Money Hints

You can see how to make money online by flipping websites without creating too much hard work for yourself right here. Following on from my last post here at How to Make Money Online Hints, this is another excellent way to make money online legitimately. I won’t go too deeply into the workings of this, as many excellent posts have already been written about the subject elsewhere.

But what I will do is give you some useful information on what you’re going to need in order to know how to make money online in big chunks doing this, rather than just turning a mediocre profit. Ah, thought that might get your attention!

So, what’s involved in this latest how to make money online hint?

There are a few fairly straightforward steps you need to take to get a project like this up and running, but it doesn’t take all that much work if you’re willing to box clever.

Well the first thing you need is a good domain. That ultimately depends upon what niche you are going to build your website in and the availability of a good re-sellable domain name that is pre-aged. By pre-aged, I mean an old domain that you can buy from the GoDaddy expired domains auction. This is so that you’re new website will stand a better chance of getting indexed and ranked by Google and alsoof staying out of their sandbox. The reasons should be obvious, but if you don’t know, then to make the most money from selling on your website you need to show good organic traffic stats and hopefully some good sales trends.

That is, you’ll make more for your website the more money it makes and the more organic traffic it attracts. This is very important and will make the difference between a big healthy profit and merely a mediocre one!

How to Make Money Online

Once you have your killer domain name, you need to get your site up on it as quickly as possible and start populating it with relevant, original content. I’m not going to hark on about original content here – I do that in enough of my posts because it is so damned important. Here, suffice it to say you should not be selling a website that is made up of PLR articles that every other Tom, Dick and Harry already has! Potential buyers will check, that you can count on!

Then you need to also be getting backlinks to the site like there’s no tomorrow. Ok, not quite so crazy, but you need to press quite hard here, just not so hard that Google sandboxes the site for too much too soon! You have to find a balance but get as close to the line as you dare! You want to see fast results so that you can sell a site that is performing well for maximum dollars.

Then you’ll need a little time for things to come together.

By that, I mean you’ll need to wait until Google has gone through its next Page Rank update because if you’d done all your linking properly in the preceding time, your site should have gotten some PR. The more the better, obviously but you should be able to manage a PR3 without too much trouble.

While those of us in the know understand that page rank is not the be all and end all of a website’s ability to make money online, most potential buyers do not and place a lot of weight on page rank. We simply exploit the fact that “they know better” by getting Page Rank to inflate the value of the website we’re going to sell.

Page Rank is one factor that we can use to our advantage. Alexa rank is another.

Again, many of us know that Alexa rank is not worth the paper it is printed on (!) but to many a potential website buyer, they look upon a healthy Alexa rank as meaning the site is of greater value traffic wise than it actually is. Now, while you can’t fake your Alexa rank, you can do stuff to improve it vastly.

How?

I’ll tell you.

The Alexa rank is determined by counting the number of visitors to a site that have the Alexa toolbar installed on their browser. Most Internet Marketers have that toolbar installed because they like to see the Alexa rank of their own and their competition’s sites. Everyone else in the world who is not an Internet Marketer (and that’s most of ‘em) does not have the Alexa toolbar installed. Think about it. Why on earth should they? Most people have never heard of Alexa, or page rank for that matter and they don’t care. Most people surfing the net are looking for information about something or other. Very few are looking to learn how to make money online, so they don’t know about it or need it. But most people can make up the vast majority of traffic to a website, which will never be counted by Alexa, so you can see their results are usually way off.

So in order to inflate your Alexa rank, you need to attract other Internet marketers (who do have the Alexa toolbar installed on their browsers) to your site. One of the best ways to do that is to attract scrapers. Yes, you heard right. Scrapers often have the Alexa toolbar installed and they are always looking for content to steal that they think they can use to make money off. The kind of content they’re usually after is high competition stuff, like gadgets, iphones, xbox, playstation, playstation portable, nintendo, games, laptops, cell phones, ring tones… etc. You get the picture.

Use this knowledge to your advantage.

Make a post or two and keyword stuff the bollocks out of it with high tech gadget keywords, then link to it from some high tech forums and I guarantee the scrapers will appear out of nowhere and be all over your site like a cheap suit. Viola, your Alexa rank will climb fast!

This is a short term trick as once the scrapers depart they’re not likely to come back so you need to fudge your Alexa rank so it climbs sharply a couple of weeks before you sell. You also need to remove the keyword stuffed posts as soon as they’ve done their job.

Once your site is well populated with relevant content, it has some page rank and a decent Alexa rank, you can then go to one of the websites where you can sell your site such as SitePoint and put it up for sale. There are several good articles about exactly how to go about this written elsewhere, so I won’t go into that side of things deeply here as its just duplicating other articles.

How much money you make on your site depends on several factors, such as the quality of its domain name and relevance to its niche, the niche itself and how competitive it is, the quality of your website theme and layout, how good your traffic stats look and whether that traffic is predominantly organic (good) or social (not so good), page rank, Alexa rank, SERPs position for its main keywords in Google (if you’ve managed to push it high enough in the index) and finally some luck.

That last one does make a difference because it’s the luck of the draw if you get a buyer looking for a site that sits exactly in the niche your’s occupies and he finds it before he finds someone else’s.

So now you know how to make money online flipping websites. Ok, it involves some work, but the short term ROI can be quite stunning and run into several hundreds or even thousands of dollars, so its important to get it all right and squeeze every last dollar out of your hard work!

Terry Didcott
Make Money Hints

Greetings fellow make money online marketers. I’m following my last keyword weighted post here at How to Make Money Online Hints, which I really went to town over in order to push forward the importance of using the keywords you want to rank for in your posts as well as getting back links to your site to improve its SERPs placement and authority. Well that was then, this is now.

Here’s how to make money online. Its a bold statement that probably got your attention pretty quick which is the reason you’re here and reading through my annoyingly long drawn out way of writing to get to the best bits, or that point in the proceedings where I spill the beans and actually come out and tell you how to make money online. Well, you may well have heard a lot of this before, in fact I’m sure you have, but there is more to my rambling style than meets the eye.

This post has a dual function as always. I don’t just spend all this time hammering away at the keypad for my health and neither do I do it just to pad out this blog with content, although that is certainly a part of it. I also don’t do it just to give away large portions of my not inconsiderable knowledge to those of you who have, by hook or by crook, found this helpful, make money hints blog of mine which is all about how to make money online. Nope, I do it for all of these reasons combined and more.

You see, part of building up a website or blog is of course creating lots of good, keyword relevant content in order for the serach engines to find it relevant enough to include it in their respective indexes. Or should that be indeces? Mmm, not important. You see this is all leading somewhere and its important that you understand why I’m doing this.

Let’s face it the only search engine really worth getting to the top of is Google, because they are simply the search engine that by far the majority of people use. And you need to attract a portion of those people to come to your site, if you want to make money online, as these people are all potential customers, or at the very least they are the people that will make money for you. I’ve said it befire, but I’ll say it again and again because it is so important to grasp if you want to stand any chance of making money online any time soon. You need organic search traffic and you need it to be targeted to your niche to stand any chance of getting your site to make money for you.

Forget trying to attract stumblers and digg traffic or any of the other social site traffic as a source of income, because social traffic will not click your ads or click your affiliate links. Why? Because the vast majority of social traffic are marketers just like you. They know what an adsense or other PPC ad looks like and they simply don’t click them. They know what an affiliate ad looks like and if they wanted to go buy a product from Clickbank, they’ll use their own affiliate link to buy it and get their own discount, not yours or give you the commission.

Once you get that idea firmly entrenched into your grey matter, then you can start to throw off the shackles of the A-lister blogger mentality that will keep you broke for as long as your credit card stays under its limit and start to learn the truth about how to make money online!

You make it using the make money online tools that are freely available to everyone who has the nouse to look for them. I’ve already mentioned PPC, chiefly adsense. This is not going to be a post about adsense as there are other more knowledgeable souls out there than me on that subject. Suffice it to say, having a niche site well positioned in the Google index with adsense will make money for you. Ten sites all in different niches and all equally well positioned in the SERPs will make money in spades for you.

But there are more ways to skin a cat, likewise there are more ways to make money online than the average marketer can shake a stick at. So here is one of them that I am knowledgeable about. Domains. Or more specifically using domains as online real estate for using as your fast make money online tools.

How?

Buying new domains from the likes of GoDaddy is fine, but its getting increasingly tough to find appropriate domain names for your niche that have the coveted .com suffix. Plus the fact that new domains that have great websites or blogs added to them can suffer the effect known as the sandbox if they get too popular or attract too much traffic too soon. They start off well and do nicely in the SERPs attracting good organic traffic for a month or two then they disappear off the map and traffic drops to nothing. That’s the sandbox and new sites can expect to spend some time in there, from a few weeks to several months, until they suddenly emerge and go back into the index and start seeing traffic again.

One very good way of avioding the sandbox is to buy a domain that already exists and has been around for over two years more or less. These can be had at auction, some with working websites already on them that are attracting good traffic and have good SERPs placement. These domains will not be cheap, but can be had at prices ranging anywhere from a few hundred dollars to several thousand dollars, depending upon their age, traffic stats, income generation etc.

Of course you could go your own route by buying an expired domain from Godaddy Auctions and build up yoru own authority site from scratch. Using an aged, authority domain, you have the benefit of Google’s trust, the age of the domain gives it more authority than a new one and a well built site with plenty of relevant content can see itself rising quickly in the SERPs with the right promotional work of getting links and building trust. For a really great post on the subject of expired domains, check out Elliott’s extremely detailed and informative post on the subject at his blog blogexplosion.net by following this link: Buying Aged Preowned Domains

Then you have more options. Once you’ve built up your site with good SEO and are attracting some targeted organic search traffic, you can make money from your website using certain monetisation such as PPC (adsense) or promoting affiliate products, leads or even put up some eBay store widgets.

Or you can make a lot of money fast by flipping the site. This is simply a term relating to reselling the domain with the site you built for a hefty profit. And I do mean hefty.

An expired domain that probably cost you $15 or thereabouts to purchase, plus a few weeks of writing and link building and a few months of maturing could pay dividends if your site is capeable of generating a good income from the monetisation techniques already mentioned and has the verifiable serach engine traffic to do it with, you could be looking at a profit into the thousands of dollars range.

So when I started this post and I said here’s how to make money online and then started to ramble on a little in order to make this post work for me as well as provide information for you, I reckon that now you’ve gotten to this point, I’ve done exactly what I said I would do.

Shown you exactly how to make money online.

Terry Didcott
Make Money Hints

Here are some easy make money ways of using expired domains to get a head start in the SERPs and avoid the sandbox.

I want to follow on from my last post here at Make Money Hints, which covered how to get sneaky and turn all your spam comments to your advantage in the SEO wars and get on with another contentious method of getting yourself into a position where you can easy make money from a new website or blog.

Easy Make Money Domains?

Well, we all know how important it is to have your main keywords in your domain name from an SEO standpoint. But when you buy a fresh domain name for your intended niche site you run the risk of being dropped into the sandbox by Google which means you won’t feature anywhere useful in the SERPs and that could last for several months. All that time, you are losing potential revenure from your site because it’s not getting any organic traffic.

So how do you get round the sandbox?

I’ll tell you.

Instead of buying a new domain, have a look at the domain auctions and see if you can find a suitable domain that is up for sale. New domains are likely candidates for the sandbox if Google thinks they might be used for spam sites. A domain older than two years will not be considered for the sandbox purely because of its age and its less likely to be a spam site – that’s because spammers are generally stupid and only use fresh domains. There are thousands of expired or soon to be expired potentially easy make money domains for sale at any given moment and the older the domain, the better.

But won’t that cost a small fortune?

No it won’t.

You can get your hands on expired, or soon to be expired domains for as little as $5 plus the cost of a year’s registration which can be had with discount coupons for less than $10 per year. This is easy make money! Domains that have expired sometimes come with page rank.

Ah, now that is a little icing on the cake.

The longer ago a domain was first registered the better, because when you’re fighting your way up the SERPs with your best SEO and you finally make it to the high pages you’ll come into contact with other highly SEO’d sites that are all vying for the top spots in order to make money more from their sites. The distinction Google will make between sites will be based on things like keyword relevancy, keyword authority, Page Rank, age, whether monetized or not, volume of relevant content… whoah back up a bit… age!

The older your domain, the more authority it will be given by Google and the other search engines. Meaning when all other things become equal, the oldest domain will usually move above its rivals because it is seen as having the most authority. Sort of like respecting your elders and betters!

Only that kind of respect will be your ticket to the easy make money places in the SEPs.

So, how do you go about buying an expired domain?

The easiest place I’ve personally found to buy expired domains is at GoDaddy auctions. Simply go to their site (you can use the link) and click on the “Domain Auctions” tab.

You’ll be taken to their domain auctions page and you’ll be presented with the overview page and an offer to “join The Domain Name Aftermarket”. That’ll cost you a measly $4.95 (yes, you have to spend money to make money!) but you have to do that to be able to bid on or buy the second-hand domains. You’ll have to be signed in first, so if you haven’t already got an account with GoDaddy, then its free to create one – just go here=> GoDaddy, and click on the “create new account” link in the log-in box.

Once you’ve done all that, click on the “Current Auction” tab and then click the link to view expired domains (or view all auctions if you like).

The list you’ll get is huge, but you can narrow your search down a lot by using the “advanced search” link and searching on the keywords you want to see what’s available. Prices start at $5 for “Closeouts” which you can “buy now” without having to bid against anyone. Or you can bid on domains that start at $10 if something catches your eye and you can see a way to easy make money from it! How you do it is really up to you, but to save you a little time floundering around, these make money hints should help.

• Filter the search by clicking on the “Price” tab to get the cheapest domains first.
• Check the “Time Left” – that’s how long before the auction (or buy now window) closes.
• Bid near to the end of the auction for a better chance of winning the domain
• Use the advanced search feature – it’ll save you hours of searching
• You can set the number of items displayed. Default is 50 but I change it to 200
• When you find a domain you like, research it

That last one needs some explaining, so here goes:

Use whatever tools you have available to you to research the domain before you buy it. At least do a whois to ascertain the age of the domain, remember you’re looking for nice old domains but at least two years old will practically guarantee you escape the sandbox.

You can also use a tool like SEO Elite to find out if the domain has any verifiable backlinks – very handy way of discovering if it comes with any page rank and if that page rank is likely to stay with the domain once you’ve bought it.

You can also check a domain’s page rank by simply opening it in your browser and using the Google toolbar. You should also Google it to see if they have any of its pages indexed. Sometimes they do, sometimes not which might mean the domain has been de-indexed for some reason. The worst case is if the domain was banned for bad practices, like spamming. Then you will have to tread carefully, but even a banned domain can be fixed by informing Google you are the new owner of the domain and are using it for legitimate purposes through Google Webmaster Tools.

Other than that, go and buy your domain. You’ll have to wait a few days before it is released into your safekeeping, which you can keep a track of at the GoDaddy site by clicking on the “won” link in the “Bidding List” box.

Once you have taken possession of the domain (you’ll get an email from GoDaddy to confirm this) then it’s yours to do what you want with it – preferably to make money!

Terry Didcott
Freedom Writer
Make Money Hints