Cash The Checks

Make it easy for your readers to get your content. Put your rss feed in a visible spot on your site. Don’t fill your site up with ads. Your first goal is to build up readers to your blog, worry about making money later. Some people swear by creating mailing lists but I’ve never tried that myself. Ultimately without your readers you’ve got nothing so keep them coming back by updating and happy with minimal ads.

- Edwin, CashTheChecks.com

- Ebay: If applicable, add a link to your site from your ebay listings. Ebay allows this only if you link to something relevant tot he product/item you’re selling. I have a product review site so when I sell an item I’ve reviewed, I add a link to the review.

- Reciprocal links: Sure the search engines have greatly devalued them, but this is one of the oldest methods of attracting new visitors that still works.

- Groups: If appropriate you can add links to your comments on yahoo/google group sites, yahoo answers and and forums.

- Social networking: Add a link to your site on all your social network sites and your email signature as well. The more eyes that see your link the better.

- RSS: If you have a site that updates regularly (and you should) publicly display a link to your rss feed because plenty of people add it to their google homepage, mobile phone or get new posts via email.

- Edwin, CashTheChecks.com

It’s easier to retain a customer then get a new one. So once you got your hooks on a customer, find out ways to get them to buy from you again. The real money is in recurring income. So build a customer user base, have a solid privacy policy, and have fun.

- Edwin, CashTheChecks.com

Always add Google Analytics on your site. Here’s a few reasons why this tip will pay off.

- Spidering. If you have a new site and want it spidered quickly, add it to google analytics and you’ll be indexed fast. Another way of getting indexed is by getting some link backs to your site, but this method works as well and is quicker (depending on the linkbacks you get).

- Tracking. You can find out several key things here. First, how many visits you’re getting, where your visits are coming from and what pages people are going to.

With Analytics you can spend hours analyzing the reports to see what people are searching for to get to your site, how long they stay there, what country they’re coming from and more. Not only is it neat to see, but it’s a useful free tool to better help target your traffic to the best advertisement.

- Edwin, CashTheChecks.com

In rough economic climate like these we’re experiecing, some see RISK, some have FEAR.

I see OPPORTUNITY. This is the time to buy a car from a scared Escalade owner, who sees his rising gas bill. This is the time to buy someones failing business at below market cost.

Things will pick up, they always do. If you have the money, right now you have the POWER.

- Edwin, CashTheChecks.com

Making money with many small sites is easier than making money with a single big one. It’s what many people do wrong: they start a single big project that takes up all their time, rather than many small ones that each take very little time. That makes them much more vulnerable to failure than they would be otherwise.

Creating a single “build and forget” site that takes you a week to create and nets you $100 a month is easy. Now do that every week, year after year. After a year (52 weeks) you’ll be making $5,200 a month.

More importantly, it gives you the opportunity to expand your most successful projects and “forget” your unsuccessful sites. This will teach you through the process of FAILURE what works and what doesn’t.

In the long run, following this strategy, you’ll end up with several huge sites or at least one big successful site with tons of other smaller successes.

- Edwin, CashTheChecks.com

The most boring part of a business is the repetitive tasks, that’s why automating boring tasks is usually a good idea.

What about if you don’t know how to automate it? Hire a programmer to create a program to automate your daily tasks.

What if a program can’t handle your daily tasks? When you can’t automate it – outsource it. Hire a cheap employee to handle the easy things.

Your job as an innovator and business owner isn’t to waste your time with silly tasks, it’s to create new ideas, new methods & new products.

- Edwin, CashTheChecks.com

It takes an innovator to come up with great ideas, but only one who has patience can implement them. Usually innovators are eccentric, erratic, creative – anything but patient people. Likewise, patient people can be seen as calm, slow and boring,

If you can come up with great ideas and then have the patience to not give up on them, you’re all set.

- Edwin, CashTheChecks.com

1. Find a market
2. Define your customer
3. Define your product
4. Advertise your product
5. Test & Refine until it makes profit
6. Automate
7. Repeat

- Edwin, CashTheChecks.com

At the start of a new site, it’s often times better to build value to the new site instead of trying to monetize from it immediately. A good example is YouTube. They’ve built quite the following and I’m sure at some point Google will start making big money off the site.

Here’s another example: As a programmer, it’s usually better to write your own scripts and sell them over and over again – instead of just doing custom script jobs for others.

A writer is better off writing for his own blog rather than writing guest posts for other peoples’ blogs.

In closing – building value and spending time on your own sites first is better in the long run than chasing the quick buck.

- Edwin, CashTheChecks.com

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

I make my money by creating hundreds of small sites that only take me a short time to create. Most are considered “flops” and only make me a couple of dollars a day, some make me more, much more.

Most sites are created for the sole purpose of sending the visitor to where he/she wants to go, using my referral link of course. For example, if someone searches for “eHarmony free trial” my goal is to have my site appear at the top of Google & Yahoo & MSN for that keyword. On my site I may just have a short and simple 1 page review of eHarmony with a link for them to enter the site they want. Visitor clicks and joins, I make money.

Other sites don’t have a clear sponsor and aren’t meant to just redirect the visitor. These sites are “information sites”. These are perfect for advertisers to buy ads on them or to place Google Adsense ads.

That’s the category that this site, Cash The Checks, falls under. Because this site doesn’t promote any sponsor exclusively and is a bit of a general site, I can promote sponsors offering: credit cards, marketing books, loan sites & entrepreneur magazine subscriptions. I can also promote contextual sponsors like Google Adsense who offer up ads based on the content of each page, if I can’t find a suitable sponsor. Finally I can also sell ad spots for people to promote their own site(s) too.

There’s plenty of ways to make money off a site, the harder part for me is getting the quality traffic.

- Edwin, CashTheChecks.com

Now you can embed videos with The News Room and get paid for it, too. I just joined today and it was free and easy to embed the video above. You just choose the category, see a list of videos, and if you see any videos that would be interesting to your viewers, you can add them to your site by copying the code they provide. The video I embedded is titled “Four Gas Saving Myths”. It’s a good way to put timely, relevant news on your site.

Here’s how you make money.. Every time somebody views one of the news videos on your site, you get paid. Each video has an ad on it, so that’s how they make money. TheNewsRoom.com has a payment model where you earn anywhere from $1-$4 per thousand views (CPM).

Personally, I’ll be adding some tech videos to my tech blogs. So if you have a blog, want to deliver relevant content to your readers, and make money, give The News Room a look.

- Edwin, CashTheChecks.com

PayPerPost.com, a site that pays you to post reviews on your web site or your blog, has launched: Pay Per Post Direct. What is Pay Per Post Direct? Well, with this newly released service, you can add banners on your blog so that your visitors / readers can directly request that you review their product or their site and post it on your site specifically. You set your own price, and your advertisers have the option of either accepting your price for the review or declining it. It is yet another way to make money with your blog, by using Pay Per Post Direct.
You can watch this video here that shows you the step by step process to becoming a member of PPP Direct and on how to install the banners on your site. Personally I’ve found that it’s best to add it on your sidebar, at the bottom or near the bottom, where you have your contact information or where you’ve placed your rss feeds links, because that’s usually where advertisers look for ways to contact you about your ad rates.
PPP Direct lets you connect one-on-one with your potential advertisers, and for only a 10% fee (5% goes to PayPal & credit card processing). You may think of Pay Per Post Direct as a trusted escrow, with low fees. Competitors such as ReviewMe charge anywhere from 50-100% and keep nearly half of your money. So with PPP Direct you can make more money, by doing the same exact work, or you can simply pass on the savings to your advertisers, thus getting you more happy repeat media buyers.

- Edwin, CashTheChecks.com

Just wanted to give a quick update on Bucks 4 Banners. This company pays you a flat monthly fee for keeping their ads on your pages. It’s about $10 per month per site. I won’t be placing the ads on this site because the ads don’t fit very well with this blog theme. But on other sites of mine they’re perfectly fine. The ads are the usual 468×60 size.

I was real sketchy about this company since I had never heard of it before and they’re overseas. I opted to give them a shot and added them on an old blog of mine. It took a few days but my blog was approved and I added the ads on my site, then a few days after that, i got an Amazon.co.uk gift certificate. It was my signup bonus (about $20) then I got another payment for my first month (3 ads on 3 pages on 1 site) for about $10.

The only “bad” thing is that they pay via Amazon.co.uk gift certificates. I did use up my credits by buying a couple of books, but the shipping fees are pretty big considering the items are being shipped from the UK to the US, and they don’t qualify for Free “Super Saving Shipping”. Today I added 2 more sites of mine to Bucks 4 Banners, hopefully they’ll get approved so I can make even more from my “hard to monetize” sites.

- Edwin, CashTheChecks.com

ReviewMe is another alternative for blog owners to make a few extra bucks by posting reviews of sites or products that reflect the topic of your blog. I’m posting this now because yesterday I was paid for a few reviews I made. I did two $5.00 reviews and one $12.50 review and posted them on this very blog, so I received $22.50 into my paypal account.

The drawbacks that I notice first is that not every blog is accepted, you need to have a blog with a history of posts, readers and traffic, so beginners’ blogs most likely won’t be accepted. Next, review offers are hard to come by. It appears there’s many blogs in the database but not many advertises paying for reviews.

This site seems real good for advertisers, because there’s a high supply of blogs and a low demand, so you can get one-way permanent links on blogs reviewing your product or site for just a few bucks.

You can create a Review Me account here.

- Edwin, CashTheChecks.com