

Failure? There is no failure! You are as close to being a web-god as there is. Keep up the good work and you will soon find yourself among the internet elite.

Final Phase: Multiple Servers – WEB GURU!

The final phase in the lifespan of a website is the move to multiple servers. Your site is now a monster! Your traffic is likely as high as that of sites run by the top corporations. You are probably making a small or huge fortune with your website, and you now rank with the web elite. You are a god to the rest of the internet world and are now often called a visionary. Go back to your reunion now and laugh at that teacher who said you wouldn’t amount to anything! Offer him a job as your secretary’s secretary!

Chances of Failure – Only if an Asteroid Hits Earth or Nuclear War Breaks Out!

You are featured in magazines and have appeared for TV interviews. You are a regular panelist at web conferences, and can do no wrong.

Want to start a new site? There will be no four phases for you this time . . . Venture Capital people and Angel Investors are lined at your doorstep. Congrats. Yoda would be proud! Tell your friends like Mark Cuban, Jerry Yang, Darren Rouse, Sergei & Larry, Kevin Rose, Craig Newmark, or Bill & Melinda about the rough times over beers on their private islands.

If you’re a Phase 4 Success and are reading this, please drop me an email . . . I’d love to shoot the breeze!