There are a number of ways to determine the value of a link on your website.
You could sample a whole bunch of sites, look how much they are charging then draw your own conclusions.
Or you can use this nifty calculator over at Text Link Ads.
Check it out for yourself. Just go here.
Follow the link then click on “Make Money” > “Link Calculator”
Try it out & let me know what you think.
If you have been looking for work from home typing job then I recommend you check out the Type At Home website.
These folks approached me asking if I would promote their program on my website.
Having promoted a few programs in the past that I rather would not have associated with, I decided to check it out for myself. I wanted to ensure that my readers were getting a genuine business offering.
I wrote to the owners asking some questions about their program. They wrote back, providing me with a short term access to the program so I could see if it really did measure up.
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When looking for residual income, some of the best opportunities relate to products which have global appeal.
A number of options spring to mind which are internet related. These include ISPs (you need one to get on the net), Web Hosting (you really need this to market yourself) and spam (you get this as you get more popular.
Thinking about spam there are a number of ways to combat it.
The last option has some appeal. Learning systems get it wrong, they never quite “tune” properly. Challenge systems are black and white. If the email is legitimate it gets through, otherwise it doesnt.
Spam is a global problem. There is a opportunity here to help people with a genuine problem and make a little money at the same time.
SpamArrest is a whitelist/challenge based spam blocker. It also has an affiliate program which pays residuals for those who signup as a result of your marketing efforts.
There are other companies which offer similar functionality. They ask the individual to confirm details multiple times. Each time trying to sell their product. Spam Arrest does it just once - I prefer it this way because my friends dont want to be pestered each time they email me. Once is fine - more often is too much.
Have a look at SpamArrest & let me know what you think.
I know it held me back for nearly two years before I finally saw it. You don’t need to take that long :-) Learn from my mistake today and succeed.
I wanted to title this article The Ultimate Secret To Your Online Success. But I suspected that not many people would actually believe the claim. As I wanted as many people learn from it as possible, I settled for a less catchy but more believable title.
I consider what I ‘discovered’ the ultimate secret not because you can’t find it anywhere. You can. In fact many successful people talk about it quite openly.
I do consider it a secret because it took me almost two years online to discover. It stared me right in the eyes the whole time, yet I couldn’t see it. As far as I was concerned it was hidden from me.
Then after two years of struggling to make any decent income online, it was time for some deep soul searching.
I had my back against the wall: It was either turn it around and start making money online, or go back to my old career. For a while I also considered selling one of our homes, but my wife and I decided that this was a dumb idea. Selling a house was not going to solve my problem. It would only prolong my online agony.
What I really needed was to discover what I was doing wrong for the past two years, and change it. Otherwise, I was quite prepared to go back to my successful computer programming career. (But I just didn’t like the idea of working for someone else again.)
It didn’t take me long to discover what I was doing wrong. And this brings me to the ultimate secret:
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I recently finished a massive study of profitable and unprofitable sites. The average length of the profitable site’s sales letter was 1.8 pages. The average length of the unprofitable site’s sales letter was 2 pages.
Shorter ad copy was more profitable on average than long copy.
Of course that is heresy. Many, many famous copywriters swear by long copy. Still… the study was valid and it is a fact… known profitable sites had shorter copy than known less profitable sites on average.
I then remembered that I had done a similar study way back in June 2002. That study wasn’t based on profitability, but it was comparing length of copy to an action… in that case, a click. The shorter the anchor text (the clickable text), the higher the click-thru rate… on average.
Still, I had a decision to make. Would I follow my own advice? I thought about the hours that I had spent coming up with 10-13 pages of sales letter for the three products I recently released. I thought about the hours I spent in Glyphius optimizing each of the dozens of paragraphs. Could I really just hack up those sales letters based on these two studies?
I realized that I wasn’t quite a believer yet. I needed some backup data before I was willing to hack up my own sales letters. Since the results were so heretical, I suspected that most of you would also need some reeassurance that the study was, in fact, valid… that I hadn’t read the numbers backwards or something.
Then it came to me. Without spending the hours I usually do for one of these studies, I thought of a way to validate it with a different dataset.