When you meet someone for the first time, there is always a time in the conversation when you’re going to ask each other what you do for a living. When I was working for the man, the answer was easy. I would simply say “I’m the Vice President of Marketing for a web company that offers various services to franchise companies”.

Now that I am self-employed and that I generate 100% of my revenues on the Internet, I find it a bit harder to explain what I do in one short and concise sentence. The best answer would be that I make money online. I’ve found that telling this usually generates about 60 more questions about the possible ways to make a living off a computer and an Internet connection.

In this article, I would like to discuss the various ways I make money online, mostly through blogging, content publishing and projects for clients.

How I Make Money Blogging

To me, blogging is one of the easiest ways to make money online. The start-up cost is extremely low. All you need is a domain name, a hosting plan, and a blog set up for a total cost of about $100/year. Of course, besides this you’ll need some time, expertise in a given field, and some serious motivation and dedication.

I run several blogs but there is one that I am completely dedicated to: my iPhone blog. I’ve been running this blog since May 2008 and at the time I am writing this, it is one of the most regarded iPhone blogs out there and it gets about 1 million visitors per month. Yes, you read it right. About 1 million people come visit my iPhone blog every month. Google “iPhone Blog” and you’ll see the iPhone Download Blog up there in the top results!

This didn’t happen overnight, but I can’t say that it took me forever to get here either. I’ve invested a lot of time in it. I really know what I’m talking about. I am very motivated and totally devoted to this blog, which I update at least once a day, every single day.

This being said, here is how I make money blogging:

Adsense

Adsense is a a service offered by Google that allows you to be paid everytime someone clicks on an ad on your site. This is basically how it works. You sign up with Adsense, Google gives you a piece of code to put on your site. This code will look at what your site is about and will display relevant ads. Whenever someone visits your site and clicks on one of these ads, Google will pay you a little commission. These commissions can go as little as $0.01/click to well over $50.

Although many A-list bloggers will tell you that Adsense sucks because it drives traffic away from your site, it still is a great and easy way to generate money easily. The downside to this is that you have no idea how much Google is really making thanks to you. When they pay you $0.25 for a click, they might actually make $4 for it, keeping the largest piece of the pie.

Banner Ads

I make quite a bit of money with banner ads without having to spend time managing them. I work with a company called BuySellAds (BSA). This is how it works. I tell BSA that I have a few ad spots available on my site and I also tell them what each spot is worth. That’s my part of the job.

BSA has a huge inventory of advertisors and puts my site in front of them. When an advertisor thinks my blog would be a great fit for their products, the advertisors can look at my ad spots options (placement and price) and decides to buy an ad.

From there, BSA collects the payment and takes a 25% cut. That’s their commission for their service. After collecting payment, it will automatically display the new ad on my site and send me an email telling me I just made money (I love receiving those emails).

The benefit of using such a service is that BSA helps me connect with advertisers that I may never find otherwise. Additionally, it makes it very easy and safe to collect the payment. Finally, and more importantly to me, all this is handled without me having to do anything.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a form of marketing where the affiliate (me in that case) promotes a business or service in exchange for a percentage or fixed commission of the sales they generate.

Let’s take the example of my iPhone blog. Invisible Shield is a product that helps protect your iPhone from scratches. I placed a banner for their product on my site and every time someone clicks on this banner and buys an Invisible Shield, I get about $5.

There are affiliate programs for virtually every product or industry out there. Here are 5 of my favorite affiliate marketplaces:

• ClickBank
• Regnow
• Share A Sale
• Commission Junction
• LinkShare

On my iPhone blog, I promote several affiliate programs ranging from accessories to softwares for iPhone. This generates pretty substantial revenues every month.

In-Text Advertising

In-Text advertising refers to links placed inside your text, that come with a double underline to differentiate them from normal links. Once the user rolls the mouse over the link, the advertising will pop.

Although these in-text ads, also known as contextual ads, can seem annoying, they’ve been generating quite some income for me since I started using them.

I was very reluctant to include them in my blog until I realized that 1) my readers don’t mind them at all, and 2) they can generate thousands each month.

I use Kontera for my in-text ads. I even cut a pretty sweet deal with them, which is probably why I generate so much income from these ads.

Sponsored Tweets

Just like in-text ads, it took me a while to jump on the sponsored tweets bandwagon and so far, I’m not really impressed by the results. I do get people to pay me to send a tweet promoting their products from time to time, but not as often as I would want it.

There are 2 ways I go about it. The first is that I let people pay me directly via Paypal to send their sponsored tweets. That’s my favorite way because there is no middleman.

The other way is to use a service called Sponsored Tweets. It’s like a marketplace where advertisers can find tweeters like me. Although this service is very respectable, I don’t like it as much as the first method because it takes a pretty big commission, which means less money for me.

Content Publishing

Publishing and selling content is my favorite way to make money online because if you do it well, it doesn’t require much work at all and can provide a steady revenue stream.

Writing & Selling eBooks

eBooks are hot and they’re about to become even hotter. They allow anyone with a little bit of knowledge about a given topic to be published at a very small cost.

The concept is very simple: you find problematic topics and give the solution under the form of an ebook. I wrote a few eBooks on my own that I am now selling via the ClickBank marketplace.

Blog Building and Internet Marketing Consulting

I recently started offering my services to a select group of clients. From constructing a new blog from scratch, through to writing killer articles that attract more traffic and links, I help individuals and businesses, large and small, every day. Here are some example services:

• Blog building
• Blog teaching
• Social Media consulting
• Search Engine Optimization
• Content creation

More to Come

As the Internet evolves, new ways of making money online are created. I believe that what I’m doing now online has nothing to do with what I’ll be doing in 10 years.

How do you make money online?

How I Found Out My Adwords Account Was Banned

On December 3rd, I noticed that I hadn’t made any sale at all on my affiliate sites. Very unusual! Last time this happened, it was because Google Adwords had put my account on hold for review (without even letting me know about it!), back in August.

I logged into Adwords and realized my account had delivered no impression, no click, nothing. Clearly there was something going on. I tried not to stress too much but I failed at it. I was (and still am) traveling in Australia with limited Internet access and emailing back and forth with Adwords’ reps didn’t sound like fun.

Besides, it was the middle of the night in the States so I simply decided to send an email to customer support and basically asked them if my account was being reviewed again, which would explain the reason why I didn’t get any click or ad impression. This is a copy of the email I sent them:

Hello.

I logged into my account on Dec 3rd and was surprised to see that none of my ads for all of my campaigns had been displayed. There is not even a single impression.

The last time this happened, it was because my account was under review. As usual when that kind of thing happens, I am bit worried. I rely intirely on Adwords for my revenues.

Would you please let me know what’s going on? Why are my campaigns not showing anything at all? Should I be worried? What are the next steps?

Please let me know as soon as possible. As I said above, I rely intirely on you and a day without ads displaying is a day without income. I’m sure you understand my concern.

Thank you in advance.

Sebastien Page

After a night spent without much sleep I got up and checked my emails on my iPhone, hoping for an answer from Adwords telling me everything was fine. Instead this is the email I received:

Hello,

Thank you for your email. Google is dedicated to providing safe, relevant
and high-quality experiences for all of our users – including visitors to
Google sites and content publishers, as well as our valued advertisers and
partners. To help us achieve this goal, we require advertisers to adhere
to our Advertising Policies and to follow our Landing Page and Site
Quality Guidelines. The AdWords system visits and evaluates advertiser
landing pages on a regular basis to ensure this compliance.  In cases
where a violation has occurred, some advertisers may first receive a
warning to correct the problem; however, in other cases where violations
have occurred frequently, or are considered egregious, Google may choose
to permanently disable the advertiser’s AdWords account.

A disabled account may no longer run existing or future ads. Account
access will still be available for the purposes of viewing historical
data; however, no ads will be allowed to run on this or associated
accounts in the future. Likewise, any new accounts opened by the disabled
account-holder will also be disabled.
Google considers inappropriate or unacceptable behavior by advertisers to
be a serious offense. To help avoid these problems, we strive to educate
our advertisers about advertising best practices, and to provide extensive
information about our policies regarding advertising policies, ad quality,
and approvals. The vast majority of our advertisers try to provide good
user experiences through the sites they promote.  However, Google will do
its best to remove from the AdWords program those advertisers who choose
to ignore our policies and guidelines and instead promote websites that
create poor, or even harmful, user experiences.

We cannot reveal our specific filtration methods for measuring site
quality or triggering account suspension. However, the unacceptable
business practices and policy violations for poor-quality landing pages
for which Google will disable AdWords accounts include (but are not
limited to):

* Data collection sites that offer free items, etc., in order to
collect private information
* Arbitrage sites without relevant and original content that are
designed for the purpose of showing ads
* Affiliate sites without relevant and original content that are
designed to drive traffic to another site with a
different domain
* “Get-rich quick” sites
* Malware sites that install software on a visitor’s computer
* Poor comparison shopping or travel sites whose primary purpose is to
send users to other shopping/travel
comparison sites, rather than to provide useful content or
additional search functionality

You can find links to additional information about our advertising
policies and landing page guidelines below:
* AdWords Advertising Policies:
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=guidelines.cs
* Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines:
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=46675

If you have additional questions, please visit our Help Center at
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/, where you’ll find answers to many
frequently asked questions. We look forward to providing you with the most
effective advertising available.

Sincerely,

Tasneem
The Google AdWords Team

Just by reading the first sentence you understand it’s a copy/paste and that the rep probably didn’t even take the time to read my full message.

I was pissed for 3 reasons:

1. Google didn’t even deem it necessary to alert me my account was being banned. I mean no email, no status update in my Adwords account, nothing. This is completely unprofessional and unacceptable. If I hadn’t inquired about it myself, I would have never found out. But what are you going to do about it? Yes right. Nothing.

2. I didn’t feel like I violated their landing page and site quality guidelines. Nothing ever told me I was in violation. Again, I never received an automatic email from Adwords telling me my sites were not in accordance with their guidelines, neither did I get a status update in my account.

3. My account had been under review just a few months prior to that and passed the review process without any problem, so why now my account is being banned, especially when I didn’t make any change at all to my account or my sites?

Talk To The Hand Google

Talking to Google is like talking to a brick wall. It probably hears you but it’s not gonna do much for you. After reading this copy/pasted email, I replied to it:

Hi,

What a shock to receive the email below from you this morning. So apparently my account has been disabled, like hundreds of others it seems.

First, I find it harsh that I had to email support and inquire about the 0 impression and 0 clicks in my account to find out that my account was disabled. Many reports receiving an email alerting them their account was being disabled but I did not get such email. Anyways, that is the least of my worries at this moment.

Over the past year or so, I spend $23,431.25 with Adwords. My ads have been reviewed several times. My account was put on hold back in August for review, and it was back up a couple days later. At the time, a Google Adwords Rep manually reviewed my sites and campaigns. Why wasn’t my account disabled then?

In your email to me, you mention that I was warned several times. I was not. I never got any warning from Google. Seeing how much I spend with you, it would have been nice to dedicate a CSR to help me figure how to improve everything.

My ads, campaigns, and keywords have always showed good quality scores (usually 7/10). So why disable my account now?

You also give a list of reasons for being banned. None of them apply to me. None!

I want to believe this is some kind of computerized mistake. Again, by reading all the forums and blogs about the matter, it has to be a mistake.

Instead of sending me a copy/paste email, would you please take a few minutes of your time and help me figure out why I was disabled. Maybe this was just a mistake. I hope this was just a mistake!

It might not mean anything to you but Google destroyed my business overnight. I make 100% of my revenues via Adwords. Yes, in other words, I’m broke.

Considering how much money I spent in the past, I would appreciate if a real person (not a computer) looked at my case and gave me a tailored answer.

Thank you in advance.

Sebastien Page

I also immediately tried to chat with an Adwords rep but for some reason it said it was impossible at the time. It seemed strange to me as it was Thursday in the States, middle of the day. Then I had the bright idea of logging out of my Google account and tried to access the chat again. Magically, it worked. This was a bad sign. Why wouldn’t Google let me chat with a rep when logged in, yet they let me get in touch with them when I am not logging in (aka when they don’t know who I am).

The chat session was very brief and useless. I told the rep that I had never had any warnings. He told me I did. I told him most of my campaigns get ads get a 7/10 quality score but he ignored me.

Two days later, I received this email from Google:

Hello Sebastien,

Thank you for your email. At Google, we consistently seek ways to better
ensure and protect the online experience for all of our users and
advertisers. At times, we may review historical as well as current account
behaviors to preserve this integrity. During a recent review of your
account history, it was determined that your past violations of AdWords
policies and disregard for landing page and site quality guidelines
warranted further action to avoid future incidents of violation that might
lead to notably negative or harmful user experiences.

Google considers inappropriate or unacceptable behavior by advertisers to

be a serious offense, and we reserve the right to to disable AdWords
accounts at any time in order to protect the quality and safety of our
users’ experiences. The decision to disable your AdWords account was not
taken lightly, and we appreciate your cooperation in this matter.

If you believe that this account disabling was unwarranted, please send me
additional information about why this is the case so that I can further
research this issue.

In the meantime, you can find links to additional information about our
advertising policies and landing page guidelines below:

* AdWords Advertising Policies:
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=guidelines.cs
* Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines:
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=46675

If you have additional questions, please visit our Help Center at
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/, where you’ll find answers to many
frequently asked questions. We look forward to providing you with the most
effective advertising available.

Sincerely,

Tasneem
The Google AdWords Team

There was a bit of hope as her email said that “If you believe that this account disabling was unwarranted, please send me additional information about why this is the case so that I can further research this issue.” So I pleaded for my case…

Google Doesn’t Even Bother Reading My Explanations

I spent a solid hour writing the following email, which I sent at 9.01PM. Note that the names of my campaigns have been edited for privacy reasons.

Hello Tasneem,

Thank you for taking the time to reply to me and most importantly,
thank you for allowing me to give my side of the story.

I chatted with one of your colleagues a couple of days ago who told me
that the quality score of my websites were too low, especially on
the”TG” campaign.

Here is why this came as a shock to me.

1. My 3 main campaigns (TM, AC, and B) all show
a quality score of at least 5/10. In most cases, they show a quality
score of 7/10. Now the only way I can find out about my quality scores
is by going to each keyword in the campaigns and hover my mouse over
to the various keywords. From there, a little yellow window tells me
the quality score and gives me the following information:

* Keyword relevance: No problems
* Landing page quality: No problems
* Landing page load time: No problems

This is as far as I know the only way I can tell the quality score of
my campaigns. Please note that I don’t consider myself an Adwords
“guru”. As you may be able to tell, I haven’t made much changes to my
account/campaigns within the last few months.

This being said, I don’t consider that these 3 campaigns have low
quality scores, as they all show in green.

2. Back in August of 2009, just a few months ago, my account was under
review for a few days. It took me a few days to realize it was under
review and when I did figure it out, I contacted one of your
colleagues via your chat feature. Your colleague told me at the time
that it was something that most accounts are going through from time
to time and there was nothing to worry about. A few days later, I
received an email from her saying that my account was reactivated and
everything was fine. My account seemed to be in good standing at the
time.

Since August 2009, date at which Adwords Team reviewed my account and
deemed it as “in good standing”, I didn’t make much changes to my
campaigns. The most I did was just editing bids. I also didn’t change
anything at all to my websites.

3. In September or October, I contacted Adwords support for a simple
issue I had. Your colleague looked at my account and never mentioned
anything about my account being fraudulent.

Taking the 3 points above into account, it never occurred to me that
my account could be in violation of Adwords terms. To me, everything
was fine until I realized my account had been disabled a few days ago.
If anything was wrong with my account, I honestly thought that it
would have come up at some point during the review process in August,
or when I chatted with support a few months ago. Now that I am on the
spot, I also would have expected to receive some kind of email
notification or status warning letting me know about my account being
potentially against Google terms.

One part I recognize being in the wrong is with the “TG”
campaign. When I first created this campaign, it was active for a few
days or maybe weeks. It was receiving impressions and clicks. All the
sudden, it stopped working. I was getting 0 impression and 0 click for
it. After chatting with support a few days ago, I know realize that it
might be the campaign that got my account flagged and disabled.

To my defense, I really didn’t think that this was an issue at all.
The campaign was still active (I deactivated it after chatting with
support) but receiving no impressions and I was under the assumption
that the “system” (aka Adwords computers) was just seeing this
campaign as “dead”. I knew that at some point, I would want to work on
this “TG” campaign and figure out what was wrong with it,
but I was in no rush because I wasn’t aware that it could get me
banned from Google. In all honesty, I wasn’t even aware that it was
against Google’s terms to have this campaign still active.

In summary, I completely take responsibility for the “TG”
campaign mess up. Even though I was not aware that it might get me
banned, I should have disabled it. For the 3 other campaigns (TM,
B, AC), I believe these campaigns are in good
standing since they have been receiving impressions and clicks on a
daily basis.

Tasneem, I know an email can’t really translate emotions and it makes
it easy to say whatever I want, but I beg you to believe me when I say
that I didn’t know about the TG campaign. If I had known
what it could get me into for one second, I would have never taken the
chance and I would have deactivated it right away. I know that
ignoring the rules is not an excuse for breaking them, but I would be
forever grateful if you could give me a second chance. I am not a bad
man. I don’t scam people, I don’t try to steal their information, I
don’t try to install virus on their computers. I am just trying to
make a living online.

If I was guilty of violating Google’s rules, I ask for forgiveness and
pardon. As I said above, I am not an Adwords guru who tried to fool
the system. I am an honest and hard working man. I moved to the States
6 years ago and I was starting to realize my American Dream. I was
working for myself and being proud of what I did. Now this Dream is
shattered because of an innocent mistake I made and that has been
seriously changing my life for the worst since I found out about it.

Tasneem, all I am asking from you is a little compassion and trust in
me. Please take this email into consideration and let me know if you
have additional questions or comments. If you’d like to chat with me
over the phone or over the internet, please let me know as well. I am
willing to do virtually anything I can to show you that I am an honest
man.

Thank you very much for your time.

Regards,

Sebastien Page

Eleven (11) minutes later, I received this email back:

Hello Sebastien,

Thank you for your email. As mentioned in our previous email, your Google
AdWords account has been suspended due to multiple LPQ violations. We are
unable to revoke your account suspension, and we will not accept
advertisements from you in the future.

Please note that our support team is unable to help you with this issue,
and we ask that you do not contact them about this matter. If you need
more information about our content policy guidelines, please visit
https://adwords.google.com/select/contentpolicy.html.

As noted in our Terms and Conditions, Google reserves the right to
terminate advertisements for any reason. To view our Terms and Conditions,
please visit https://adwords.google.com/select/tsandcsfinder.

We appreciate your cooperation.

If you have additional questions, please visit our Help Center at
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/, where you’ll find answers to many
frequently asked questions. We look forward to providing you with the most
effective advertising available.

Sincerely,

Tasneem
The Google AdWords Team

Assuming the CSR read my email immediately right after I sent it, there is no way in the world she could have read it all and taken the time to reply to me in just under 11 minutes. Realizing that she didn’t even read my email made me pretty angry and confirmed that once Google made a decision, there is nothing you can do about it.

The Situation As I see It

Why was my account reviewed and approved a few months back and now it’s being disabled?

Why was my account “good to go” in August but mysteriously gets banned a few months later?

Why wasn’t I alerted that my account was at risk of being banned?

Why didn’t an Adwords rep get in touch with me and tried to help me figure out what was wrong?

Many Questions. No Answers

To date, I still don’t know why my account was banned. I suppose the “TG” campaign got me in but it was never confirmed. No one at Google can point out what I did wrong.

Imagine for one second that one day the cops come to your house and take you to jail. You ask them what you did wrong to be thrown in jail and they tell you that you broke the law on many occasions. You ask them what law you could have possibly broken. They say “our law”. You beg them to tell you what you did wrong but they don’t say anything. They just tell you that you are going to jail because you broke the law and you knew about it. You tell them you have no idea what they are talking about and you never knew you were doing anything wrong. They say “too bad, we knew you were doing something wrong but we’re not going to tell you what or when”.

That’s exactly how I feel right now.

Google Is Over Reacting

I paid these guys a couple thousand dollars a month for a year and they seriously can’t help me at all? They ban me like I am a miserable spammer? They don’t even bother helping me out? I think Google just over-reacted to this. While they could have simply disabled the campaigns that were in the wrong, they chose to ban me for life. I think it is out of proportion.

The Giant With Feet Of Clay

Google can afford to ban accounts left and right without any explanation because they own the search market. Reality is they are not going to own this market forever. Maybe they will for the next 5, 10, or 20 years, but eventually it will lose its grip on people as more and more realize that Google’s old motto “Don’t Be Evil” becomes irrelevant. That’s probably why they dropped it a few months ago…

What’s Next?

I seriously have not much a plan for what’s next. I already use Miscrosoft Ad Center, which by the way is amazing (oh, and you can even talk to their CSRs on the phone!), but it doesn’t deliver much. Yahoo and Overture? Meh!

I could create another account under a different name and start over again but Google is smarter than that. They could easily figure it out and ban me again. Besides, I really don’t want to play cat and mouse with them.

Can You Help?

Do you know anyone at Google? Do you know someone at Adwords? If so maybe you can help me figure out what I did wrong. Seriously, it’s killing me!

I want to talk to you about how I am extending one of my products to different niches. By the way, this post is for people interested in web/affiliate marketing. If you’re not into it, you will find this post worthless.

About 5 months ago, I wrote my first ebook and created a website/sales letter for it. I sell this ebook through ClickBank, which allows me to take advantage of their huge network of affiliates. As a side note, to date, affiliates generate about 40% of my sales for this product. The product in question is a health-related ebook, some sort of “how to cure XXX in 60 days”. Sales are doing great so far!

While I was writing the ebook, I realized that it could hit 3 different niches. I wasn’t sure how to go about it. Should I try to hit these 3 niches on the same sales letter? Or should I create different websites and sales letter aimed at each specific niche? It didn’t take me too long to make my decision to create 3 different products.

Creating different products has the advantage of you delivering exactly what people are looking for when they come to your site, which is the most important thing. You know how it is, people come to a site and if they don’t see exactly what they’re looking for right away, they will bounce. By creating different websites for each niche, I avoid this problem.

What’s great about this technique is that it doesn’t take much time to create the additional sites. Simply copy/paste the first one you created, then change the main keyword.

Let’s take an example. Imagine you write an ebook about “how to cure swine flu”. You will create the website around the “swine flu” keyword. Additionally, you should create 2 other websites to focus on “how to cure H1N1″ and “how to cure influenza A virus”. This way, you will cover every terms people will look for on Google and you will deliver content targeted to these people. The websites as well as the ebooks will be the same, except you will replace “swine flu” by “H1N1″ and “influenza A virus”.

Last week, I created the second website of the series. It was approved by ClickBank on Thursday and I already made a few sales out of it. My goal this week is to update the website and the ebook with the 3rd keyword and get it approved by ClickBank to start generating revenues from it.

As you can see, this is a very simple technique that allows you to increase your reach and hit different similar niches with the same product without reinventing the wheel.

I look forward to reading your thoughts on that :)

I started a site called iPhone Download Blog to replicate what I had done with iPod softwares. At first, I set up the blog like a store and only had products for sale. I didn’t have content per say, except descriptions of softwares. So I started creating content just so search engines could see that my site was legit. I expected to write just a few articles but I quickly got sucked into it and started blogging about the iPhone for fun.

I found my niche

I had an iPhone so I knew what I was talking about, I wasn’t just bullshitting people with some useless content. In the same time, I started hacking my iPhone and learned how to jailbreak it. I wrote mostly about this topic, and I started realizing people really liked what I was doing, and most of my traffic was coming to learn more about how to hack their iPhone and how to get the most out of it. That’s when I realized that I had found my niche.

I was spending a lot of times reporting about iPhone news; the same news that most other iPhone blogs were already talking about. At this point, I kinda stopped blogging about iPhone news. It was pointless. I was clearly wasting my time. So I really cut back on the posting of iPhone news and I didn’t notice a traffic decrease at all. It was very stable. I received a few emails from die hard readers who were pissed because I wasn’t posting news anymore so I wrote a post explaining what the situation was. I was pretty honest and told them that people were obviously not coming to my blog to read iPhone news and that writing these articles took a lot of my time (sometimes up to 2-3 hours a day). Looking at the comments I had on this post, I think people understood the situation and were cool with it.

These days, I still write about iPhone news from time to time when it’s a big deal or when I feel like it’s important but I mostly focus on my niche: iPhone hacking.

I hired free staff

In the meantime, I posted on my blog saying that I was looking for writers/bloggers to join me. I thought that even though people mostly came to my blog to learn how to hack the iPhone, it wouldn’t hurt to have other people blog about news, applications, and other stuffs. For a while, I had 3 bloggers that were posting quality content, but like most bloggers, they got tired of it and after a few months, they completely stopped writing for me.

What was really cool is that these people were writing for free. They were writing very good content, which to date still drives large amounts of traffic.

Today, I have only one guy who writes on a pretty regular basis about iPhone applications. I also have a few people applying to write for me every once in a while but it’s very hard to find good bloggers. I’m really not looking for quantity anymore. I’m all about quality now!

What about money?

When I started my iPhone blog, my only income stream was the Regnow affiliate program to sell iPhone softwares. I have to admit that it was performing very poorly. Let’s say that a $100/month was a good month at the time.

Then I set up the blog with Adsense. It was working ok, making about $10/day on average. The problem with an iPhone blog is that visitors are young and are pretty much adproof, meaning that they don’t even see the ads anymore because they are too used to them. I tried optimizing my ads but it didn’t improve things much. Then I heard about The AdSense Code, a best-seller by Joel Comm, a pretty successful internet marketer. I bought it from Amazon and implemented a few of the techniques described in the book. Results were astounding. I went from making $10/day to making between $20 to $30/day, sometimes more.

The last few months, my checks from Google have been between $700 and $800. I created a special banking account for all the money I make with Adsense and it is my girlfriend and I’s travel found. For example, we’re going to Costa Rica next month for 2 weeks and it’s all paid by Google Adsense!

I also signed up for 2 other affiliate programs: one to sell iPhone screen protectors and one to sell custom iPhone skins. The first one brings in about $150/month and the other one about $100/month. Not too bad considering that I don’t have anything to do at all for these.

The biggest move was probably to set up an iPhone store where I sell hundreds of accessories for iPhone. The best thing is that, again, I don’t have anything to do at all. It’s all managed by a third-party company. They set me up with the store integration, they add products as they come, they take care of billing, shipping, and customer service. I basically have nothing to do but sit back and wait for my monthly PayPal payment. The iPhone Store brings in another $150/month on average.

I used to be an affiliate of the iTunes App Store as well, which started working very well for me but the assholes at Apple cracked down on every affiliate that had an Apple trademark in their URL. Since my URL contains the trademark “iPhone” (www.iPhoneDownloadBlog.com), they suspended my account. I wasn’t the only one having this issue. Many other iPhone and iPod blogs had this problem and were forced to stop marketing the App Store applications. Why would Apple do such a thing? I have no idea, but all I know is that they’re leaving a lot of money on the table by doing that.

Where am I today?

Things are doing pretty well for my iPhone blog these days. I get about 12,000 unique visitors a day on average and I usually spend a couple hours a week working on it, except when there are major events such as the release of a new model, new firmware, or a new jailbreaking or unlocking method.

If I add up all the revenue streams from this blog, I make an average of $1,100/month, which is more than decent. I really want to keep growing the site without compromising its integrity. I think it’s very important to stay true and don’t be a total sell out.

First, let’s see what’s good about Craigslist. To me Craigslist has 4 major benefits: it’s free; it’s a well known website; it is a trusted site; and most importantly, it is one of the most visited websites in the US.

Many internet marketers use Craigslist to make a quick buck. If you’ve been on Craigslist before, you’ve probably seen all these ads such as “Make $12,000 in 3 days”, or “Earn 2K residual for life”. These are ads made up to advertise affiliate programs. From an affiliate marketer standpoint, these ads have very little value because they will most likely be removed in a matter of minutes.

The real deal is to create ads that will stick (which means not be removed) to generate traffic to your site, not from Craigslist visitors, but from Google visitors.

Let me explain to you something you probably know… Google loves Craigslist and it crawls the site many many times a day. When you post an ad on Craigslist, Google will find it in a matter of minutes, index it, and give it much more importance than it actually deserves, putting it on the first page of Google for a given keyword. If one of your keywords shows up on the first page of the SERP, you’re gold! You will get good qualified traffic from this.

Let’s cut the crap. Here is what I recommend to do in order to get your Craigslist ad on the first page of Google:

1. Your ad title should be your main keyword/keyphrase
2. Choose your ad title wisely. If your website sells warts removal cures, don’t just name your ad “warts removal”. There is too much competition for this keyword, so be more specific: “Natural Warts Removal” would be good.
3. Write a very short post description. Just a few words are enough. You’re not trying to sell the people right here; you’re trying to get them to come to your site! A good description for our warts removal site would be: “Our natural warts removal cure will help you get rid of warts naturally without drugs or cream”.
4. Make sure to include your main keyphrase in the description.
5. Include your URL and make it clickable. Not good: www.SebastienPage.com – Good: www.SebastienPage.com
6. That’s it!

Now here is what you shouldn’t do:

1. Do not repeat the same process over and over again with the same keywords. I don’t even recommend doing this over and over again with various titles as the Craigslist community will get back at you by flagging your posts. Just do it a couple times a week, switching ad titles and ad descriptions. Note that ads show up quickly on Google, but they don’t stay for more than 2-3 days.
2. Do not use broad titles!!! As I mentioned above, do not use competitive keyphrases but go after the long tail.

I use this trick on the 3 of my money making sites and I get great traffic for free. Since you’re targeting the long tail, you’re most likely not gonna get thousands of visits. But as we say in French, “10 grams of fine patisseries are better than 10 pounds of potatoes”.

Here is a screenie of my fake ad posted on Craigslist for “Natural Warts Removal” ranking #1 for this search! Note that I posted this ad on Craigslist on 1/16/09. This screenshot was taken on 1/17/09. So by the time you see this, the results will most likely have changed.

Click on the image for a larger view.