WebDiggin.com: An Adventure to Make Money Online

How to Get $100 from Yahoo & Google combined? Easy. Sign up for a BlueHost account to host your websites (There are lots of reasons to switch to BlueHost). A year (12 month) subscription with Blue Host costs $7.95 per month and you’ll get charged a one-time fee of $95.40. But, you get a $50 credit with Yahoo Search Marketing and a $50 credit with Google AdWords, so you’ve entirely recovered your costs. (BlueHost only charges $6.95 per month if you sign up for 24 months.)

There are two ways to think of this promotion. Either 1. You spend $100 to experiment with search marketing and you get free unlimited content website space for a year or… 2. You spend $95 to experiment with making money through content websites and you get a bonus $100 to experiment with search marketing on yahoo and google’s search engines. Not bad.

My wife just signed up with Yahoo and Google to use the coupon codes from BlueHost. (The coupons only apply to new accounts.) When you log into your BlueHost control panel, you should see at the top right a section called promotional. Here is where you’ll find your Yahoo Search Services ($50 Free!) and Google AdWords ($50 Free!) links.

Part 1. Getting a free $50 credit from Yahoo Search Marketing

The Yahoo link in your BlueHost Control Panel is a special link that sends you directly to Yahoo’s search marketing webpage. When you arrive there, it should say $50 promotion or something to that effect. (In other words, you can’t use your own affiliate link to get the secret discount and make a commission on this sale.)

We had a slight problem with the free $50 Yahoo Search Marketing promotion. You have to pay $30 with your own credit card to activate the account and receive the free $50, so in essence you’re getting $80 of money for only $30. (It’s the same when you promote Yahoo Search Marketing as an affiliate marketer: Yahoo! Sponsored Search connects businesses and customers online. Sign up and get a $25 credit.) It’s still not a bad return on investment. However, when we closed the transaction, Yahoo took a long time to verify our order and when we finally logged into our account, it only showed the $30 from our credit card. The $50 free credit was missing… We’ve since contacted Yahoo and expect the problem to be corrected shortly. I suspect it’s a problem on Yahoo’s end since up until the final screen did it list $80 in our account.

Part 2. Getting a Free $50 Credit from Google AdWords

Seeing the free $50 credit with Google AdWords was a little easier. From the BlueHost control panel, you click on the link for Google AdWords. It leads you to a page that generates a coupon code for you. You can then use your own affiliate link to get to Google AdWords to sign up for a new account. My wife went through the process and started up her own Google AdWords account.

Here’s the fine print on the Google AdWord coupon from BlueHost. You have to pay a $5 non-refundable activation fee (but $45 for free ain’t bad). The coupon has to be applied within 15 days of creating your BlueHost account and… offer valid only in the US and Canada. The plus side is that the promotion is currently slated to run the entire year (expires Dec 2008):

Promotional credit must be applied to a new AdWords account within 15 days of creating the account and is valid only for new Google AdWords™ customers with self-managed signup accounts. Advertisers will be charged for advertising that exceeds the promotional credit. Advertisers will need to suspend their ads if they do not wish to receive additional charges beyond the free credit amount. Subject to ad approval, valid registration and acceptance of the Google AdWords™ Program standard terms and conditions. The promotional credit is non-transferable and may not be sold or bartered. Offer may be revoked at any time for any reason by Google Inc. One promotional credit per customer. Advertisers with self-managed signup accounts are subject to a $5 activation fee. Offer valid only for advertisers in the U.S. and Canada signing up through the URL provided for the promotion. Void where restricted or prohibited by law. Expires 12/31/2008.

The downside seems to be that she can’t access her promotional money in her Google Account. This might be because she selected prepayment instead of postpayment (which means she tops up her account with her credit card before running ads, instead of running the ads and then getting billed by Google). We’ve sent an email to Google to see what they can do for us.

Bottom Line? We seem to be jumping through some hoops to get our free $100 from Google and Yahoo, but in the end, we’re quite confident that it will all work out. We’ll keep you posted on our free money.

(1 votes, Rating: 4 out of 5)

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