Category: Reviews

Joey Burdick has started up a blog called the Revenue Pro.

At first glance, the site seems like a basic make money online type of blog. The normal sorts of links and such. The blog’s new enough that it hasn’t accumulated a lot of posts, and so hasn’t developed its own character.

Joey seemed to realize that, and has started a regular series of revenue sharing contests on the blog. For example, this one offers a 5% revenue share for his October blog income. The idea is to encourage more readers participating in the contests, and thus to increase the value of the prizes. It’s a fun idea that various blogs have done now and then, but I can’t recall seeing one that made it a regular event.

The blog theme is nice and clean, and doesn’t distract from the content. The advertising is nicely low key, and meshes well with the theme. The list of categories is small and doesn’t detract overwhelm the sidebar.

I would suggest a couple improvements, though.

First, the permalinks used are the WordPress default, which is terrible for search engine optimization. Including the post title in the permalink structure would help attract more search engine traffic.

Second, allowing email subscriptions to comments helps to foster conversations between commentors. Without it, someone will leave a comment and not come back for days. With it, they’ll come back to check out the ongoing comments, prompted by the email reminder.

Head on over to the blog and get a share of his revenue for yourself!

While I don’t do many blog reviews, when Arun emailed me about his contest I wanted to let you all know about it.

AruntheAce.com is a new blog about how to make money online. He’s holding what he calls “the golden egg contest“. The contest is modeled after John Chow’s review contest.

This sort of contest is difficult for a new blog to use, because typically the entrants get only a backlink out of writing a review. And most bloggers don’t value backlinks from low PR sites (regular readers will know I think that’s a mistake, but I won’t rant about that here).

So what Arun has done is to provide a prize that is sure to interest any blogger. Free lifetime web hosting, with unlimited web space and bandwidth. This is worth anywhere from $2,000 to $4,000, depending on how long you intend to live (you will keep blogging right up until the end, right?)

Go over to his contest page at “The Golden Egg Contest” link above for the rules. Now on to the review.

AruntheACE.com is very new, so there aren’t a lot of posts yet. The posts that are there are a fairly typical mix for a blog about making money online. His link building series has covered, so far, directory and article submissions, and he has an post on Adsense basics, along with the usual entries into other contests.

One of the things I liked best was that he asked his readers if he should use Kontera links to monetize his blog or not. I hate those links in content, so anyone who takes the time to find out if his readers want them is showing a lot of respect for his readers.

That’s it for the review. You’ve probably already clicked over to his contest page and are writing your own review right now, so I’m not sure why I’m still typing.

Oh, and since this review counts as an entry in Arun’s contest, if I win the lifetime hosting will become the prize for whatever contest I hold the next month. So if you don’t win his contest, hope for me to win and get a second chance!

Autopilot Profits is an ebook that says it’ll guide you through the process learning Internet marketing and building an autopilot income. The ebook sells for $27, or you may find it offered through a site you already are a member of for $17.

The ebook covers four main areas:

1. Finding a hungry crowd
2. Determine what to feed them
3. Tell them about your offer
4. Put it all on autopilot

As a bonus, the author says he’ll identify a hungry crowd for you, tell you what to feed them, and provide you with a sales page and make it all automatic. What a deal, right?

None of the information in this ebook should be news to anyone who is willing to spend a couple of weeks reading blogs on Internet marketing. It’s all out there, for free, on the web. The ebook could have provided additional value by going into great detail on the four areas above, going beyond what’s available for free. But it didn’t.

Instead, there’s just enough information to give you a vague idea of what you’re supposed to do, and affiliate links to websites and products that will help you to do it. I’m really surprised the author didn’t give this ebook away for free, since he’s bound to make more money from the affiliate links in the book than he does from sales of the book.

The ebook gives you just enough information about Google Adwords to get you into trouble, and then affiliate links out to Perry Marshall’s Definitive Guide to Adwords. If you want to find out more about Adwords, get Perry’s book and skip Autopilot Profits.

The ebook continues on to give introductions to blogging, Ebay, forum marketing, traffic exchanges, and article marketing. Also covered are software for generating content automatically (either by scraping it from other blogs or by computer generating it), and another tool for creating hundreds of blogs automatically. At least he does mention that the last one is a black hat technique.

The special bonus, of course, is that you can market Autopilot Profits to other Internet marketers to earn affiliate commissions. You earn $17 out of $27, and meanwhile the affiliate links in the ebook continue to generate profits for the author. He doesn’t even offer a way for you to rebrand the ebook so the affiliate links pay you instead.

Frankly, if you have $27 to spend on learning Internet marketing, give it to me and I’ll give you special unrestricted access to my blog archives (yes, that’s a joke). You’ll be no worse off than if you’d spent that $27 on Autopilot Profits.

Oh, and one good piece of advice the author gives is to market Autopilot Profits by providing an honest review on your blog, noting that honesty will sell more copies. What do you think, did my honest review sell any copies?

I’ve decided to join the ranks of those bloggers who emulate John Chow in providing backlinks for reviews. In fact, I’ll pretty much just duplicate John’s offer. I’d love to just copy and paste his rules below, but I suspect he has much better lawyers than I do. So here are the rules:

You write a review of Online Opportunity, good, bad, or indifferent. Criticize my choice of colors, compliment me on the logo, or just ask why on earth I usually post at half-past midnight. It’s up to you. The only hard and fast requirements are:

1. Link to the Online Opportunity homepage with the anchor text “make money online”
2. Link to this post describing the rules of the review
3. Your review should actually be a review, and not just a paragraph with the above links.

Here’s an example that would be appropriate as the start of a review:

Online Opportunity is a blog about how to make money online. And because Jay’s such a nice guy, he’ll give you a link back to your site if you review Online Opportunity.

What you get:

1. Links from a PR 0 blog. This is a bit of a wildcard really. The blog had no backlinks during the last page rank update since I was in the process of putting it online, and now has backlinks from the likes of JohnChow.com and others. How high could it go in the next update?
2. The anchor text of your choice for a link to your blog’s main page.
3. A link to your review of Online Opportunity using anchor text of my choice.

When you have posted your review, use my contact form or post a comment here letting me know where the review lives, and what anchor text you’d like for the link to your main page. And because I am such a nice guy, you can even request the anchor text “make money online”.

I’ll post a batch of reviews every week, generally Friday or Saturday.

This is my day for reviews, apparently.

When I first went to Ja Kel Daily Dot Com, I had such a sense of deja vu that I had to check the Firefox address bar to make sure I wasn’t actually at John Chow Dot Com. The WordPress theme used is the same, the layout is the same, right down to a picture of a car in the main banner.

Now, I just wrote a post talking about learning from the people who are making money online, featuring John Chow. Jason Neuman, the editor of Ja Kel Daily Dot Com apparently felt the same and decided to create a John Chow Dot Com clone. Since Jason hopes to make money from his blog, I suppose cloning John Chow’s site does give him an edge. Jason has even cloned John’s review scheme to improve his search engine rankings for the keyword “make money”. He might have wanted to pick a less competitive keyword…even John Chow isn’t on the first page of Google results for that one.

A blog should really be judged by its content, though. Of the posts showing on the home page when I visited, 4 were paid reviews, 3 were rehashed topics from other blogs, 1 was the post about his review scheme, and 2 were original content.

One of the original posts was about Squidoo, and the other was about an article submission service. The Squidoo post was pretty much just an overview with his referral link. No problems with that, but it would have been nice to see some concrete tips for newcomers to Squidoo. The article submission service was a new one to me, and I enjoyed reading about it. I’ll be interested to see what sorts of results Jason gets with it, since article submission can be a powerful tool for getting backlinks.

So, what can we learn from Ja Kel Daily Dot Com about making money online? One is that it isn’t necessary to have much original content to blog each day, if you’re willing to reuse ideas from other blogs. The other is that using John Chow’s scheme of offering backlinks in exchange for reviews is a great way to build traffic. According to Jason, in the comments of the linked post, he had 0 subscribed readers before he started using the review for backlink scheme, and now has hundreds.

While I probably won’t subscribe to Ja Kel Daily Dot Com, I do have to admire Jason for putting together a package that makes him money online. It’s hard to argue with success.

SELaplana is a blog by Sustines E. Laplana. The blog covers a wide variety of topics, including ones designed to help you learn to make money online. Sustines was the first person to use my new contact form (only minutes after I activated it!) and requested I review his site as part of his Join Review Me Challenge and Win promotion.

Sustines has picked an interesting way of branding himself. He calls himself the Dumb Blogger, and one claim to fame is being #1 in Google for the keyword “dumb blogger”. In fact, the top 5 results are either to SELaplana or about SELaplana. Unfortunately, “dumb blogger” doesn’t even register as having search volume, which generally means there’s less than 1 search a month.

The blog itself is an interesting mix of posts. Technology, making money, religion, there’s a little bit of everything. A truly impressive amount of content, spread over nearly 60 categories. As I was scanning the category list, there were the usual suspects, but also ones like “surgery”, and “God”. For a niche blog about making money online, there are quite a few off-topic posts.

According to Sustines, the blog gets about one thousand visitors every day. As he notes in that post, though, most of the keywords being used in search engines related to those off-topic posts, not to making money online. In my opinion, Sustines is sitting on a gold mine of information about what people are searching for online. While SELaplana doesn’t interest those visitors, he could create another niche blog or two that would.

And that brings up an excellent lesson about targeted traffic. Traffic alone doesn’t make you money, targeted traffic does. Keyword research is a critical component of writing a blog, and no blogger should write a post without having determined which keywords will bring in the right sort of traffic.

There are a few things that caught my eye that looked unprofessional that Sustines might want to fix. The first was that while he’s using the Top Commentators plugin, he doesn’t have it set to ignore his own comments (so the first entry in the top commentators list is himself). Another is that the Google ads in the right hand sidebar don’t blend well, having a white background while the sidebar itself has a gray background.

The sheer number of links in the sidebar is a bit overwhelming. The last 30 posts are shown in the sidebar, along with a list of projects, the most popular posts, the MyBlogLog widget that shows pictures of recent visitors, and a few links to anime guides.

I’d like the blog more if it were more focused on the primary topic, making money online, and didn’t have quite so much visual clutter.

With one thousand visitors a day, though, Sustines is sitting on a traffic stream that he should be able to make money from, if he can come up with a blog targeting what those visitors want.

I referred to Randall Cornett’s blog, RandLife, in my post, How to Make Money Blogging: What Would John Chow Do?. Well, Randall has entered the ranks of bloggers who run contests to gain reviews of his site with his Here’s your chance at winning a easy $100.

Since I write a blog about making money online, I could hardly pass up an opportunity to make an easy $100. Competition is fierce, though, with the likes of Jane May involved.

On with the review! RandLife is a blog about many topics, including affiliate marketing, search engine optimization, blogging techniques, and, in his own words, “my ever so boring ramblings”.

One of the things I really like about RandLife is that it’s a blog that includes topics about making money blogging, and Randall is actually making money blogging. That’s a significant accomplishment, and testifies to Randall’s perseverance. He says he made $55.78 in May by putting Google’s Adsense ads on his blog.

Now, before you start to say something about that not being much money, let’s put it into perspective. Randall has put a very discrete ad block on the top of his home page only. The ads don’t show on individual posts. This is classy, and very respectful of his readers. Nevertheless, this means that people following links directly to posts won’t see ads.

The sort of ads that show on RandLife are typically those about making money online. Let’s say Randall gets $1 per click on those ads (I don’t know exactly how much he gets, and he can’t tell us, but keywords about making money online are typically expensive). A 3% clickthrough rate on ads is average, which means that only 3% of the people who see an ad click on it.

Let me get my high school algebra text book out…that’s 55 people clicking on ads in May, I make that at a little over 1800 visitors. Some of those may be repeats, but that’s still a good amount of traffic coming through the blog. Don’t let the relative scarcity of comments fool you, RandLife has readers.

While some of the posts on RandLife are derivative, you can’t really fault Randall for that. The culture of blogging means that some topics are duplicated throughout the blogosphere. The recent acquisition of Feedburner is a great example of this. By the time I’d seen it appear for the fourth time in my RSS reader, I’d begun to tire of it.

Some of his other posts, though, are just plain interesting. His recent post about the Website Grader is an example. I’d never heard of this tool before, but it’s useful for anyone running a website. Randall gives value to his readers with lots of blogging tips.

If it sounds like I’m a fan, I am. While I cover far more than how to make money blogging at Online Opportunity, I think that’s the way that is most accessible to just about everyone. And I admire anyone who sticks with it long enough to build an audience, and who provides interesting original content.

Good job, Randall!

I’m taking a break from SEO to do another ebook review, this one of “On Demand Profits“.

“On Demand Profits” is one of those $7 ebooks. I’m finding a trend with these sorts of ebooks. They each give you one technique, and explain it in great detail. In this ebook, the technique is a way to get your affiliate links out to where people can see them, and to people who have a motivation to click on them.

The ebook itself is very professionally done. There’s a cover page, table of contents (9 sections, no less, for a single technique!), and the writing is clear and understandable. It was written by Alok Jain, who has apparently put out a number of these $7 ebooks (Two Minute Profits, reviewed in an earlier post, was one of his).

I normally don’t reveal the technique in these ebooks, since I don’t want to hurt the author’s sales. In this case, though, the technique is one I regularly recommend to people for free, so I don’t think it’ll make much difference if I tell you what it is.

The technique is this: join forums relevant to the product or service you want to sell, and put your affiliate link in the forum signature. Make sure the forum is one that allows affiliate links in signatures.

My normal advice goes like this: do not promote your link (e.g. posting “Click on my link”), but make quality forum posts and people will follow your link naturally. If you’ve targeted your forum properly and make quality posts, you’ll see some action.

Now, the ebook has 9 sections, so I certainly didn’t do justice to it in two paragraphs. Some of the other topics the ebook covers are:

• What products to promote
• How to find suitable forums to use
• Creating clickable signatures
• How to track which forums are converting best
• What not to post in forums

The ebook really is well done. One thing I would not recommend following is his advice to market On Demand Profits to forums related to Internet Marketing. Those forums are saturated with people who aren’t creative enough to find their own niche. Find a new product in a field you’re passionate about, and find forums relevant to that product.

If you want to purchase the ebook, you can do so here: On Demand Profits

Let me know how you do with the technique!

I have to admit, I haven’t really found any ebooks yet that deliver what they say they will. Most are vague, and don’t provide detailed explanations of how to accomplish what they say you can accomplish using their techniques. In terms of driving directions, they’re more like “Head east until you get to the ocean” instead of “Drive 2 miles to the shell station, turn left, go 2 more miles, etc.”

But, I tend to buy one now and then just on the off chance that they’ll provide useful information. The latest one I bought is Two Minute Profits. The ebook says it’ll show you one specific technique for making money with affiliate programs through Adwords.

As a recap, an affiliate program is where you get paid a commission for directing traffic to a product’s website. Adwords is a means of paying to get people to go to websites by placing advertisements into Google search results. So essentially, you pay to have people go to a product page, and if they buy the product you get a commission. Obviously, you need to pay less for Adwords than you make on commission.

Two things factor into this: cost per click and conversion rate. The cost per click is what you pay for each person who clicks on your advertisement to go to the product page. The conversion rate is how many of those people actually buy the product.

Keeping cost per click as low as possible is a good thing. Two Minute Profits says it’ll show you how to get the lowest possible cost per click. Generally this means you’re bidding on keywords that are not very popular (e.g. they get a low number of searches each month).

So, the review: Two Minute Profits does give you what it says it will. It shows in detail a specific technique and exactly how to go about using that technique (you should already be comfortable using Google’s Adwords to use this technique). Following the technique will get you low cost per click keywords.

The results of my limited playing with the technique were inconclusive. I wasn’t able to come up with any keywords matching the Two Minute Profits criteria that had any search volume at all (e.g. they didn’t get any searches each month). At least some search volume is needed so we have people viewing the advertisements. I used the Overture keyword tool referenced in the ebook as my way of estimating search volume.

Now, to be fair, I tried about half a dozen keywords and then called it a day. So the conclusion of the review has to be that the ebook delivers exactly what it says. Whether the technique actually works or not I can’t say yet. I’ll come back to it another day and try some more keywords.

At $7, Two Minute Profits is one of the cheaper ebooks out there. If you already have played with Google Adwords and want a new technique to try, you can purchase the ebook here.

If you’re new to Google Adwords, please do not just jump into it! You can lose a lot of money if you don’t know what you’re doing. I highly recommend Perry Marshall’s Definitive Guide to Adwords. You can signup for free email tips that are worth their weight in gold, and Perry continues to deliver email tips beyond the five days. There’s more value in his email tips than in many people’s ebooks!

I’ve also reviewed another ebook by the author of Two Minute Profits. Click here for a review of On Demand Profits.