Surprise Surprise! I got an email other day saying I won some prizes for Shoemoney RSS Contest. I won $100 Google Adwords account from Darin Carter: www.darin.cc and $20 Cash prize from Joe at www.joetech.com

I got $20 cash sent to my Paypal immediately from Joe. Thanks! How cool is that! All you have to do is subscribe to RSS by entering your name and email address at Shoemoney.com

Shoemoney and John Chow is having a RSS contest this month. Only one more day to go and looks like John Chow is leading in the contest. Go subscribe to Shoemoney RSS or Johnchow RSS Contest. Both are giving away great prizes. You might win too!

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Every other day I’m reading inspirational stories of how people got rich and successful online. There are few that just got lucky and was there at the right time (tech boom). Some just have worked hard and persevered. We been hearing about Ashley at Whateverlife.com website all over the internet and even featured on CNN twice. I personally think she deserved to get that exposure and successful site that generates over $1 million a year. She worked hard and dedicated her time for two years, now its paying off.

Another story that you should know about is how TrafficZ co-founders started their company. Kevin Vo and Ammar Kubba are co-founders of TrafficZ, an industry leader in monetizing parked domains. Looks like Kevin and Ammar put in time and dedication to get their business running. They almost didn’t make it. They were one client away from dropping this idea and doing something else. One client is all it took them to continue pushing their business and successfully getting a contract with Yahoo Search (Overture). Read rest of TrafficZ story at DNJournal

We all have ideas and strive to make tons of money to retire early right? I have many ideas in back burner but don’t have enough time to do them and lack of capital to start. It doesn’t matter if your idea is small like starting a blog or big idea that can revolutionize the internet. We all seen ideas like Paypal, YouTube, Slide.com, and plenty of Facebook Apps start out small then it explodes with funding from Angel or VC investors. Do you have an idea but don’t have any capital? You can read and learn how to network with potential investors and other start-up companies seeking funding at Techcrunch Forum.

Also checkout 2007 Finalists: Best Young Entrepreneurs

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A couple of week ago, I got an invitation email from Patrick Gavin from MediaWhiz, AuctionAds, Text-Link-Ads, and now ShoppingAds. I’ve tried AuctionAds for several months then removed from my sites from poor performance. I’m sorry to report that ShoppingAds is no better than AuctionAds. I’m mean we are talking about cost per click for ShoppingAds versus Cost per action with AuctionAds.

Here is an example of what ShoppingAds look like.

I managed to insert several different campaigns: one campaign using their Automatic Popular Keywords and rest were from my selected keywords that I used to show targeted ads. Glad this is in Beta because I sent them 49,000 impressions, resulting in 51 clicks, total $1.53 in earnings. That averages to $0.03 per click, this is similar to lowest of the low from adsense earnings. $0.03 per click? I did use their popular keywords: Ipod, Tv’s, Camera, etc. ShoppingAds claims to average $0.25/click

I really like the way you can customize ads, showing without borders, and eye catching “Hot” button on the top left area but these ads are not performing well for my sites.

If one advertising network isn’t working out for you? There are so many options you can choose from: Chitika, Widgetbucks, TTZMedia, Amazon.com, or go straight to source: Shopping.com partner.

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I first heard about this Make Money Online method from SeoDave at WickedFire forum. He started a thread called “SeoDave’s Guide to Generating High Converting Zip/Email Submits”. SeoDave written a short guide about how to promote zip/email submits. I really liked his idea and I have to give him credit for sharing this out in the public. I’ve seen other people try this method then quit because they were not profiting from it.

I decided to give this a try myself so I read SeoDave’s instructions and partly copied his site Mike Vick Survey to my own campaign.

My test site: www.cheaphannahtickets.com I created a single page with a Question and voting system (Yes or No). I followed exact method as SeoDave but I used my own idea for Hannah Montana.

Hannah Montana is very popular these days and her fans are disappointed because her concert ticket prices are so high. She’s on the news often so I decided to use this topic for my experiment.

When someone takes a vote from this poll question (Yes or No), they are taken to an Old Navy $500 Gift Card sign up page. I make $1.25 each time someone inserts their zip code on that Old Navy result page.

About a week into this campaign, I only had the Question and Answer (Yes or No) button on the site. Then, I decided to add Google Adsense ads on the site to offset the cost of advertising and also added Google Video ad as well. (very simple page to create).

My Adsense stats

I had Hannah Montana related ads on the site from Shoppingads

My ClickBooth Stats: Old Navy $500 Gift Card Zip Submit Offer

Adwords campaign stats

So far I have spent $31.31 in advertising in 2 weeks. Average $0.10 per click per visitor.
Total Earnings: $36.86 combined from Adsense, ShoppingAds(removed), and $1.25 Zip offer from Clickbooth.
My experiment is still profitable: $36.86 - $31.31 = $5.55 profit (with help from Adsense earnings).

Conclusion: I didn’t do this to make tons of money. I had lot of fun and learned a new method of making money online from SeoDave. There could be some improvements in monetizing it.

1. Turn this into an actual Hannah Montana fan blog to generate organic traffic and repeat visitors. Add a forum and gallery section so the visitors has something browse and return to. Just make the zip offer as sticky post so it always stays on the top for new visitors to see.

2. Implement other monetizing options: kontera ads, popups/popunder, CPM ads, and a place to capture email addresses (sending future email/zip submit offers, get them to subscribe to rss or newsletter to have them come back to the site).

3. Continue this campaign, develop a blog, then sell this site for lump some profit. (Provide traffic and earnings stats).

Try this out, pick a hot news story then create a voting site. Good Luck,

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I been really busy this month working on my online ventures. Posting is last thing on my priority list. However, I’m trying to find the time to write at least one blog posts a day. That is when I have enough time to write. Anyways, I’m checking for traffic stats on my blog here and noticed that I receive a PR3 in recent Google update.

I didn’t think I would receive a page rank this time around since this blog is still new, less than 2 months old. Plus, latest news throughout the internet about page rank updates been very dismal. You are hearing everyone’s page rank dropping and not a single blog posts about their page rank was increased to PR5,6,7 and so on.

I’m not planning on selling any text link on this blog anytime in the future. Page rank doesn’t really matter if my blog isn’t getting any traffic right? So, my priority should be posting quality contents and continue to drive traffic to my blog.

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Just few weeks ago, we noticed Google downgraded PageRanks on some popular sites like John Chow going from PR6 to PR5. Now we are hearing all over the Internet with another PageRank downgrades amongst other popular blogs like: Problogger PR 6 to PR4, Copyblogger PR6 to PR4, and Engadget from PR 7 to PR5. There are plenty more blogs and websites that lost PR. Check out the list here at DailyBlogTips.

Looks like Google is trying to penalize people selling text links and marketplaces like text-link-ads. With so many people earning income from internet advertising, this PageRank downgrade will hurt them. We all know PageRank is a scale that determines the ad rate, but might not be in the future.

Google is trying to sway away from people buying and selling text links on their sites well as not to focus strictly on PageRank system. This is true. Do not rely so much on PageRank when you are buying and selling advertising. Look for traffic, relevancy, and ad location; choose between text link or banner ad for better conversion. Most importantly, able to track incoming traffic from that ad space and able to figure our return on investment: Example: capturing email addresses, using these leads to makes future sales, or have them subscribe to your newsletter and RSS feed.

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