Once I get all my websites built and am watching the zillions of dollars rolling in from Adsense, affiliate programs and link sales you might think I’d be tempted to chill out and spend all of my time being a lady of luxery. But you’d be wrong. I’ll only spend 90% of my time being a lady of luxery, another 5% maintaining my sites and the remaining 5% looking for other ways to earn money online that aren’t related to my websites.

I really love creative type things like drawing and writing so I’ll be searching out opportunities for paid gigs writing travel articles and designing logos. I might also get a chance to live it up in hotels in Asia and write some reviews for Expedia. All of these things will bring in a bit of extra income here and there and are things that I’ll enjoy doing so they won’t feel like work. I’m not as good a writer as I’d like to be and still need to work out how to use Adobe Illustrator so taking on little jobs will be a challenge and will force me to keep learning.

If you’ve got any talents, they could be in demand. It could be anything from writing and creating logos to coding or designing Wordpress templates. If you’ve got a skill to offer then check out Elance and have a look around for jobs that might suit you. Of you could always look into selling things on eBay, or look for gigs as a translator. There are loads of opportunities out there, you just need to find them.

Or if travel writing is more your thing and you want to compete with my amazingly awesome writing skills then check out this list of travel magazines that want to publish your writing.

This month is the first that I’ve explored this area and so far I’ve written a few articles for Brave New Traveller at $20 a pop. I’ve also designed a cartoon logo type thing (shown to the right) for $50. The articles can take awhile to write so $20 isn’t much but with each article I get links back to a couple of my sites which makes it worthwhile. The logo only took a couple hours so my time was well rewarded and I enjoyed it.

Knowing that once I quit my job in December all of my income will be coming from my websites is exciting, but a bit scary too. By adding a few more income streams in there it reduces the risk a little bit and keeps me out of trouble.

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I had just about resigned myself to the fact that my meager web empire would never break through that elusive $100/month earnings barrier and then suddenly my eyes were opened to the wonderful world of selling links directly to other sites. I’ve had a bit of success doing this and here’s a bit of information that might be handy to people who are just getting started in this area.

Where to Look for Buyers

Digital Point has a very busy link sales forum that has served me well in the past. There are all types of links on offer and it’s a great place to start. Most posts are from sellers but buyers will occasionally post what they’re looking for so it’s worth trolling through a few pages worth of posts before submitting your own offers.

Most of my large sales have come from contacting companies directly. If you have a well targeted niche site and can find companies who want to reach you target market then you should do well in this area. It’s interesting to note that none of the people I sold links to even asked me for any information on how many visitors I was getting. I think marketing online is still a new area for smaller businesses and many aren’t sure of what questions to ask and have no idea how much ads should cost. They still have a marketing budget to spend though and you can use their lack of experience to your advantage.

If you are having trouble finding companies to approach, try looking through some magazines that cater to your target market and focus in on the ads. Make a list of each company you think would fit well with your site and send out some emails. These companies will be paying big bucks for ads in most magazines so if you offer them a reasonable price for a link or ad on a well targeted site then there is a good chance they can swing some of that advertising budget your way.

Setting Your Link Price

When I had to set my first price I was totally clueless. I posted a ‘help me, I’m clueless, how much should I charge for links’ messages in the forum but nobody came to my rescue. I was going to pull a price out of my ass but thought it might be a better idea to have a look around the forum to see what sites similar to my own where charging.

Initially I wanted to set up monthly payments but decided that the hassle was too much effort and instead tried for sales in 3, 6 and 12 month slots paid into my Paypal account. The more months purchased, the better the price per month. I’ve since found this site that makes setting up monthly Paypal payments really easy so I don’t mind selling monthly links anymore. I actually prefer it because it’s all automated and I don’t need to chase people for renewals.

Your best bet is to hang around the Digital Point forum for awhile to get a feel for what your site is worth and then submit a post with your prices and hope for the best. Aim high at first but stay flexible. If you don’t get any sales you can always lower your price but. If you set your prices too low and sell out then you’re selling yourself short.

Keeping Track of Link Sales and Renewals

Once you’ve sold a bunch of links, keeping track of expiry dates can be a bit of a headache, especially when you have a lot of sites. You have to keep on top of expiry dates so you can chase people for renewals. I’ve had mixed results with renewals. About half always renew and the other half are one offs but filling empty ad slots isn’t too difficult.

To help me keep track of things I’ve done the truly nerdy thing and whipped up a simple spreadsheet to track the link’s URL, location on my site, price, expiry date and the contact details of whoever bought it. I would be completely lost without it so once you start selling links, have a think about how you want to keep track of them.

The Importance of Google Page Rank

Travoholic.com had somehow stumbled and bumbled its way to a PR5 ranking over the years and I soon learned that links on my site were in demand. Because of this, all of my link spaces were sold out a few hours after I placed my first ad and I was pretty happy with myself.

That site’s PR has since fallen to 4 and suddenly it doesn’t stand out from the crowd quite as much. When my PR dropped, so did my prices and the number of replies to my ads. The crowd over at Digital Point are pretty savvy so if you’re looking to sell links there then PR matters a lot.

My Experiences

I’ve had some success in this area and it’s something I wish I would have explored a lot earlier. The money I earned through link sales in December 2007 was the easiest money ever and I was in shock at all the extra cash that was rolling in. Things have since slowed down but it’s nice to know that if I need to pad the ol’ Paylpal account a bit I can make space for a few more ads and more than likely fill them fairly easily.

On the down side, I feel like a bit of a sell out. The main page of Travoholic.com is covered in ads: Adsense in the middle, Text Link Ads on the right, and a bunch of random links in the footer. Having all these outgoing links not only looks terrible, I also suspect it has a negative impact on my PR. There are also some rumblings that the almighty Google is attempting to crack down on this by devaluing links that have been purchased. How they’ll do this is anyone’s guess but Google knows all and sees all so I don’t doubt they’ll find a way. If this happens then the bottom could drop out of the market pretty quickly.

So while direct link sales can be easy money, there are tradeoffs. The trick I think is to find a few companies that are perfect matches for your site’s readers and then build long term relationships with them that will hopefully benefit you both.

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Text Link Ads (TLA) and Linkworth are two companies that act as the middlemen in the world of selling links. If you have a quality site, a reasonable amount of traffic and a good Google Page Rank (PR) then there are people out there who want to pay you to put a link on your site. How do these people find you? Well they can either hunt you down on their own and email you (very time consuming) or they can do things the easy way by signing up to one of these programs and browsing through member sites to see if they can find a good match.

Text Link Ads

I had a hard time setting this up because all of my sites were built ages ago with good ol’ HTML and TLA won’t run on .htm or .html pages. So I had to figure out how to convert my sites to PHP which was a bit tricky since I didn’t even know what PHP was! But once things are up and running you don’t have to do a thing except approve or deny ads. Or if you change the settings you don’t even need to do that. The main problem I have with TLA is that they set the price without any input from you and then take 50% of the link price.

It can also be pretty difficult to get accepted into this program. I submitted my Living in London site to TLA about 6 months ago and it was rejected. Granted, 6 months ago the site was complete poop and barely got any traffic. Now that I’ve overhauled it though it’s my top performing site as far as traffic goes and is in an area that I think would attract lots of advertisers. TLA say they review sites that have previously been rejected each month but I have yet to hear anything from them. It’s very frustrating since I’m not allowed to resubmit my site - they just tell me to wait… and wait… and wait…

I would advise you to make very sure your site is up to scratch before submitting it to TLA . I’m not sure what their minimum requirements are but based on my experience I would aim for at least 100 visitors per month and PR4 before submitting to try to avoid getting stuck in the no man’s land that my London site seems to be in at the moment.

TLA also run an affiliate program that I’ve just signed up to as I’m writing this post. They pay $25 for each approved sign up so if you’re thinking of joining TLA why not use my link to earn me a few bucks. Or you’ll often see the image to the right on people’s sites. If you click on it and sign up then they’ll earn $25. So if you’re planning on registering with TLA, head to your favourite blog, click on that image and the author will get a commission. Affiliate sales in action!

Linkworth

Linkworth gives you more control since you can set your own price, put your link anywhere, and they only take 30% of the link price. Rather than placing PHP code like TLA, you can add the link to your HTML code meaning you can put it anywhere and format it however you like. It’s more flexible but it also means that it’s more hands on and you can’t automate the process as with TLA.

I’ve had a couple problems with Linkworth when advertisers’ creditcards were declined and I didn’t receive payment when I was supposed to. Linkworth didn’t let me know so I had these ads up for free for several weeks which is pretty poor on their part. Keep an eye on payments to make sure you’re getting what you’re owed and if you notice a missing payment contact Linkworth to see what their story is.

Text Link Ads and Linkworth Earnings

TLA have managed to sell 9 out of the 10 slots on Travoholic.com and 1 slot on Working Holiday Info. The prices have been pretty low at $12-15, meaning I only get $6-7.50 a month per link sale. That’s much lower than I was expecting but it feels like money for nothing since once things are set up I just wait for the money to roll in. I’m not sure if TLA ever raise their prices or what so as my sites grow, if the prices stay the same I will probably abandon TLA in favour of private link sales.

Linkworth started off great and I was earning $35/month straight off the bat from January 2007. In May I earned $56 but all of my advertisers have since jumped ship for reasons unknown. I’m wondering if Linkworth is losing advertisers as they head over to Text Link Ads or maybe they just don’t like my site anymore. *sob* I’ve lowered my price a bit but so far nobody’s biting.

So in summary, both of these programs are great ways to get started monotising your websites. Linkworth offers more flexibility but TLA is automated and once you get accepted and add the code there’s not much else to do. There’s no reason not to participate in both programs to try to fill up all your ad space.

Both programs take pretty hefty cuts though so if you have the time and a good, well targeted site then I’d suggest you try to sell links privately. More on that in the next post!

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Google Adsense is good as the steady, consistent earner but that’s boring! I want the thrill of the big sale… a dollar a day isn’t going to cut it anymore and that’s is where affiliate programs come in.

If you can find programs to match your target audience then these babies can pay off big time. Yesterday I sold a travel insurance policy through one of my sites that earned me nearly $90 in one go. That’s a lot of Adsense clicks let me tell you.

While the potential for huge earnings is there, finding the right programs and setting them up takes a lot longer than slapping some Adsense code on a few pages. Unfortunately I let my laziness get the better of me and put off exploring affliate programs properly until early 2007. Up to that point my only affiliate was through Hostelworld and I was lucky if I earned $5/month from bookings. Actually, most of the bookings from my site were my own!

Spurred on my other people’s remarkable stories of affiliate success, I decided to put more effort into this area. It’s a bit of a half-assed effort with only a handful of affiliates, but it’s a start. Here are the companies I use:

• Trade Doubler
• Clixgalore
• Affiliate Future

There are more out there like Commission Junction plus programs through individual companies, but other things like writing and designing new websites always seem to get my time ahead of scouring the net for products to sell.

Affiliate Sales Earnings

Affiliate sales earned me just over $500 last month but most of that came from one company. If I could spread the risk around a bit by getting some other programs up to speed then I’d feel a bit more confident. I really should put more time and effort into developing this area so it’s something I’ll be working on.

Finding good affiliate programs takes time, like I mentioned, and can involved sifting through a lot of unrelated affiliates on each of the networks (Trade Doubler, Clix Galore etc.) until you find a few that are good matches to your content and target market. Once you find one that pays off though it’s worth it.

I like to cheat sometimes and head over to my competition’s websites to see which programs they’re using. Sometimes you can’t tell they’re using an affiliate program because they use tricks to hide the affiliate links that show up in the bottom left hand corner of your browser (I’ll show you how to do this in a later post) but viewing the source code will reveal all. Sneaky, yes, but a huge time saver too.

I’m still learning by trial and error and really need to set more time aside for finding affiliates… damn this laziness of mine! I’ll keep you posted on my progress though once I get off my arse and get to work.

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I made a pitiful attempt to monetise Travoholic.com with Amazon way back in 2003-ish and still have yet to sell a single thing through them. I resigned myself to the fact that my site would remain a hobby and any dream of being able to make a dime had been crushed by my lack of book salesmanship.

I didn’t know anything about the world of SEO and didn’t know that webmaster forums even existed so when I was put onto Adsense by the guy that runs 2 Camels, I really didn’t have a clue what to expect. For all I knew, my site only got a few daily visitors so getting them to click on these ads seemed like an impossibility.

Google Earnings History

When I got my first ever click for 0.03 back in November 2004 I was completely amazed. I even thought that 3 cents for a click was a huge amount when compared to the payouts of CPM banner ads that were in rotation at the time of 0.00000000001 per visit or something crazy like that.

More clicks made their way to my wonderful wee Google ads and by the end of November I had earned nearly $20. This was an amazing amount of money to me considering I didn’t believe it was possible to make money from my site at all. In December I made $30 and was dancing in the streets because I had broken the $1 a day mark. In January 2005 I made $70 and I my first Google cheque arrived and things were about to get serious.

February and March saw me earn $175 and another cheque rolled on in. I started hanging out at the Digitalpoint forums, discovered the world of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), made some tweaks and I thought things were about to take off.

Well, things didn’t take off. They tanked. For the rest of 2005 I struggled to make $50 a month. I had started tracking my stats and it turns out that all the wonders of SEO and changes I made caused my site’s traffic to drop off drastically. I never figured out why my changes caused my traffic to plummet but things eventually picked back up and I earned close to $100/month for much of 2006. I’d had added another 5 websites to my repertoire by now so not being able to go past the $100/month mark was frustrating.

In January 2007 the traffic for many of my sites shot up and earnings followed and things have been going well ever since and steadily improving along with the number of page views. For me, as you would expect, my Adsense earnings improve as traffic rises. I don’t spend any time tracking or tweaking individual ads because I’m too busy doing other things but when I get everything set up I’ll start doing this and let you know how it goes.

I had my first $20 day in July so I know it’s possible. I’ll be happy though if I can rake in $15 per day steadily by December. It feels like a long way from $250 to $450 in less that four months but I’m working on overhauling one of my sites at the moment and I think that will make the difference.

So that’s the history of my sometimes dysfunctional relationship with Google Adsense. We’ve had our ups and downs but I’ve bought him flowers and I think we’re on the mend.

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Now that the pesky first post is out of the way, lets talk numbers - as in money. I plan to post monthly earnings reports with a break down of where that income is coming from. I might even chuck in some fancy bar graphs and, if I’m feeling really crazy, a pie chart or two. So it makes sense to give you a rundown of where I am now as far as income goes.

I wrote this post in August 2006 over at Working Nomad giving a frustrated summary of where I was a year ago. Back then Adsense was my only major source of income and it had been hovering just under $100/month for ages.

One year later, I’m hovering around $1000/month and still frustrated because I can’t seem to get over that mark. What’s changed in a year? Well my Google income has risen to $250/month but the most important thing has been exploring other sources of income.

Here’s where my income comes from:

• Google Adsense
• Affiliate Programs (hostel bookings, travel insurance etc.)
• Text Link Ads
• Link Worth
• Direct Link Sales
• Cafe Press (t-shirt sales)
• Logo Design
• Travel Writing

Rather than have a frighteningly long post, I’ll stop now. I’ll spend some time talking about each of those income streams in detail over the next few days including how well (or not) they’ve performed for me.

If you’re experienced in the world of web income then you won’t be learning anything new here, but if you’ve just started out, maybe with a personal travel blog, then some of this might come in handy.

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Hi, welcome to my blog.

So… ya. The first post. It’s a pretty big event. Firecrackers just went off behind me and the Mayor is about to cut a ribbon and smash a bottle of Champagne over my monitor. Or is that just for boats? Hopefully it’s just for boats since I’m at work at the moment and I don’t think my boss would appreciate the mess. He’s already suspicious about why the mayor is here.

About Me

I’ve been guest blogging over at Working Nomad since September 2006 but have since decided that the internet needs one more blog so have jumped ship and started this baby. The guy that runs that site has been travelling around the world working on his websites from anywhere and raking in some serious cash in the process. I figure that sounds like a damn fine way to spend my time so I’m attempting the same thing.

I’m from Canada but have lived in London, UK for 5 years. I’ve done working holidays in Oz, NZ and Ireland and have an itchy feet thing happening at the moment and plan to hit the road again in January 2008, this time with my laptop in tow.

My Websites

While new to blogging, I’ve been a net nerd since 2000 when I started Travoholic.com, a semi-neglected website about backpacking mainly in Europe and Australia. I didn’t do much with it until 2005 when I discovered Google Adsense.

In the early days I was only earning pennies a day and when I hit the $1/day mark I was probably a bit too excited judging by the looks people gave me when I told them of my new found ‘riches’. But I got to thinking… if I grew Travoholic then I could earn more. Or even better, build more sites and watch the money roll on in… slowly.

I’ll go into my sites and earnings in more detail other posts but the gist of the operation is that I’m currently earning an average of about $700/month for 2007 from 3 main sites and a couple of smaller, niche sites.

The Plan

I’ve given my boss plenty of warning and my last day of work is December 13th. The plan is to head home to Canada for a few weeks, visit the friends and rellies, and spend a lot of time getting my sites up to scratch. Then I’m off to Asia one way with laptop. No plans, no deadline, and no budget! Ok that’s a lie, but it sounds good. My only plan is to be in Beijing for the Olympics and my budget will be dictated by what I’m earning. So if I bring in $700, that’s what I’ll try to live on during the following month. If I earn more than I need to survive as a meager backpacker then I’ll whack it into my savings account.

So… what’s the blog about?

I’ll be posting my earnings, tips on making money online, the cost of living in places I go to, how much I spend and various other things that sound very uninteresting as I type this but will be filled with wonder and amazement and will change your life for the better! Ok maybe not that but hopefully you’ll find a few nuggets of interesting blurbs now and then.

That’s all. Wow, the first blog post. Bit longer than I expected. I wonder if anyone will read it? Who knows. Ah crap, now I’m talking to myself… probably a good time to sign off.

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