In case you all were wondering where I’ve been the last few weeks, it’s time to finally let the secret out!  I’ve been spending a TON of time working on a website for a new addition to the Countryside product line- Countryside Custom Laser Engraving.  The website is now live and ready for traffic, and more importantly, orders!  Take a minute and go check out some of the cool unique gift ideas and other things we’ve got available over there, just waiting to be personalized with a picture, logo, or your own custom text inscription.  Whether you need a birthday gift, wedding or anniversary present, something special for a new mom, or corporate incentive/giveaway items, we’ve got you covered.  There is really no limit to what we can do with that laser, we have really only “scratched the surface” ourselves!

The whole process has been quite a learing curve for everyone involved.  Ryan has spent countless hours trying to get the various settings figured out to actually run the equipment, and I’ve managed to learn the Joomla! Content Management System basically from scratch.  Joomla! is a great platform to use, but to call the learning curve steep is an understatement- I would go with vertical!  Having said that, it was the right choice to use for building the website and online store, and very much worth the time investment to learn it.

Take a minute to jump over there and check it out- there is some really cool stuff for sale and with Christmas coming, it’s never too early to get started shopping!  Countryside Custom Laser Engraving

Greetings all!  Things have been, as usual, crazy around here!  But I’ve got a few minutes to write for you guys today and I thought I’d change things up a bit.  The last few posts have been some of my random thoughts on PageRank, AdSense, and traffic issues.  Today we’re back to a way to make a few bucks online again!

This is another similar program to Inbox Dollars, in that you get paid to read email.  The name of this program is Hits4Pay.  The signup and account setup is very simple, and you get a $10 bonus for signing up through HomeBasedHowTo! The process itself is also quite simple.   You’re notified via your regular email service whenever there is a paid email in your inbox at Hits4Pay.  You simply click a link in the email you get at your regular inbox and it takes you to your paid email inbox at Hits4Pay.  You read the email, click a link for verification purposes, make a few cents and you’re done!

Also similar to Inbox Dollars, they offer an affiliate program whereby you sign up people underneath you and earn a percentage of the money they make reading emails.

Hits4Pay seems to pay out a little better for reading the emails than does Inbox Dollars, but they don’t offer the other incentivized offers than Inbox Dollars does.  All the same, a few cents here and a few cents there can really add up over time, and when you start adding small money to small money, soon enough you get bigger money.  Money that can be used for things like a paid hosting account- I recommend ebound hosting by the way.  Denis and his guys are great!  It can also be money you save up to spend on an autoresponder- more about that later also.  You can use the money from reading emails to buy a good ebook with information on how to make even more money online- more on this later also!

The point is this- I said I was going to walk you through legitimate ways to make money online, and that’s what we’re going to do, and have been doing.  Home based business isn’t always a simple thing when you’re starting out.  There are many many different ways to make money using the internet, and there can be a very steep learning curve.  My goal here is to help you out as much as I can to avoid some of the pitfalls, keep you from wasting money on things that don’t work, and focus on honest ways to make money online.

Back to Hits4Pay, my advice is to sign up today- you get a $10 bonus in your account if you click here and sign up now!

Well, you thought a week was going to go by and I wouldn’t get a post done, didn’t you?  I’ve actually been thinking about this one for some time now, since I wrote last week’s update regarding AdSense and monetizing your traffic.  I truly believe that the best way to make honest money from a website is to give visitors only two options when they leave- either click the red “x” and close out the browser window, or click a link that will pay you or at least has the potential to pay you.

Now for all those links on the far right hand side of this page, let me explain.  They are part of a traffic-trading program called The Traffic Link.  If you want to learn more, you can click here- by the way this one isn’t an affiliate link!  Basically, the program is a simple traffic-trading script that generates 3-way or a-b-c link trades among participants.  A simple link trade, called a 2-way trade or an a-b trade, is where site a links to site b, and site b links back to site a.  The 3-way, or a-b-c trade is where site a links to site b, and site c links back to site a.  The reasoning behind the a-b-c trade it is that Google sees a two-way or a-b link as a “trade”, and that has less value toward increasing your site’s PageRank than does a one-way link.  And a 3-way or a-b-c link is seen by the Google spiders as two separate one-way links.  And when we look at ways to increase the PageRank, and eventually get your site seen as more relevant to Google and therefore get listed higher on the natural search results and make millions and retire early, a good linking structure is a very important part of that.  But bear in mind, PageRank is but one of some 200 factors that the Googlebots look at when determining search results, so PageRank is not the be-all end-all of a website.  There is some good information on what the Google webmasters have to say about PageRank, and I’d highly recommend you read it here.  This one here is my personal favorite.

So now that I have seemingly contradicted myself in terms of PageRank- what to do?  The purpose of all those links over there are to try to “impress” the GoogleBots and increase my rankings with The Almighty Google.  But they are a MASSIVE traffic leak, and no source of income whatsoever.  The jury is still out on whether they stay or go, and today I’m leaning towards go.  But I have yet to make up my mind entirely, we will wait and see if they are doing more harm than good.  I am watching very carefully at Google WebMaster Tools, and there will be a decision coming very soon.

The moral of the story is to build a good website that is useful to visitors, update it frequently with unique content, get links from relevant sites and link to relevant sites, and leave the rest of it up to the Google algorithms.  A friend on a message board that I frequent said it best, “The way to make Google think you have the best ____ site on the Web is to get up off your ass and actually build the best ____ site on the Web!”

Well look at this, two posts in one week! I was serious when I said I’d be re-committing myself to my duties here at homebasedhowto, getting this site up to the standards I had set out when I started. Plus as we all know (or maybe some of you don’t but will be learning), fresh content is the king when it comes to getting those all-important google rankings. Anybody can put up a cheesy sales page, cram it full of affiliate links, run an adwords campaign and hope they get enough sales to overcome the expense of buying all the clicks. I know this, because I’ve tried it! AdWords can break the bank relatively quickly, if you don’t know what you are doing. And believe me, I don’t claim to know what I am doing! I did run a campaign awhile back that was profitable, but only marginally so. It would have taken 10-15 more campaigns doing the same thing to generate enough sales (after buying the traffic) to be an income worthy of doing anything with. You can very quickly have high-priced clicks going to a page that for whatever reason, doesn’t generate sales and you will be upside-down in no time.  There are people that have built entire home-based operations around this, and have been very successful. But they are targeting specific niches, maybe even sub-niches, where clicks can be bought cheap and you have very targeted buyers in mind. One last point I’d like to make about AdWords is that for the most part, people who click the ad are at least somewhat motivated to buy whatever it is they’re looking for- so if your landing page is good enough you should be able to convert reasonable well. More on this stuff later.

I prefer to go after the “natural” rankings, the ones that show up on the main part of the Google results. And believe me, those can be tough to come by- depending on what your niche is. Something broad, like “home based business” is an extremely competitive niche and by itself almost too broad. But getting this site to that coveted “First Page of Google” status is my goal, and I am going to do it! There is a certain segment of search-engine users who don’t pay any attention to the “sponsored results” (those are the AdWords listings), but again this will be very niche-specific. They will definitely be a tougher sell, but if your product is worth it they will be loyal customers and unlikely to cause you headaches down the road. Depending on the niche, the highly coveted #1 on Google can be relatively simple- I have several sites (outside the scope of this discussion, suffice it to say that they exist) where I am consistently #1 and always on the first page. But these sites don’t generate a great deal of revenue, simply because they are related to an obscure niche that doesn’t get searched for. My point is this- it is possible to get to that first spot, now what do you do when you get there???

As Ron White says in his famous bit about getting kicked out of a bar in New York City, “I told you that story so I could tell you this story…”. And here’s the story- a great way to monetize traffic you are able to get to a site where the traffic doesn’t cost you anything (natural #1 Google listing), vs. buying clicks through AdWords, is with Google’s AdSense program. The concept of monetizing traffic, if that term is new to you, is to simply get paid when a visitor leaves your site.  It could be through a product sale at a linked sales page, a sign-up as an affiliate to a program you promote, or through AdSense. If you’re not familiar with it, take a look to the right and you’ll see AdSense there, in the box that says “Ads by Google”.  Basically, those are people who bid on clicks and when the ad is clicked, they are charged.  Since, by virtue of being the site owner, I am the one supplying the click, I get a commission for each click.  Now it’s against the TOS of AdSense for me to ask you to click, so that is definitely NOT what I am doing, I am merely giving you a brief overview of the concept, in case it’s new to you.  By the way, Yahoo and MSN also have their own “versions” of AdSense, but they are not nearly as popular as Google’s, I imagine simply because Google is the #1 search engine and as such generates higher prices for the clicks, part of which is passed on to site owners who incorporate Adsense.

Is AdSense going to make you millions and fund an early retirement?  Possibly, but unlikely.  The way I see it, you need to give visitors to your sites two choices when they leave- either click the “X” and close out the window, or click a link that will somehow generate revenue- and AdSense is a great option for that!

Well, as you can see from the dates between posts, life in the real world has been a little hectic around Countryside! We’ve been so busy with concrete work in Minnesota that I haven’t had much (read: any!) time to devote to my little blog here. I apologize for that, but I am now making a concerted effort to give updates at least once per week on the little things I do here and there to try to make an honest dollar over the internet. The focus of todays update is a program called Inbox Dollars.

I’ve been working with them so far for about 6 months now, and I can honestly tell you they are a legitimate way to make money online. You can do as much or as little with them as you like, from simply opening emails and clicking a few links all the way up to completing surveys and signing up for trial offers for both real and digital/online products and services.

It just so happens that their office is only about 5 miles from my house, so I drove by there one day just to see if it actually exists. And it does! I would have taken a picture to post it up here for you guys to look at, but the battery in my digital camera was dead that night (someone, and I won’t say who….left it on!). But I will get back over there and take a picture of the building. There are literally millions of scams and get-rich-quick schemes online, and it’s hard to know who to trust, who to give your money to, etc. So seeing a bricks-and-mortar operation where the company actually operates can go a long way toward adding legitimacy.

The other cool thing about Inbox Dollars is that it doesn’t cost anything to join. You can read emails to make money, as well as some simple surveys and trial offers. Some of the offers do require a sign-up fee, but it is less than the money you get from Inbox Dollars for trying them. A word of caution- many of them have an automatic re-bill option after the trial period, so if you don’t like the product or service, make sure to cancel before you get billed!