How To Make Money At Home

Hi all, I was hoping to get a bit of feedback from you today as to if there was something in particular you’d like me to focus on in future updates. I am currently in the process of creating some walk-through videos of how I create product marketing sites as an affiliate marketer, but I’d like to know what you’d most like to see! So leave a comment with what you want me to focus on most, and we’ll go in that direction.

Also, just a bit of news to inspire you some: According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), U.S. Internet ad revenue hit an all new record in the 3rd quarter of 2010 with sales totaling $6.4B. Why should this news be inspiring? Because it means if you’re interested in Internet marketing, at least you’re interested in a market that is growing (very difficult to find in this economy). There’s a HUGE opportunity to get just a sliver of this ad revenue, as most marketers still spend way too little money in online advertising. The amount spent online (by businesses, etc.) will continue to grow, as the amount of time that users spend on the web continues to expand.

Let me know what it is you’d like to learn most, and we’ll start making some money together!

As you’re aware, TUK has been on a sort of hiatus for several months, as Jason has been very busy with University work and business opportunities in Hong Kong. School can be very demanding, and being a proper student while functioning successfully as an entrepreneur is a feat that not many have achieved. Typically, it’s prosperity or failure at one or the other. Let me be the first to wish you great success, Jason, in both.

Until such time that Jason is able to extend his thoughts and ideas on this blog again on a regular basis, I will be taking an editorial type role. My name is Nick Leavens, and I’m a 27 year old self-titled ‘Online Upstart Entrepreneur’ who has been involved with internet marketing and entrepreneurship since before I attended university.

I presently serve as Managing Partner of a social media management organization, as a freelance writer, and as a political consultant. Additionally, I operate profitable marketing campaigns on behalf of local businesses and as an affiliate marketer both on and off-line. I’d like to share my experiences and methods with other young entrepreneurs, in an attempt to enlighten and encourage them to accomplish great things.

Now that I’ve had a rest and recouperated some from the greuling days spent fighting in the mudslinging trenches known as the American political system, I’ll return to my usual semi-regular schedule of updating my social networking accounts with random things I find fascinating or entertaining. If you’d enjoy seeing daily life through my perspective, I can be followed on twitter – @nickleavens (I will refrain from posting my political leanings on this account in the future, so if you’re the apolitical type, you don’t need to fear my musings).

Thank you kindly for your continued support and patronage of The University Kid. My next post will detail upcoming plans for this site and serve as an introduction for one of this site’s new featured entrepreneurs!

Please be sure to let me know in the comments section what you’d really like to see in the future from TUK. We’re here to help you out with your endeavors, but we’re not professional mind-readers, so feedback is needed. Thanks!

This is a paid review for T3Leads affiliate network. This review is in no way biased as a result of being paid. To order a paid review, please contact me.

There are a handful of well known affiliate networks online, and hundreds more if you consider all the ones that aren’t as reputable. When starting to try and earn an online income, affiliates may get confused (I did!) – which network to join? Which network to trust? Which network can you use to help you earn money?

The truth is that you can earn money with quite a few networks – T3Leads is one of the better ones. I last reviewed their affiliate network way back at the end of 2008 and since then they have only gotten better and better – both in terms of the quality of the network as well as offers available.

With so many competitors available, the best thing possible is to focus strongly on one part of your business, and make yourself very good at that. T3Leads have done that in the sense that they only focus on pay per lead offers, and avoid other kinds of affiliate offers. This means that if you’re looking for some of the best PPL offers you can promote online, it’s likely T3Leads will have them.

T3Leads Third-Gen Affiliate Network

T3Leads recently introduced a new third-gen network and it’s not just easier to use, but also looks more stylish. This simplifies the process of making money – no hassle in signing up, and since the offers are high quality all you have to do is promote. (diagram shown below).

Some of the things I like best about T3Leads:

Bi-weekly payments. T3Leads pay out on earned revenue every 15 days. This can be shortened to weekly payments once you start earning $1,000/week.

Simple, easy to use interface. Many affiliate networks try and include too many options in their user interfaces – making them difficult to understand and use, especially if you’re signing up for the first time.

Collection of turnkey websites you can use and customize. One of the things that’s held me back on promoting various offers in the past is the need to develop a specific website to promote that offer. Often I’d have problems talking to designers / coders etc and in the end never get started due to all the hassle.

T3Leads helps you avoid this problem due to its collection of turnkey websites. Now, all you have to do is focus on driving traffic – be it through pay per click, blogging, paid advertising or SEO – they provide a high quality, professional website for each offer which you just have to plug your affiliate link into.

Gifts to publishers. Although it’s true that if you’re making any kind of real money with the program you’ll be able to afford these gifts easily, it’s nice to be rewarded for your efforts and get stuff you wouldn’t buy normally. T3Leads reward their most active affiliates with gifts including hard drives, laptops, cameras, music devices and so on.

To end off with this review, T3Leads is trying to do it’s best to offer you high quality offers that can be easily set up and promoted to make money, and there’s no harm in giving them a try. You can get started promoting one of their offers in less than ten minutes after you sign up – having used them a bit myself and having only heard good things about them from others, I’d suggest giving them a try.

Feel free to leave any questions or comments and I’ll ask T3Leads to respond to / consider any questions or improvements you want them to implement.

As you guys can probably tell, due to the lack of posts on here, I’ve been too busy with stuff to update. A shame really

If you’ve got the time for a guest post, send one in and as long as it’s unique, related to internet marketing / making money online and decent I’ll post it up.

Guest post contributors will have their post go out to 4,000 odd subscribers, including permanent link(s) back to your website. A chance to share your views with a new audience, gain some traffic etc etc

If interested, send an email to jason(at)leonetworks(dot)com

Thanks!

As I run a fairly large blog in the internet marketing niche, I tend to get a lot of questions about what people should promote online. Today I’ll discuss a potential affiliate program you guys can try related to earning money by directing people to a website which they’ll find very useful.

Most of you reading this post will have travelled on an airline and booked a hotel at one point in your life. With online searching being so easy, many of us tend to look online for the best deals. Now, imagine if you could make a commission on referring other people to good hotel deals – saving them money and making you money.

Hotels Combined is one such website which is used by over 80,000,000 people every year. With 200,000 hotels in its database, it’s worth a bookmark just so that you can save yourself some money. However, it also has a travel affiliate program which you should definitely look at.

The way its affiliate program works is that you get paid for every lead you send to the website. I asked the owner for a rough idea of why – here’s what he said:

There is a common misconception that you stand to earn more by selecting a hotel affiliate program that pays on a CPA (per booking) commission model, rather than by choosing HotelsCombined’s CPL (per lead) commission model. I hope to explain here that the overall earning potential is approximately the same, and each method has other pros and cons to consider.

Let’s take an example where you direct 100 clicks to a hotel affiliate program.

Under a CPA program, you may make 1 or 2 hotel bookings out of those 100 clicks, each with a value of around $20. This yields an average revenue of around $30 over the 100 clicks. But since the exact value of each booking tends to vary greatly, and since it is very easy for one of those bookings to cancel, your actual earnings per day can be as erratic as a gambler’s winnings. Also, the commission is only credited to your account once the end-user actually stays at the hotel, which may be as much as 6 months after the original booking was made.

Under the HotelsCombined Affiliate Program, your 100 clicks may convert into around 60 leads, with an average value of around $0.50 each. These leads may still only convert into 1 or 2 hotel bookings, but now your $30 average revenue is much more stable. If a few clicks don’t convert into leads, your overall average remains relatively untouched, and booking cancellations never affect your accumulated earnings. Also, your commissions get paid into
your account as soon as they occur, so there’s no wait to find out how much your traffic earns you.

So at face value it appears that both types of commission model pay an average of around $30 per 100 clicks (in this example), but HotelsCombined offers more stable cash flow on shorter payment terms. Speak to your accountant about your Risk Profile before making a decision between these two models.

Personally, I’d rather get paid per lead for something like this as like the above mentions, you don’t know when people are going to book their hotel for. Also, many people sign up for the website but book after weeks, if not months – you get paid for the lead nevertheless.

I played around with the site looking at it from the eyes of a user that would be interested in booking hotels – I tend to travel a lot, so a website like this definitely helps. Here’s my search for hotels in Hong Kong:

The search found over 240 hotels and above you can see some of them (sorted by Price). For me, this has everything – price, pictures, reviews, a high quality search function so I can specify exactly what I need.

Here are some of the benefits of the affiliate program:

• Payment monthly through Paypal, cheque or bank transfer
• 12 month cookie so you get paid for repeat visits
• Variety of hotels for your visitors – over 200,000
• Multiple affiliate tools – banners, search boxes, private branding
• Real time online reporting

My favourite is the Paypal payment option – I hate waiting around for cheques or dealing with bank transfers.

Basically, you have a website which people that you send to it will find useful – which means it’s easier to make money. If I sent friends to this website, they’d thank me for it – I’ll definitely be using this to book hotels in the future.

Now, how do you promote this and make money with this website?

Niche website. Think about setting up a niche website (use Google Keyword Tool to find keywords) for country specific hotels. For example, “Mexico cheap hotels”. On your niche website you could review the top five hotels in Mexico (or the best value for money ones), redirect your visitors to the website and earn a commission on each booking they make.

Offline flyers. If you hired someone to hand out flyers where people that travel a lot tend to be – around office buildings or airports, for example, you could buy a domain, redirect it to your affiliate link and advertise this domain on flyers.

Pay per click. You can generally get very cheap clicks on travel / tourism websites using Adwords in content model as that niche tends to pay poorly (for whatever reason). So spend a day on Google looking for travel websites using Adsense, buy clicks at $0.1 and send them to your cloaked affiliate link.

You could also try Adwords search for various keywords but you’d have to go more niche as that could get expensive. Lastly, you could also look at buying banners on travel websites, or any that would get a lot of buying US traffic (Facebook, for example) as most people tend to need a hotel at some point in their life.

Good luck with referring people to HotelsCombined, and at the very least you’ve found a high quality website you yourself can use. I’m in contact with the affiliate manager and will ask him to check out this post every so often, so if you have questions feel free to leave them below!