WebDiggin.com: An Adventure to Make Money Online

For Derek, who talks about making money online, but hasn’t really gotten into the game yet.)

It’s not always easy to make money online. In fact, this post about making money online has been 12 months in the making.

Not because the post was particularly difficult to write, but because about a year ago, I realized I was spending more time blogging about trying to make money online, instead of actually trying to make money online. As Yoda might put it: make money online or don’t make money online. There is no try.

For those of you who have been reading WebDiggin for a while, yes, we still love BlueHost.

For those of you in a rush, skim the numbers and tables, but jump to the last chapter on first steps towards making money online. (Derek, start here.)

• Overview on How I Make Money Online
• How Much Money Can You Make Online? I’ve made $1011.18 (USD) online in 21 months
  • Why are there some differences between this Make Money Online Report and your previous ones?
• Income: $9639.66
  • product commissions,
    • How to make money online using Affiliate Marketing
    • Hints and tips when using affiliate marketing to make money online
  • website ads,
    • How to make money online using ads
    • Hints and tips when using ads to make money online
  • getting paid to blog.
    • Hints and tips when Making Money Online by Writing Sponsored Posts
• Expenses: $8,628.48
  • PPC advertising costs for my search affiliate marketing campaigns,
  • Research and Development costs,
  • Web contests, and
  • Webhosting and Domain Name Registration costs.
• Three Steps to Make Money Online
  • 6  reasons why I use WordPress to make money online (or 10 things I love about WordPress)
  • 10 reasons why I renewed my webhosting account with Bluehost to continue to make money online (or why I love BlueHost)

 

Overview on How I Make Money Online

I first started my adventure to make money with the internet on May 24, 2007. I read Affiliate Millions and it sounded so easy – sign up with Commission Junction, find a few good affiliate programs, create an account with Google AdWords, select a few relevant keywords, write a few good ads, monitor your search marketing campaign et voila: instant, expandable, repeatable, online, turn-key money making machine. (That’s why we like the idea of search affiliate marketing to make money online.)

I remember how excited I was to get my first online commission: $8.40. By the end of the month, I was thrilled to have made $13 in online commissions. The only problem was that I spent closer to a hundred dollars in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising costs, not to mention close to another hundred dollars in webhosting and domain name registration. (I made lots of mistakes with my search campaigns as well as my first choice of web host.)

Around December 2007, I started to make more money online than I was spending online. By the end of 2007, I had made $440.09 dollars online that year through affiliate commissions, but spent $881.35 in PPC advertising trying to make money online. If I include web costs, I was down by $631.46 in my attempt to make money online.

At the start of January 2008, I still hadn’t made any money online, but I found a niche to separate my blog from the other making-money-online blogs.

The general formula for make-money-online blogs to make money online is to recommend a whole slew of products to you and then make a commission if you buy one of the recommended products. WebDiggin is different from many of these money-making-blogs because we try to show exactly how much money we’ve lost (or made) online, which I think gives us a little credibility.

Trying to make money online is the new Gold Rush, so no wonder so many people are trying their hand at digging for money online. (Hence our choice of blog name: web-diggin.) When you look around, there are examples everywhere of people who’ve made big money online. That’s because there are so many different ways for you to make your first “million”: AdSense, affiliate marketing, adsense arbitrage, selling on ebay, PPC marketing, storefronts, Paid to Surf programs, web contests, etc…

The thing about these people who have found ways to make money online is that they make it look so easy! Of course, that’s the trick. Combine that with the fact that you have to separate the “real deal” from the “fools gold”, and all of a sudden, making money online isn’t as easy as it looks.

How Much Money Can You Make Online? I’ve made $1011.18 online in 21 months.

My goal is to make a million dollars online. So far, I’ve only made $1011.18 (USD) profit since I started in June 2007, but I”m still learning. (That works out to be $48.15 per month over 21 months or $1.61 per day. It’s coffee money, I know.)

I started to blog about making money online. In a blogosphere where most blogs don’t live to see their first birthday, 21 months later, I’m still in the game.

Posting how much money I’ve made online has been received with mixed results. Some people see this and say that’s a lot. Other people say it’s a joke compared to what they make. Some people send compliments and appreciate the advice. Other perople share their experiences and offer suggestions on how I can improve my bottom line. A few people flame and send angry messages.

Since I’ve started to try to make money online, I’ve made $9,639.66 through affiliate commissions (i.e. Commission Junction), contextual advertising (i.e. Google Ads), and paid blogging (i.e. Pay Per Post). However, I’ve also spent $8,101.82 on expenses, including PPC advertising costs (i.e. AdWords), and web costs (i.e. webhosting and domain registration).

Why are there some differences between this Make Money Online Report and your previous ones?

If you look carefully between this make money online report and my numbers from 2007, you’ll see a few discrepencies:

1. The amount of income made online is different. That’s because not all of the affiliate commissions are included yet. Some commissions don’t lock for 30-60 days, depending on the publisher.  That means that someone can return a product and your commission will be deducted because the product wasn’t sold. Also, some advertisers have a cookie that lasts for 30-60 days. That means someone could click on your link in November but not purchase the product until January. (It’s the difference between the click date, event date, and posting date.)
2. The 2007 Make Money Online Report includes revenue generated by Google Ads. I didn’t include it in today’s report until the next quarter when the money was direct deposited into my bank account. (I suppose for consistency I should have published the revenue generated by Google Ads as it happened month-by-month because I published the affiliate commissions and advertising costs month-by-month. Sorry.)
3. The 2007 cashflow report didn’t include my webhosting and domain name expenses. This report does. (I simply wasn’t as organized back then.)

Income: $9639.66

In 21 months, I’ve made $9639.66 (USD) online through three different sources:

1. product commissions,
2. website ads, and by
3. getting paid to blog.

Click on the picture below to see a larger version of the breakdown of how much money I’ve made online:

1. Make Money Online with Product Commissions (Affiliate Marketing)

The bulk of the money I’ve made online ($9,188.21) comes from affiliate commissions (i.e. Commission Junction).

I’m not going to identify the specific products I’m promoting for two reasons. First, to comply with some of the advertiser terms of service requirements. Secondly, I’m still new not confident in my ability to create other successful search marketing campaigns, so I don’t want to accidentally destroy my current campaign with competition.

I will say, however, that I am currently promoting 3 different types of products:

1. To date, I have made $318.56 in commissions from selling computer hardware and software products.
2. I have also made $394.90 online from selling internet services and products.
3. However, the bulk of the money I make online through product commissions ($8,474.75) comes from buying traffic and sending them to buy retail goods and services online from the major box retailers whose brands you would recognize.

Although $8,474.75 in commissions sounds like a lot of money, this income is offset by the advertising expenses ($7159.34) spent on buying traffic using Google, Yahoo, and MSN. In search marketing, you buy traffic and send it towards your advertisers. You make money online using search marketing when the cost per click (CPC) you pay to run your advertising campaign is less than the earning per click (EPC) you receive in product commissions.

In 2007, and in the first quarter of 2008, I experimented with several different advertising campaigns. However, by April 2008, I focused exclusively on this one campaign.

How to make money online using Affiliate Marketing:

Basically, you sign up for free with an advertiser network like Commission Junction (or LinkShare or any of the other networks.) Once you have an account, you can look through their lists of advertisers, find a good affiliate program, and apply to promote their products.

Some advertisers will automatically accept you, whereas other advertisers manually approve applicants. (They look at your blog or website and decide if you’re a good fit for their product and brand.)

Once you’ve found some products to promote, you scatter their special tracking links on the internet and try to send traffic to the advertiser. Any traffic that  clicks through your link will have your special tracking code so that if the person purchases a product, you make money.

The amount of the commission depends on the advertiser and the product. Commissions for retail products tend to be low (around 1-7% of the sale price) whereas online products can be as much as 30 to 50+% of the sale price.

There are several different ways to make money online using affiliate links. Be careful to read the advertiser’s terms of service because some advertisers specifically prohibit you from using some of these techniques:

1. Some people spread their affiliate links in chat groups, discussion forums, email mailing lists, or by commenting on other people’s websites. (It’s generally frowned upon to leave affiliate links when commenting in someone elses’ blog. Chances are they won’t publish it anyways.) I do know someone who has had some success leaving affiliate links in sites like Craig’s List, but I personally haven’t tried this approach.
2. Some people create websites and include affiliate links in the content of their posts or on the sidebars. You read the post, you follow the link to the advertiser’s site, you make the purchase, and somebody makes money online from your purchase. This is a major way for bloggers to make money online. The challenge, of course, is to build up the traffic and to create webpages that convert into sales and commissions. Some people create websites so that they or their friends/family members can buy stuff online and they will receive a commission.
3. Some people buy traffic from search engines and send them to their advertisers’ sites with their affiliate links. This is called search marketing, search affiliate marketing, or PPC marketing, amongst other things. This is the area I’m currently experimenting with to make money online. I find advertisers I recognize or like, create an ad campaign on Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, or MSN AdCenter, target specific keywords, set maximum bids for the specific keywords, put in the affiliate links, set a monthly budget, and then monitor closely to make sure the amount of money I spend on PPC advertising is less than the amount of commissions I make online through the affiliate links.

Hints and tips when using affiliate marketing to make money online:

1. Cloak your affiliate links (in other words, make the links look pretty and less obvious that they’re trying to make you money.) Affiliate links often look like this: http://www.jdoqocy.com/click-987294782-8234792384?sid=blahblahblah&url=http://moreletters&numbers.They’re messy, untidy, and obvious to people that they’re affiliate links (or at least that something special is happening.) We do our webhosting with BlueHost which allows us to mask our affiliate links by uploading a file called .htaccess into our blog directory. This means, our links look like this: domainname.com/productPrettier and easier to make money online with. You’ll need to register your own domain name as well as use an Apache-based webhosting account to upload your .htaccess file.  (Make sure your webhost isn’t using Microsoft IIS or you won’t be able to use the .htaccess file to get a 301 redirect to mask your affiliate links).Just create a textfile called .htaccess and include the following lines. Upload it to your blog’s directory.Redirect 301 /product  http://affiliatelink.com/click-987294782-8234792384?sid=blahblahblah
   Redirect 301 /product2  http://affiliatelink2.com/click-98723422-92384?sid=blahblahblah
   Redirect 301 /product3  http://affiliatelink3.com/click-98729233-82344792384?sid=blahblahblah
2. Be careful to read the advertiser’s terms of services because some of them explicitly forbid buying traffic from the search engines, placing links in forums, or using your own links to buy products. A few advertisers explicitly state that you can use your own affiliate links to give yourself a discount, while others explicitly state that you can’t.At the very least, read the terms of services because it’s interesting to see what some companies prohibit and others don’t (yet). It opens your eyes to different ways to use affiliate links to try to make money online.
3. Try to find advertisers that allow you to deep-link in their site. This means that you can create affiliate links to any page in their site. Some advertisers only allow you to link to their front page or a specific landing page, and no offense, but some of these landing pages don’t convert well. In other words, they won’t make you money very well.
4. As someone who isn’t making a million dollars online (yet), I recommend starting with an advertiser network (i.e. Commission Junction, LinkShare) for one reason: it’s easier to get paid because there is a wider variety of products to promote. Most services that make you money online have a minimum amount before they will cut a cheque (or more accurately, make a direct deposit into your bank account.) Google AdSense won’t pay out until you make $100. Amazon affiliates don’t receive a cheque until they reach $100. (They do get paid by direct deposit once they’ve made $10, however.) Commission Junction requires you to make $50 USD for a direct deposit and $100 USD for a cheque before you get paid, but at least you can promote a variety of products trying to make that amount. The Linkshare network of advertisers has a minimum payout of $1, so I think I might be looking more closely at their advertisers which includes some big names like Macy’s, iTunes, AT&T, and Office Depot.

2. Make Money Online with Website Ads

In the past 21 months, I’ve made $325.80 online through contextual advertising programs like Google Ads. Contextual ads are when you create your own content on your website or blog, insert some ad code, and then the ad network serves up ads that they believe are related to the content of your website.

Ad quality is obviously hit-or-miss, and it’s not perfect, but depending on the quality of your website and traffic, it can be an effective way to make money online. This is where people work on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) (i.e. adding nofollow to their outgoing  links) to get their websites listed as high as possible in the natural search engine listings to get the most traffic.

If you do this right, you don’t have to spend a dime on buying traffic through PPC advertising. You simply create strong content (or create strong traffic through back links and search engine optimization) and you make money online whenever someone clicks on your ads.

How to make money online using Ads:

Sign up for AdSense. This will allow you to make money online by placing Google ads on 1) your websites, 2) on the domain names that you own but are not currently using, 3) in your RSS feeds, and by 4) beside search results stemming from a Google Custom searchbar on your webpage (you make money when someone does a search from your webpage and then clicks on a sponsored ad.)

There are other options for contextual ads or text links, including the Rubicon Project,  AdBrite, AdGridWork, Adpinion,  Yahoo! PN and WidgetBucks. If you use a WordPress blog, you can use Martin Fitzpatrick’s AdSense manager plugin to make integration of the ads easier.

Hints and tips when using ads to make money online:

We haven’t mastered making money online with ads, but there appear to be two schools of thought:

• blog about what you love and the money will come, or
• create niche-sites and try to get on the first page for a search term by targeting long-tailed niche keywords. (I’m currently playing with Josh Spaulding’s Article Marketing Domination formula.)

Here are some more things that I’m thinking about:

1. Not all keywords are created equally. Some keywords pay out more money than other keywords. Try a service like spyfu.com to find out which are the most expensive keywords. Then you can use a service like SEOBook to search for long-tailed keywords with low competition so your page can rank on the first page of the search term. Check out Josh’s ebook for specific instructions on how to create mini niche-sites that make $5 per day.
2. Be carfeful to read the fine print. Google is very specific about click-fraud and will ban your website or account. Make sure to include a privacy policy and to follow their terms of service.
3. If you want to make money online using websites and blogs, the name of the game is traffic. Can you generate interested traffic to your website that will click on your ads? I’ve learned that the tech-savvy, internet power-users who write blogs about making money online generally don’t click on Google Ads. However, I have found that your average-Joe searching the net occasionally does click on the ads. I have two content driven sites that generate around $15 per month. I’m still working towards my goal of $5 per day.
4. Ad placement is key. We’re still experimenting with this one, but apparently placing a large ad box directly below your post title has the best results. (Be careful that the post title doesn’t mislead the visitor and violate your terms-of-service. “Hot deals of the day” as a post title placed directly above some google ads would mislead the visitor to click on the ads as Quick Online Tips pointed out.) So far, I’ve gotten more money when the ads blend into the website and when a visitor lands on a single post as opposed to the main index page of the blog.
5. Using WordPress gives me a lot more flexibility to control where my ads appear. First of all, you can use ad plugins like Martin Fitzpatrick’s AdSense manager plugin to control where the ads appear. But the power of WordPress comes from the ability to edit the themes directly using HTML and PHP, so I can control exactly where my ads appear. I found trying to tweak my Blogger theme was possible, but more of a headache than it was worth.

3. Get Paid to Blog – Blogging for Money

There are a few different companies out there  that will pay you to blog. I’ve made a total of $125.65 by blogging for money.

In theory, it’s easy to make money online by getting paid to blog. Visit PayPerPost or Smorty, create a free account and register your blog. Browse the  market place for writing contracts. The job offer will tell you about the product, whether the review needs to be neutral or positive in tone, how many words you need to write, whether you should or should not disclose that this is a paid blog post and finally how much the job pays. Accept the job offer, write the post, include the appropriate links to the product, tell PayPerPost or Smorty where the sponsored post can be found and wait for the money to show up in your paypal account. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Hints and tips when Making Money Online by Writing Sponsored Posts:

Things I’ve learned about trying to make money online by getting paid to blog.

1. Google won’t like you. Chances are when you put pay per posts on your blog, Google will penalize you in the natural search engine listings, so in theory, this will reduce the traffic to your site and affect how much you make from contextual ads.
2. It’s hard to get decent writing assignments. Sure there are some assignments that pay big bucks, but they’re far and few in between and often limited to high standing blogs.
3. It’s hard to get writing assignments, period. I remember checking every day through the Pay Per Post job listings. It would be hit or miss whether I found anything. Some times I would find things but if I didn’t accept right away, it would be gone.
4. It can be hard to get your sponsored post approved (sometimes). We had to edit our writing a few times in order for it to be approved by PayPerPost.
5. You have to write the post. If you don’t write, you don’t make money. I know this sounds obvious, but my gut tells me that getting paid to write reviews isn’t the fast way to make a million dollars online. Most writing jobs are around $2.50 – $5.00 per assignment at my low level. The most I’ve ever been paid to blog was $20 for a post. Once you get big, advertisers will approach you directly through the marketplace to commission a sponsored post. Having said that, when I look at the front page of PayPerPost today, the top posties make around $600 to $800 per month (or $7200 to 9600 per year).  Getting paid to blog isn’t a bad way to start making money online, but I don’t think you can’t make big money with it with the push of a button. Like I said, if you don’t write, you don’t make money.

Expenses: $8,628.48 (USD)

I’ve spent a total of $8,628.48 trying to make money online. Obviously when I started this adventure to make money online, I wasn’t shelling out thousands of dollars. In the first month, I spent just under a hundred dollars ($96.75) on web hosting (and our first web host called WebServe was a horrible choice. On the other hand, we switched to BlueHost and over a year later, we’re still with them.) I also spent $97.84 in that first month trying to make money online using the search engines.

Over time, I started to try other ways to make money online. My expenses in trying to make money online come in four categories:

1. PPC advertising costs for my search affiliate marketing campaigns,
2. Research and Development costs,
3. Web contests, and
4. Webhosting and Domain Name Registration costs.

I’ve only included expenses specifically related to the business of making money online, so I haven’t included the cost of my computer or the cost of my internet connection.

1. PPC advertising costs for my search affiliate marketing campaigns,

I’ve spent $7686.00 on buying traffic using the 3 big search engines:  Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Here are some of the things I’ve learned so far:

1. If the ad campaign isnt making money online right away, change it or shut it down. When I started to try to make money online, my first ad campaign wasn’t working, but instead of shutting down the campaigns, I kept on hoping that the affiliate commissions would start to roll in. Many advertisers will credit you with the referral for 30-60 days after the visitor clicks on your ad. So, you won’t actually know how much money you’ve made until everything gets locked in 1 or 2 months later. In looking at some data, I’ve found that after 3 days, I’ve accounted for 84% of my sales and after 4 days, I’ve accounted for 92% of the sales.
2. Content ads never converted into commissions for me – only search ads made money. When you create your search marketing campaign to make money online, you’ll have the option of only showing your ads whenever a user types the targetted keywords in the search engine or also to show your ads on relevant websites (i.e. content ads in Google Adsense). I’m sure Google Ads do wonders, but my ads never led to any sales when I placed them on other people’s websites. They only work when they show up on the search engine. Maybe you’ll have better luck.
3. If you are buying pay-per-click traffic using the search engines to make money online, be careful which keywords you go after. Some advertisers have restrictions on lists of keywords – either don’t use them or don’t out-bid the advertiser for the number one ad spot. This is the fun part (and challenging part) of making money online with the search engines: trying to figure out which keywords will make you the most moeny online.
4. Some advertisers allow you to use their brand names as keywords which means you can attack the head of their traffic. Other advertisers specifically forbid you to use their brand, and the brands of their competitors, forcing you to use keywords related to their product and attack the tail of their traffic.
5. Some advertisers might specifically prohibit you from directly linking to their site. In other words, you’ll have to link to your own site first, and then the visitor has to click on a link to the advertiser’s site. (Google AdWords doesn’t allow you to directly link to the advertiser’s website first, anyways.)
6. Use the SID cookie in your affiliate links to track which keyword you’re using. Not all affiliate programs allow you to use SID, but use it if you can. (Commission Junction allows you to use SID). That way it’s easier for you to figure out which keywords are making you money online and which ones are just spending your advertising budget. The affiliate link code will automatically include a code which identifies which website and which ad content you are using. SID allows you to add your own custom field to the tracking cookie. We have found that different keywords produce different results in the 3 major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN).
7. Test your search marketing PPC campaign in all 3 major search engines. We’ve found we get different results from Google, Yahoo, and MSN using the exact same ads and the exact same keyword bid. Make sure you experiment and track your keywords with SID.
8. Make sure you set the monthly budget. This is your way to keep control of how much you are prepared to spend on your advertising campaigns.
9. Use dynamic keyword placements in your ads. They will show up in bold when someone searches for them. MSN even allows you to use the dynamic keyword placeholders in the destination URL which means that it’s easier to use the SID cookie to track which keywords were used. (You can still set up custom destination URLs with Google and Yahoo, it’s just that you’ll have to do it manually one keyword at a time.)
10. What you say in your ads can increase or decrease your commissions. For example using the word “discount” and using the word “cheap” can mean the difference of 1% in your click-through rate.

2. Research and Development costs

I’ve spent $154.61 to buy 3 things to help me make money online:

1. Affiliate Millions by Anthony Borelli and Greg Holden. This is the book that got me interested in affiliate marketing and Search Marketing.
2. Josh Spaulding’s Article Marketing Domination eBook. I really like his blog and his ideas (i.e. using twitter to find people who are about to buy stuff). I’m still trying to find the time to put his ideas fully into practice but found him to be pretty helpful.
3. Article Post Robot (based on Josh’s recommendation as well). We’re looking for ways to increase traffic to our site to make money using Google ads. One of the ways we’re trying is to build back links by posting articles to article directories. (Google is a popularity contest. Generally speaking, the more links you have pointing to your site and the more popular the sites that are pointing to you are, the cooler you are in the eyes of Google.) I was spending hours trying to copy and paste articles manually. Article Post Robot is a way to automate the process into significantly less time. I’ll keep you posted.

3. Web contests

I spent $30 as prize money in various webcontests: I gave away $5 as an initial contest prize followed by another contest giving away $25 in 2008. I’ve tried to do web contests on some of my other blogs and they flopped miserably. Similarly low readership, but regular people just don’t commit to the web contest idea in the same way that chronic bloggers do.

It was a neat way to build in-bound links, but I haven’t decided whether it was worthwhile or whether I will repeat it. The prize money came from money I made from sponsored posts.

4. Web costs.

To be perfectly honest, I was a little surprised (and scared) to see that I spent $757.87 in online webhosting and domain name registration costs. This includes a bad webhosting experience with WebServe followed by paying for a total of 4 years of webhosting with BlueHost, in addition to 18 domain names.

I paid up for the next 3 years of webhosting with BlueHost because 1. I love their product, but 2. they have a pro-rated return policy that lets me cancel at any time. (That way if things change or my needs change, I’m not locked in.)

So aside from recurring domain name registration fees ($10 per domain name per year), the web costs should be quite low. (Having said that 18 domain names = $180 per year. I’ll definetely be downsizing any blogs or experiments that haven’t made any money online yet to recover the domain name costs.)

At one point, I was paying over $30 per year for a domain name and over $7 a month for a website that had 5 email addresses, a small server that took forever to load, and horrible technical support. At first I was happy because I didn’t know any better. Then, I realized that you shouldn’t be paying over $10 per domain name and for $7 per month in webhosting fees, you better be getting unlimited email addresses and websites hosted on a single account.

As a result of this experience, one of the side projects I’m working on now is providing a resource for friends and family members to use to find the lowest price for domain names and web hosting.

Three Steps to Make Money Online

We all need to start somewhere. (Derek, here’s where I would start to try to make money online.)

Here’s a list of steps that I would follow to make money online, beginning with low risk to high risk. You need to decide what you’re comfortable with.

Step 1. Ways to make money online without spending a dime

1. Set up a free blogger account (blogspot) with Google. You can get your feet wet with blogging and blogger accounts allow you to run Google Ads so go get a Google AdSense account too. Click on the My Account tab and scroll down to get your AdSense publisher account number (”Property Information”)
2. Set up a free account with Link Share and Commission Junction and find a few products to promote on your new blog. Put the affiliate links on your blog.
3. Sign up for a free account with Pay Per Post. (Your blog must be live for at least 90 days with at least 20 posts.)

Step 2. Ways to make money online by spending a few bucks per month

1. Eventually you’ll need to get a web host to take your game to the next level. (You can only go so far with a free Blogger account and the free WordPress.com accounts don’t allow you to use Google Ads or monetize your sites with PayPerPost or affiliate links. You’ll need to run the free WordPress.org software off of your own web host which means you’ll have to find a webhost provider.) We use Bluehost for many reasons. It will cost $6.95 per month, but you can run an unlimited number of websites off of a single account. You can also cloak your affiliate links so they’re less obvious.
2. You’ll also want to start to register domain names to improve your Search Engine Optimization as well as to look more professional. A .com domain name should cost around $10. With BlueHost, you’ll get the privacy registration for free. (Other services like GoDaddy charge $8.99 per year per domain name)

Step 3. Ways to make money online by spending more than a few bucks per month.

1. If you want to try your hand at search PPC marketing, you’ll need to sign up for accounts with Google (AdWords), Yahoo (Search Marketing), and MSN (AdCenter).  If you are going to go this route to make money online, I again, recommend that you set up a BlueHost account first. They offer free coupons with the search engines. At the time of writing, they offer $50 in free Google credits and $25 in free Yahoo credits (only valid with new Google and Yahoo accounts.) Be careful with PPC advertising as it’s easy to have a bad ad campaign spend more in advertising costs than you make in affiliate commissions. (We lost around $600 in 2007 because of this.)

6 reasons why I use WordPress to make money online (or Why I love WordPress)

1. WordPress is free. (You can always start with a free WordPress.com account, but eventually you’ll need to run WordPress.org on your own webhost if you want to run ads or make money online by using affiliate links. The WordPress.org software is free, but you’ll have to pay to have your own webhost.)
2. It’s easy to create a new website in minutes. Easy to create. Easy to maintain. Easy to change themes. Easy to add eye candy (i.e. widgets). Easy to add ads. Easy to add mini programs (plugins). Easy to add affiliate links. Easy to upgrade. Easy to backup.
3. It’s easy to do search engine optimization and help your website rank high in Google or the other search engines. Use the All in One SEO plugin.
4. It’s easy to use ads and affiliate links to make money online. Use the AdSense Manager plugin to insert your AdSense or affiliate link code easily into your blog posts and themes.
5. It’s easy to change the appearance of your blog or website. There are thousands of free themes to choose from. (You can start with the WordPress theme directory. Beginning users can simply pick a theme; power users can tweak the themes if they know HTML or PHP. Note: You need to run WordPress.org on your own webhost if you want to install your own themes.)
6. It’s easy to add extra features to the WordPress software. Check out the WordPress plugin directory where you can find over 4,000 plugins developed by other people. This is the reason why I switched from Blogger to WordPress. I found I could do more with WordPress because you could install these plugin programs. There are plugins to show visitor statistics, add a google map, allow visitors to preview their comments before they submit them, pop up little messages depending on where they came from. Note: You need to run WordPress.org on your own webhost if you want to install your own themes.)

10 reasons why I renewed my webhosting account with Bluehost to continue to make money online (or Why I love BlueHost)

Click here to sign up for an account with BlueHost.

1. You can install WordPress with the click of a button. You need to use WordPress.org (and not the free WordPress.com) software to run ads on your WordPress blog. WordPress.org software is free, but it can be a little complicated to set it up yourself if you’re not a code monkey and you’ll need your own webhost to run it. BlueHost is great because you can install WordPress.org software with the click of a button. (They use “simple scripts” to auto-install the WordPress.org software onto your account. You can also use the “simple scripts” button to upgrade your older WordPress installations if you previously used Fantastico Deluxe to install WordPress.) 
2. BlueHost charges only $10 for a domain name. Compare that to Network Solutions which charges you $35 per domain name per year (and another $9.00 per domain name per year to have domain name registration privacy. (You do have to have a webhosting account with Bluehost to buy domain names, but you get one domain name for free as long as you maintain a webhosting account. They also have a refund policy on domain names which is unheard of in this business. )
3. You get free domain name privacy registration with BlueHost for all of your domain names. GoDaddy charges $8.99 per year per domain name. If you’re not sure why you need domain name privacy regitration.
4. Allows PHP redirects to make cleaner affiliate links. It uses appache so you can upload a .htaccess file to redirect your affiliate links using a 301 redirect.
5. I accidentally let one of my domain names expire, but I was able to renew it 14 days later with BlueHost without any fees. Usually if you let your domain name expire, your registrar will charge you an additional fee to get your domain name back.   
6. You can set up as many different websites as you want from the same BlueHost account. For example, you can have unlimited subdomains on your account (i.e. subdomain1.yourwebsite.com, subdomain2.yourwebsite.com, subdomain3.yourwebsite.com) You can also have an unlimited number of domain names assigned to your account. This means you can have yourwebsite.com, anotherwebsite.com, and a differentwebsite.com run off of the same BlueHost account but all have different content to make money online. (My first webhost wanted to charge me money to run different websites off of my account.)
7. It’s easy to create email accounts based on your domain names. Easy to create, easy to use, and more official looking. Easy to connect to Microsoft Outlook or another email program.
8. It’s cheap and affordable and it’s easy to cancel if you don’t like their webhosting. $7 per month, but you pay up-front for 1 or 2 years.  The best part about BlueHost is they have a pro-rated refund policy on their webhosting plan which means if you cancel halfway through the year, you get whatever you didn’t use back. 
9. There’s room to expand. I don’t need a dedicated IP, SSH, or some of those other things yet, but they offer it.
10. Quick customer service. The few times my site has been down, when I sent in a call ticket, a real person responded by email. (In all cases, the problem was resolved from their end before I received the response from the technician.)

Click here to sign up for an account with BlueHost.