Hello fellow moneymakers of the internet!  This group about ways how to make money online (and elsewhere), is presented by The Monetizer - a cool, green character who learns various ways to make money from the internet.  Currently, he receives checks and deposits from at least 10 different online programs, and wants to help you get started towards doing the same!  These programs don't require paying money to join, and really only require your own due diligence and effort in creating wealth!  For this Gather group post your own success stories, ideas, and internet finds as well as any other content as long as we try to keep it clean, and green ($$$)!

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Here's to your success,
The Monetizer

Check out The Monetizer's recommended Moneymakers here to get started!

PS: Here's info about an easy yet nice program to earn monthly checks from - read more!

The Top 10 Distinctions Between Millionaires & Middle Class
I recently purchased an audiobook from iTunes called "The Top 10 Distinctions Between Millionaires and the Middle Class" by Keith Cameron Scott. After one listen to this addictive book, I've found myself returning it to it several more times. It teaches some valuable concepts not only for making money online, but for success and finding financial freedom. I highly recommend it as a way to engage in your own introspection when it comes to your personal journey to wealth. You'll find the material easy to follow and some of the stories he gives quite enlightening if not very entertaining.

Scott provides his 10 distinctions as mini-lessons which illustrate what makes the rich wealthy, while the middle class struggles. The middle class seems to get a bad rep, but they often have financial dreams which they allow to dwindle because they go for comfort instead of freedom. Meanwhile the wealthy are busy working on ways to create more sources of income so they can enjoy that freedom that eludes many.

Overall, I found the 10 distinctions book to be well presented, and it won't overwhelm you. It's inspirational, and if listened to enough you can begin to adopt the mindsets needed for financial success. You'll be training yourself to think more like a successful millionaire, while discarding small-minded thinking. This is not to say "poor and middle class people are stupid", but that millionaires tend to have a different though process when it comes to money and how it's made.

Some of the things you'll learn about in Scott's book include the concepts of being generous, focusing on multiple sources of income (especially passive), working for profits vs wages, and focusing on the long term rather than the short term. If you read or listen to this work, you'll find yourself realizing just how many times you might have engaged in middle class thinking, which can be quite small minded at times. One of the best examples is when he points out that poor people talk about other people, middle class talks about things, and the rich talk about ideas. How many times have you found yourself gossiping about others? You've engaged in a poor-financial mindset at least a few times. He goes on to point out that the rich are the ones who have developed the ideas, which ultimately are the "things" middle class enjoy or talk about. These include vacation resorts, sports teams and movies, many of which are funded by and created from a rich person.

If you've read Robert Kiyosaki's "Rich Dad, Poor Dad", you'll notice some familiar concepts in this book, such as the idea of owning your own company to become rich. If you're like me and engage in online moneymaking as your main profession, you're already partly on your way. You're focused more on creating profits, multiple sources of revenue and passive income. For me the next steps involve finding more passive income streams to start building my net worth. I currently receive at least 4 or 5 different payments a month based on my online work. To me that's a good start, but I know much more can be done. Also, I realize I may need to branch out into some real world income streams including the always popular, yet speculative real estate sector. I dabble in stocks, but after listening to this audiobook it makes me want to increase my knowledge in that area as well. The book's worth its price just in terms of its motivational and inspirational factors.

One of the greatest ideas Keith Cameron Scott gives in his book is the concept of rich people continuously read and invest in their personal finance/success libraries. He notes that the middle class believes learning ends with school, while millionaires are always learning more. This concept alone is priceless and actually gives you an excuse to buy Scott's book, "The 10 Distinctions" as it will provide a great basis for your successful path towards financial freedom.

Purchase The Top 10 Distinctions Between Millionaires and the Middle Class at Amazon.com for a low price.

Make Money with Halloween & Christmas Holidays
Hello fellow moneymakers, it's been a while! I've been busy working on a batch of mini sites lately in anticipation of online shopping season. Mainly I'm tinkering with Squidoo, Hubpages, Blogger blogs and some self-hosted websites. Two of the biggest moneymaker holidays are quickly approaching us with Halloween and Christmas 2009. Preparing for these can be fun (or burdensome) depending on how you choose to go about making money with them. I'm here to drop some food for thought and let you know what I've been working on lately.

With Halloween the main thing people will buy online is their costumes, masks or accessories to go with them. You could create Hubpages or Squidoo lenses, or even infobarrels related to this, to make money off Adsense, or by selling Amazon products. I would have recommended eBay products as well, but with their new pricing system, I'll take Amazon (more on that later). Anyhow, Halloween is one potential way to profit online, if you get cracking and create sites. I found through a few of my blogs where I talked about some Halloween related topics, that I received traffic for unrelated topics that involved costumes. So from there, those costumes were made into full blog posts, have seen some sales. You don't really need a Halloween site per se, as you can find many ways to tie the holiday in with your blog theme. Cooking, photography, entertainment, etc etc, all have some sort of relation to the holiday. Mixed bag blogs, fashion, music...the list continues...be creative and keep checking Google Hot Trends for some ideas on upcoming Halloween stuff.

Christmas is really your big time to profit. Some people start their shopping months ahead of time, while most wait until around mid-November, and particulary for Black Friday / Cyber Monday. It's key to have some product-oriented sites set up for these holidays, and even afterward. I downloaded Jackie Lee's Squidoo Christmas Cash Blueprint here, which is a nice little e-book to get you started. She prefers Squidoo, and there's some pros and cons to using them. The best is the fact that Squidoo shares the sales with you through their Amazon modules at the commission rate of 4%. Compared to Hubpages you might not always get that, because of their revenue split of 60% / %40 impressions. Of course there are ways around that..

With Hubpages you can stick your Amazon Associates link into the hub you write up, as long as you don't go spam crazy. I'd recommend two total Amazon links, perhaps one in the top and one at bottom. I learned that too much Amazon on a Hub will make Ezine articles not accept an article linking to that Hub. So tread carefully when you create your Amazon hubs or lenses. Squidoo is more lenient on allowing more affiliate links, but to a limit. The advantage to Hubpages over Squidoo is they seem to rank better in some cases with Google and other sites. I've found Squidoo always brought me a lot of Yahoo search traffic. It really depends on which keywords or product you're targeting.

Blogger blogs are another option for Amazon Associates products. Consider creating a Christmas holiday style blog as recommended by Jackie Lee from Internet Marketing Strategy for Moms. She suggests a blogger blog as a way to build links to your Squidoo lenses (or Hubpages) to get them ranked for the terms. Of course you could also just make the Blogger blog full of Christmas gift products with Amazon Associates links to the items.

Of course all of this got me thinking, why not have both a Christmas and Halloween website, self-hosted. Netfirms sells domains for just $7 for the first year, and Hostgator is my preferred hosting service, with GoDaddy probably second. Yes, these one-time holiday sites would exist year round, but they would make you bigtime profits if done properly. By that I mean, finding the right keywords for your URL that aren't too competitive. Otherwise, your self-hosted sites might just get lost in a sea of millions of Google results for Halloween and Christmas. But having these two huge holiday sites could prove valuable in terms of link power down the road, as well as in making money off the shopping done for these holidays.

If you want more insight on how a guy is making tons of money with Adsense via Amazon sites, check out 6 Months Later: $300 Daily w/Adsense (Lessons Learned) by XFactor over at Warrior Forums. Just don't get too caught up in reading all of the posts, as it's a HUGE forum thread, but contains very valuable insights.

Also, your holiday or Christmas site could really be a product review site, which if you think about it could make you money year round, as people are interested in all sorts of products that Amazon sells. You'll start to realize you might own a lot of stuff that other people are looking up online. Furthermore, eBay Partner Networks allows you to use code on self-hosted Wordpress or static websites. So you've got more options to make money - even though Amazon seems the better of the options. Chitika, Widgetbucks and other affiliate programs are even more creative ways to cash in.

That said, I'm not feeling the new EPN Quality click deal so much. To date my clicks have been worth 1 cent on several days, then 3 cents on several days. Would I prefer 3 cent clicks over someone buying an Amazon associates product to give me a 4% or 6% commission...I think you know the answer to that my friends..

So get started on making your way towards Christmas profits. It's not too late to start finding a way to profit from the 2009 season, and even preparing a website for the 2010 season and beyond!

Here's to your success,
The Monetizer

How to Make Money with SEO Traffic & Leveraging
It's been a while but I'm back again...As usual other projects have consumed me, but I wanted to share something I started thinking about more in the recent weeks. Once you're earning with Adsense on several sites, and maybe earning with some other moneymakers like Amazon, eBay, Clickbank, you might want to expand your efforts. You might produce several blogs or sites, and find that some work really well to make you money, while others fail.

Sometimes you discover that no matter how much traffic you might get on a particular blog site, it's incredibly tough to make money off that traffic. One example may be music or entertainment blogs, which are popular, but it's hard to say how profitable they are. These can be tough to monetize in my experiences. You try the Google Adsense route, but learn that the ads just don't get the clicks, or the ads just don't pay you jack for them. In some cases they even lead to smart pricing. So you swap out Google and try something else. If you're on blogger, you can't use eBay Partner Network, but can go with Shopping Ads or Amazon Associates. You continue to see that it's even tougher to convert, however there are some tricks, tips and other things you can keep in mind. Don't go hitting the "Delete" button for that particular blog, or decide to give up on the site. Here's some food for thought and ideas of ways to make money online with your content that brings the big traffic but doesn't seem to make you any money.

Leverage your Traffic to other Sites

Consider using a blog that gets big bursts of traffic as powerful leverage to bring traffic somewhere else. Why waste the efforts right? Let's say you've got a blog that you make no money with, but would like to, and it's getting a few thousand visitors a day based on some specific posts you did. Consider using that blog to bring the traffic to another site that converts. One example is Associated Content, where you can make money for writing online.. Over there you'll make $1.50 for every 1,000 page views. Doesn't sound like a lot but it all adds up, and that kinda money could pay for hosting charges or help you buy a domain. Maybe consider writing a general article that really sparks attention, that will get people clicking to it on AC. Most celebrity scandal topics could do pretty well on AC, so why write it about on the blog if you can do a 400-500 word article on AC that makes you some extra dinero? Another good example is to send them over to a good Squidoo lens, where the more traffic your lens gets, the better rank it achieves, and in some strange, mysterious formula, that could possibly give you a nicer payout.

Another consideration is using Widgetbucks which also pays for clicks and impressions. I used Widgetbucks in this form months ago until I earned a payout, and have re-introduced it in a few places that were scoring high traffic. Widgetbucks pays you for both clicks and then impressions, so the more impressions you get on your blog or site, the closer you'll get towards a payout. The minimum for Widgetbucks is $50, which again is not going to help you retire, but it will help you squeeze money out of that blog that's not performing.

Chitika is yet another one to try, and in their case the payment is just $10 minimum, so you can earn a bit of extra money to invest into your online moneymaking, buy yourself lunch, go see a movie, or whatever else the money can do for you.

From there, I just recommend testing to find what works. Consider trying related affiliate programs that Pay-Per-Lead on your blog. Back to our hard-to-monetize blog examples, a friend recently asked me about making money with a blog, saying he'd like to start a music blog. He specifically mentioned making money with Google Adsense, and based on experience, music blogs are tough to monetize. That's when you really need to put your thinking cap on though. Can you refer people to buying sheet music, musical instruments, artist albums, or joining some sort of subscription site? Consider using programs from Linkshare, Amazon Associates and Shareasale as well as Commission Junction.

Always think of Monetization

If all else fails, consider creating a catchy, clickable advertisement banner to go up at the top of your highly trafficked blog (or hire someone to make a simple one). Use it to grab those viewers and direct them to another site that you can make money with, or even to a Clickbank product. It will be indirectly making you money if you have your traffic sent to the right place (including AC or Squidoo). My overall point here is you need the mindset to make money online, to keep finding ways to monetize all your content, even the stuff that doesn't seem worth it. That's not to say put all your effort in, but keep it in the back of your head.

You need to try new things with the under-performing blogs until you can determine what works best with them. And yes, in some cases you'll try 5-10 ideas and nothing seems to work. Give them a chance though, maybe several thousand impressions before you swap them out though. Do your best to track the stats using what the various programs allow you to. There's no sense in letting any traffic go to waste these days, so always be thinking of ways to monetize it if you really want to profit at this online moneymaking game...

(As for Adsense, there's a really interesting, informative forum post over at Warrior Forums, you may or may not have seen from a guy that makes $300-500 a day using about 30 websites he built with Adsense. Check it out here.)