Google Knol will Help You Make Money Online

Google officially launched a new web authoring tool called Knol on Jul 23. Google Knol is free and opened to everyone. It is a content sharing network where you can write and publish articles in most of the topics. Each article page or content page you created is called a Knol.

Publishing a Knol is quite similar to publishing a blog post except the tone is more formal. You can insert related picture or image to your Knol and once your Knol created, readers are allowed to comment and rate your article in the Knol.

What Benefits You'll Gain from Publishing Google Knols?

AdSense Ads is Allowed in Knols
Google said that the authors can choose to include AdSense ads in all their Knols. So, each of your Knols that attract traffic may earn you some AdSense ad revenue. But, if you are actively creating Knols that share useful content, it is possible to earn a nice AdSense income every month as you will have more Knols gaining traffic.

Get Free Google Traffic
The Google knol homepage http://knol.google.com gained thousands of quality backlinks in less than a week. It is expected that it will gain decent of backlinks just like the other two content sharing networks, Hubpages and Squidoo. Because of the huge amount of backlinks Hubpages and Squidoo have gained, they are now getting million of visitors from search engines like Google and Yahoo every month (I believe most are from Google).

This will happen to Google Knol as well. Google Knol will soon gain huge amount of backlinks and many of the Knols created by different authors will start ranking high on Google search engine and enjoy free Google traffic. Those who manage to get their knols ranked on a competitive keyword will receive steady traffic. They can include links in their Knols to direct these Google traffic to their website or blog or choose to monetize their Knols with AdSense ads so that these Google traffic can be converted into AdSense revenue.

Google Knol has their own content policy and term of service. You should read and understand them before creating a Knol to publishing your content. Google doesn’t allow spamming, any Knol that against their policy will be deleted.

What is Google Adsense?

Google Adsense is a program that allows web publishers to partner with Google and earn additional income. When someone joins the program, they allow Google to place ads on their website or blog, and based upon the ad that is shown, they will either get paid for a certain number of ad impressions or when one of their visitors clicks on these ads.

Google uses their technology to “read” the content on the pages the web publisher is allowing them to place ads on. This increases the chances of the ad being relevant to the topic of that particular web page or blog entry, which also increases the chance of a reader clicking on that ad.

While Google does have the final say in which ads appear on which pages, the web publisher is the one that decides how they will look and where they will go. Adsense users can choose from several styles of ads, including links only as well as full ads with text and even ads with pictures.

In addition to choosing which type of ad, a user can choose from many sizes and shapes of ad boxes, also known as ad units. In the final step, the user gets to fully customize the color of the ad units, including the borders, links and text.

In recent months, Adsense users have been allowed to publish ads on their site in a whole new way with Adsense embedded YouTube players. Many web publishers are actively placing videos on their sites and blogs to help grab their visitors’ attention and add interest to their site. Now these web publishers can earn additional income for it, too.

The actual amount of income a person earns through Adsense has many variables. Since a person generates income through the amount of clicks they are receiving or the amount of people who are viewing the ad, a website owner with a large amount of traffic has the potential to earn a considerably greater amount of money.

There are, in fact, a number of people who are earning large sums of money with the Adsense program, but they are few and far between. To many website owners, Adsense is only an additional stream of income. Simply joining the Adsense program is not a guarantee of future income, it is only a possibility of future income.

Adsense does provide tools for their users to help them maximize their earning potential. One of these is called a channel. This allows the user to create different styles of ad units and place them on different pages of their site in order to track the results. This can tell the user which shapes and sizes of ads, as well as what type of content, induces the highest amount of earnings.

For web publishers looking to earn an additional stream of income, Adsense can be a great way to accomplish that.

How to Make Money by Socialising in Craigslist

Do you know that craigslist.org has discussion forums that cover a wide range of topics and categories? These discussion forums can help you make money online. By participating to these forums, you will have the opportunity to market your business to your new Internet friends in Craigslist. It will be even better if many of these Internet friends are living in the same area with you. There is a good chance they will become your business partners and buyers as well as your online friends.

How do you make money while socializing in Craigslist? People are more likely to purchase from someone they know or they can trust. So by getting into the online community of Craigslist.org and actively participate in discussion, a lot of the community members will know about you and this is pretty helpful for increasing your online business sale.

For instance, let's say that you run a book store and you want to have more customers. You post a business ad on Craigslist.org to let people know about a promotional offer that you have started i.e.10% discount on for all purchases more than $50. Then you begin to socialize on the Craigslist.org forums. You talk with this one and that. As you communicate with more and more Craigslist.org users and let them know about your Craigslist.org ad. Tell everyone that if they visit your ad and get the coupon, they will entitle the discount. The more people you can send to your Craigslist ad the more sales you may bring in. Also, ask them to vote for you in the best of Craigslist.org. All that your ad viewers have to do to vote you is click on the link ‘best of Craigslist.org’ in your ad page.

You will be able to expand your customer base by marketing your ad and your business on the general community of Craigslist. All the posting on Craigslist will cost you nothing except the ad posting on job board section.

So, how you can join Craigslist.org? Just like joining any other membership site, you first click on the join option, fill out your valid email address and then you will need to key in the scrambles letters at the bottom of the page so that the system can confirm you are real human and not some kind of robot signing up in Craigslist.

Apart from the book store example mentioned above; what other types of businesses can take the advantage of socializing and generate revenue through Craigslist.org? Well, almost any business can take the advantage of socializing. The most important thing you have to keep in mind is that the forums and discussion you are participating that are relevant to you business. If you are selling jewelry, then you should participate in jewelry group. If you are a writer providing content to web publishers and bloggers, then the writer group is perfect for you. It all depends on what your business is offering and what you plan to achieve through Craigslist socializing.

Socializing and earning money on Cragislist.org should not be limited to one another. You can also try to participate in as many groups as you possible, especially online groups. Online groups can be visited when the mood strikes you and there is a lot less involved.

How to Get Backlinks While Selling on the Internet

Backlinks are also known as incoming links. They are the links from other websites that point to your website. The more relevant backlinks you can obtain, the higher your website rankings can possibly be in Google and other search engines. When you reach top on Google, you'll receive a lot of free targeted traffic that will generate a consistent income for you.

What better than selling a product or service online and also gaining a backlink from it? You market your product or service from time to time and your backlink increase gradually without extra effort. This is the advantage you will enjoy when you set up your own affiliate marketing program to promote your product. People will join your affiliate program and place a link in their website pointing to your site for earning affiliate commission.

Affiliate program is a powerful way to increase free and quality backlinks. But, you shouldn't start an affiliate program specifically to gain backlinks. It wouldn't work that way. You need to have a quality product or service targeted to a niche market and offer a fairy high percentage of sale commission to your affiliates. Then only your affiliate program can attract affiliates to sign up and help you market your product. Most affiliates use website to promote your product. They will place your link on their site which means free backlink to you.

Also, try to provide as many quality marketing tools and resource as possible to help your affiliates make money. This can keep them happy and more willing to help you market your product. So your main focus should be on building your affiliate program and not the associated backlinks. A quality and long-lasting affiliate program that focuses on helping affiliates generate sales will increase your backlinks steadily from time to time. And you can expect to see your site getting higher and higher in the search engines. Once your site has ranked top for the keywords you targeted, the online profits that flow in will be even greater.

There are several options for establishing an affiliate program. The cheapest way probably is by using software like Fusion Quest to set up an affiliate program of your own. The software will plug into your existing website and allow you to manage everything thing yourself. The installation process can be complicated, so you may need to hire someone through freelancing website to help you out.

Another way of establishing an affiliate program is by joining an affiliate networks such as C.J.com as a merchant. Affiliate networks will provide everything you need for starting your own affiliate program. This is the easiest way to get your affiliate program launched and quickest way to get affiliates to help you market your product and give free backlinks to you. However, the cost for this option is very high for long-term as you need to keep paying to keep the program running.

How do bloggers make money from blogs?

The wonderful thing is that this is becoming easier and easier to do 2005 has seen many options opening up. I thought I’d take a look at some of the methods that bloggers are currently using to make money through blogs.

Income Streams for Bloggers - How to Make Money Blogging

Advertising Programs - Perhaps the most obvious changes in the past few months have been with the addition of a variety of viable advertising options for bloggers looking to make money from their blogs. The most common way bloggers seem to earn money online is via the contextual ad program from Google - Adsense. A more recent addition that many are using successfully are Chitika’s eMiniMalls and WidgetBucks, Text Link Ads.

Azoogle Ads, Intelli Txt, DoubleClick, Tribal Fusion, Adbrite, Clicksor, AdHearUs, Kanoodle, Pheedo, TextAds, Bidvertiser, Fastclick and Value Click (to name just some of the options) and there is a smorgasbord of options. Of course there is more to come with MSN Adcenter and YPN both in beta testing and with a variety of other advertising system currently in development (YPN is only available to US publishers).

Lastly there’s BlogAds - one of the first blog specific ad networks.

RSS Advertising - The past 12 months have seen some advances in RSS Advertising also. I’m yet to hear of any bloggers making big money blogging through it to this point - but as improvements are made to the ad programs exploring this I’m sure we’ll start to see examples of it being profitable.

Sponsorship - In addition to the array of advertising programs that are available to join there is a growing awareness in the business of the value and opportunity that exists for them to advertise directly on blogs. I’m hearing more and more examples of this and have been fortunately to have a couple of ad campaigns of my own in the past month - one with Adobe a couple of weeks ago and another just completed with Ricoh for a new digicam over at my Digital Camera Blog. These are not isolated cases - as I say I know of many blogs exploring sponsorship with advertisers at present and suspect we’ll see more of it in the year ahead. Sponsorship is also happening on a post by post basis with some bloggers being paid to write on certain topics by companies - either in one off or a regular fashion - and they are able to make big money from their blogs doing so.

Affiliate Programs - There are larger affiliate programs like Amazon, Linkshare, Clickbank and Commission Junction but also literally thousands of others from the large to the very small.

Digital Assets - Increasing numbers of bloggers have been developing other digital assets to support and add revenue streams to their blogs. By this I mean that I’m increasingly seeing e-books, courses and tele-seminars being run by bloggers. My recent foray into this with the first series of the six figure blogging course that Andy and I ran a few weeks ago and have just released the study version of. This type of activity will only increase in future - in fact this week I’ve seen numerous examples of bloggers running courses.

Blog Network Opportunities - with the rise in popularity of Blog Networks - bloggers are also being presented with more places to earn an income from their blogging - by writing for and with others. While it might be difficult to get a writing gig with one of the bigger networks - there are plenty who are always asking for new bloggers to join and who are willing to pay bloggers using a variety of payment models. While there are distinct advantages of blogging for yourself - blogging for an established network who will handle a lot of the set up/promotion/admin/SEO etc has it’s advantages also. More and more bloggers are combining writing for themselves on their own blogs with taking on blog network blogs as additional income streams.

Business Blog Writing Opportunities - as blogging has risen in it’s profile as a medium more and more businesses are starting blogs. Many of these companies have internal staff take on blogging duties - but an increasing number of them are hiring specialist bloggers to come on and run their blogs. I know of a number of bloggers who in the past month or two have been approached for such paid work. Check out Bloggers for Hire if you’re looking for this type of work.

Non Blogging Writing Opportunities - Also becoming more common are bloggers being hired to write in non blogging mediums. Manolo’s recent coup of a column in the Washington Post is just one example of this as bloggers are increasingly being approached to write for newspapers, magazines and other non blog websites. Along side this is the rise of bloggers as published book authors - this is to the extent that one blogger I spoke with this week complained to me that they were one of the few bloggers than they knew who didn’t have a book deal!

Donations - Tip Jars and donation buttons have been a part of blogging for years now but this last year saw a number of bloggers go full time after fund raising drives. Perhaps the most high profile of these was Jason Kottke of kottke.org who through the generosity of his readership was able to quit his job and become a full time blogger.

Flipping Blogs - Also more common in 2005 was the practice of ‘Blog Flipping’ - or selling of blogs. This has happened both on an individual blog level (I can think of about 20 blogs that sold this year) but also on a network level (the most obvious of these being the 8 figure sale of Weblogs Inc to AOL).

Merchandising - My recent attempt to sell ProBlogger.net T-shirts wasn’t a raging success, but it is an example of how an increasing number of bloggers are attempting to make a few extra dollars from their blogs by selling branded products through programs like Cafepress. While I didn’t have a lot of success with merchandising - quite a few larger blogs are seeing significant sales - especially blogs with a cult following. I’m not at liberty to discuss details - but I know of one largish blog which will see sales over $20,000 in merchandise for the calendar year of 2005.

Consulting and Speaking - While it has been popular for established consultants to add blogs to their businesses we’re also starting to see bloggers with no consulting background able to make money by charging readers for their time in consulting scenarios BECAUSE of the profile that their blogs have built them. Blogging has the ability to establish people as experts on niche topics and we all know the value of being perceived as an expert. I spoke to one blogger last month who charges himself out at over $200 an hour for speaking and consulting work - his area of expertise was something that he knew little about 18 months ago - but through his blog he’s become a leader in his field and a minor celebrity in his industry.