Cash The Checks

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.

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.

- Eddie, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Now to make money online you don’t necessarily need to know HTML or be an expert at blog marketing. You can have your own blog at the many free blog hosting services. Even if you don’t know how to make money from your blog through affiliate links, you can sell ad space, and now there’s something else you can do: You can post reviews of websites on your blog by using PayPerPost.com.

I’ve been a member for about two weeks now, so far I haven’t made any money yet, but I’m just getting started. After I get some more reviews posted on this blog, I’m going to add my tech blogs and post reviews of tech-related sites there.

Here’s how good this service is. Just for making this very post, describing my thoughts on PayPerPost, I’ll be receiving $10.00. It doesn’t get any easier than that. As long as you have a good blog, you can begin making money instantly simply by doing what you already do, make posts on your blog. You can check out PayPerPost right here.

There’s some sites where you simply can’t get anybody to buy what you offer. So you place pay-per-click ads on them, like Adsense. Then you realize your click-through-rate is low, so they’re not even clicking. Either that or the clicks are only paying a couple of cents per click. Now you’re left with a site that’s hard to make money from. What you can do is just use that site to feed traffic to your other sites. Another option are pay-per-impression sponsors, which are hard to find. You can also sell advertising spots on your site, as some want the opportunity to brand their site, get some pagerank, a backlink, and some traffic of course. Today I found another alternative, a sort of “pay per ad placement” site.
It’s called Bucks 4 Banners. This is a program I learned about from someones blog (I forgot who’s it was). The way it works is you place a 468×60 banner on any 3 pages in your site and they’ll pay you a monthly fee as long as you keep it there. You can see what the ad looks like in this example on my Law Information Blog. There’s a “£10″ signup bonus, which is just under $20.00 and the monthly payment is £5 per month, which is $9.89/month in US currency.
I was hesitant to join because I know nothing of foreign currency, and I don’t like joining non-US companies since if they don’t pay, it’s not like I can ever sue them to get my money. Since I did get to read an unbiased recommendation, I gave it a shot. It certainly won’t make you rich, but any little bit of extra money for very little work won’t hurt. They pay with Amazon gift certificates (they call them payment vouchers) or through paypal monthly so I’ll wait and see how it goes.
Take a look at the Bucks 4 Banners program.

Today I signed up Cash The Checks with Blogsvertise. This is another source for bloggers to make money with their blogs other than Google Adsense. The way it works is advertisers pay somewhere between $4-$25 for bloggers to make a post about their products and services. All you need to join is an active blog and a paypal account. I’ll be making some paid posts mixed in with my other posts from time to time, so I can capitalize on the whole pay-per-post system.

I added a new sponsor today that’ll be visible on some of my sites. The sponsor is Snorg Tees. These guys pay $5.00 per t-shirt sale. These ads will be added to any site that targets the 18-25 year old hip crowd such as any tech/gadget related sites or movie and music themed sites. I’m considering changing my Real Offensive Shirts site to 100% sponsor links instead of selling my own tshirt designs from Cafe Press. At $5.00 per shirt, I’d make more profit selling “Snorg Tees” and for less work, which is a plus.
You can sign up with Snorg Tees by first joining ShareASale.com which they use for link tracking, then joining the Snorg Tees affiliate program.

It’s an often discussed topic, in your internet marketing ventures, is it better to create 100 small websites, or devote all your time money and energy into forming 1 big monster site?

Here’s the benefits to creating just one site.

• You get to truly devote the time and work that a good site deserves.
• You can make this site real big so it competes with other leaders in the field.
• You can do daily updates and attract bookmarkers to your mega site.

Here’s the benefits to creating 100 small sites.

• If your one big site crashes or is a failure, you’re business is over.
• Some sites work, others don’t, you get to experiment to see what works.
• Diversification: There’s different sponsors, different hosts, different genres. You don’t keep all your eggs in one basket.

I’ve recently began placing ads on my sites from Amazon and other affiliate programs. Amazon pays out about 4 or 5 percent of the total sale price. It’s en extremely small amount, but conversions are good because people trust Amazon and are likely to already have an account there.

What I like best about Amazon is that if I’m selling a pair of shoes, someone clicks my affiliate link and then later buys a DVD, I’ll get credit for that DVD sale. They’re also paying out on gift certificate sales, but I don’t know if that’s a permanent thing. I’m not going to put up any links for a gift certificate if I have to remember to remove those links later if they end that promotion. I like to just build and forget.

Up to just recently the Amazon creatives were awful, but they came out with a product preview creative that displays a pop-up review when you hover your mouse over the ad. Very effective since it’s a new type of ad. Banners are a dying breed, and text ads are becoming extremely saturated because of Google’s Adsense program and other similar programs.