How To Make Money At Home

Guest post by Onibalusi Bamidele.

We know! Yes we know! We know that some people are making a living online, we know that some people can afford any of their monetary desires from their earnings online but the question remains, Why Can’t You?

Why can’t you make a living online? Why are you struggling for success while you see others reach greater and greater heights, seemingly with ease?

Do not despair! There is no hype here because I am not trying to market anything to you but I want to tell you five things you need to do if you want to start making money online.

1. You Have Not Started: Yes! You have not started, you haven’t made an attempt yet, you haven’t even raised a finger, you are just reading the same things again and again but you are yet to implement any of what you read. Take action today and you can now focus on the next step.

2. Overcome Your Fears: I know that feeling that feels like it can almost swallow you whole! But it isn’t supposed to be so. Let me ask you! Why are you afraid? Try to think over it again and again and you will see that there is no justifiable reason for you to fear. Eliminate your fears, believe you can achieve it, forget about your tomorrow… just think today, Implement your ideas and you will have a much better chance of reaching your goals.

3. Information Overload: How often do you just try to read and read and read until you don’t know what to do?Utilize what is in your head and decide to follow one strategy to the fullest before you embark on another one. When you read 10 different ebooks on affiliate marketing, blogging, freelancing etc, you will get to the realization that you don’t know where to start. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying reading is bad, it is necessary at times… but what I am saying is keep implementing as you are reading in order to avoid analysis paralysis.

4. Understand That Mistakes Are Necessary: You will have problems when you start out – most do and a perfect start is almost impossible. Learn to make mistakes and learn from your mistakes. In fact, continually testing and tweaking because of mistakes will refine your skills and eventually make you great. If things are going along too smoothly, what are you learning?

5. Be Patient: Have you ever heard that success doesn’t come overnight? Well, you heard it right. You have to be patient and wait to see the results of what you have been doing; the common phrase states that people stop digging just before they hit gold. The fact that everything isn’t going on well now doesn’t mean you have to quit, try and fix your mistakes before dropping your project that looks doomed to fail and be patient – without this you will not make money online.

The following are five things you NEED to do to start making money online, try and implement them and you are sure to see success.

Onibalusi Bamidele is a 16 year old student and blogger who passionately believes success is all about providing value, visit his online success blog to see what he has for you.

When starting a niche website, one of the most common problems beginners have is getting links. If you don’t have the budget to pay for them, the ability to write unique high quality content for guest posts / article marketing, your choices are limited… and when starting out you probably have a very limited budget for outsourcing as well.

Blog comments are a killer way to get links and definitely help in ranking smaller, niche websites.

When I decided to try and rank for this niche, I looked at some existing websites to see where they were getting their links from. Most blogs for “make money online” keywords have thousands of links… now as someone that has never tried to rank a blog in this niche before, that could get hard to compete with.

Examining the individual links however (you can do this using a tool like Yahoo Site Explorer or BacklinkWatch) and you’ll find a lot of the links coming from the same site. For example, for a website that has 3,000 links, 300 – 500 of them could be from one blog.

Now as SEO isn’t an exact science, most of the knowledge shared on it, including the stuff on this blog are from experiences and theories. I believe (through building links for my own niche sites and ranking them) that 300-500 links from the same site aren’t as good as the same amount from somewhere else, but they’re still counted. And they’re good enough to get your websites ranked from what I’ve seen.

In the make money online niche, a LOT of the links I found to sites that were ranking highly were from blog comments, with some link swaps, guest posts, article directories thrown in. Very few were paid links.

Why are blog comments so good?

For blogs that have plugins like Top Commentators, if you show up in the sidebar Google counts you as being linked to from every page of a site.

For blogs that have dofollow, each comment you leave is a link to your website. And for blogs with plugins like KeywordLuv, you can even link to your website with your anchor text.

Gold.

The best thing is that writing a decent blog comment that adds to the blog doesn’t take more than five minutes. And…

With the top commentator thing, creating enough comments for you to show up in that list is all you need for a tonne of links.

So on blogs with a lot of pages but few commenters, one comment on one post could give you 500 links or more.

Pretty cool, right?

Note that when you leave a comment, you should add value to the website. Don’t just spam your link. Read the post, tell the author what you thought of it… and both of you get a positive result (s/he gets interaction, you get that link).

That’s not even going into the additional benefits like forming a relationship with the blogger, traffic to your website from the comment, CommentLuv… and so on.

How to find blogs you can build links on:

You want blogs that are dofollow. Note that some blogs have a limit (see below) so they may appear nofollow but are actually dofollow.

To check whether or not blogs are dofollow, you’ll need a Firefox plugin:

NoDofollow

Search Status

I use the former but I believe it doesn’t work on newer version of Firefox. If it doesn’t, get the second one.

To find blogs with a setup you want, Google is your friend…

To find blogs with KeywordLuv…

“Enter YourName@YourKeywords in the Name field to take advantage.”

Paste the above into a Google search. You can even add + yourniche on the end of your search.

I get 828,000 results for just the string and 218,000 for the string + marketing.

To find blogs with Top Commentator lists

“Top Commentators”

It’s as simple as that. Again, you can add + niche onto the end to find specific niche blogs.

I’ve seen niche sites rank for weak keywords with 10-15 blog comments. A lot of people are cottoning onto how useful they are – if you take a look at any blog post on most internet marketing blogs, you’ll find at least 40-50% of all comments using keywords if allowed.

I have no problem with people keyword-commenting on here (which is why there are certain plugins installed) as long as they aren’t spammy / link to bad sites etc. On that note…

How to set up your blog for maximum link value

When you start a blog, you want two things – you want to reward your commenters for taking the time to leave their thoughts on a post with a link if possible, but you also don’t want billions of outgoing links from your site.

Here’s how to setup your blog for maximum comment value (for both you and your readers):

1. Get Nofollow Free

NFFree is a plugin which allows you to set up a certain number of comments before a link becomes dofollow. On this blog, it’s set to seven.

This prevents people from coming by once, dropping a link for SEO juice and then never returning. They can still do it, but they won’t get a dofollow link.

2. Get Top Commentators

Top Commentators shows a list in the sidebar of the top comment leavers on your site, sorted by number. This gives more juice to those that interact with your website and leave a few comments

3. Get KeywordLuv

KeywordLuv allows your comment leavers to link to their website using their anchor text without seeming too spammy. So they can use their actual name as well as get the link juice. This combined with NFFree is a great way to reward people that interact with your blog.

3. Get CommentLuv

CommentLuv is generally nofollow (at least it is on this blog) but what it does is show your comment leaver’s last post – this won’t provide link juice but will encourage clickthroughs by your other blog readers (assuming they write interesting titles, of course)

This makes sure both you and your readers get the most valuable benefits out of your commenting section. So make sure you get the most out of blog commenting – both on other websites and your own!

It’s not often I do this but it’s not often I have the time to find new blogs. Although I’ve been involved in some way in blogging in this niche for the best part of 2-3 years (despite taking a break from last April to January) I rarely come across top notch, high quality blogs that give you solid information.

When I do, I try to share them with others. Note Grizz, Trent Brownrigg and so on. Here’s another one.

Viperchill is a viral marketing blog which you should definitely check out. I stumbled across it through PluginID, the old blog of the site owner, and funnily enough despite the size of both (over 10,000 subscribers combined) I’d never heard of them before.

I’ve browsed through ViperChill, and although I don’t have the time to read all the posts the ones I did all had something of value to them. Information on internet marketing, making money online, driving traffic or whatnot – all useful if you’re trying to build an online business.

Here’s some of the posts I liked best:

How I Wrote A $30,000 eBook And How You Can Too

Guest Blogging: The Ultimate Guide

How I Really Built A Blog With 6,500 Subscribers

How To Really Build Backlinks and Dominate Google

Although this isn’t a review, more a plug, it wasn’t paid for – in fact, like me 5-6 days ago, Glen has no idea I exist

The site has no ads, no recommendations for affiliate programs, just a very hard to find $37 eBook called Cloud Living. Which I haven’t read, so can’t recommend it… but if it’s anything like the rest of the site it’ll be awesome.

Anyways, another blog to add to your reader – check it out when you have the time. The posts are massive so it might be difficult to go through them (there’re double the size of the in depth ones on here so you might struggle) but take your time, it’ll be worth it. Enjoy!

Around a month ago I did a post detailing how to make money with adsense – make sure you check it out if you haven’t already.

Now a few people asked me questions about adsense and setting up niche websites (the main business of my internet marketing company in Bangalore, India) and the WSO guide wasn’t doing so well in terms of conversions (I feel it was too niche) so I decided to compile all the information I knew about Adsense through experience / learning from reading others and put it into one free guide for you guys.

I was originally waiting for the theme to be coded before I launched this but I’m waiting on the mascot so you guys can ‘proof’ it for me… let me know how you like it, whether it could be improved and so on. It’s a 50+ page report containing a LOT of information and should give you something of use.

If you’re already subscribed (through Aweber), check your inbox as there will be an email with the report. If you haven’t, you can get it by subscribing below:

 Discover How To Make Money With Adsense In This 50 Page FREE Report!

Email

Let me know what you think!

I mentioned I was getting a new design a few days ago, as one of the things I was doing to boost subscriber count… the design is shown below.

What do you guys think?

It’s clean, Web 2.0 ish, was done by a friend. The blank space at the top is room for a mascot – the little guy you see currently is getting redrawn.

More about who did it and the process when it goes live, but would love to hear your opinions.

Some updates…

If you squint (or click through to make the image full size) you’ll notice the topic of the 55+ page free report. I can promise you that it’s insanely high quality and i’ll be adding to it as we go on – hopefully it’ll become the ultimate resource about that topic. A couple people have looked at it / proofread for me and they liked it, but we’ll see what you guys think when it’s out (if you want to help proofread and get an early sneak peek, hit me up on MSN/Skype).

Quality matters less than I think

Although I don’t mind putting out 400 word generic articles on my niche sites to build backlinks, the silly thing I’ve done is that I have a way too high expectation of what quality should be, especially on this blog.

For example, although I think “how to install a wordpress theme” might be useless information for me to put out, a lot of people need to know stuff like that. Or, an article on how to make money writing articles – most of you would think that’s way too basic but there are people out there that would kill for that kind of information.

So I’m going to be putting out a lot more information on here, generic, but helpful stuff. For example stuff like 9 ways for teens to make money, 10 things you should do to get more blog comments etc. Both a mix for SEO and for social traffic from places like Digg, Stumble Upon etc.

The bonus for you guys is that I’ve disabled blog broadcast and will only use it to send out the elite articles, so if you subscribe to the Aweber list you’ll be getting only the top stuff (and some other info that won’t even be displayed on this blog). I’ll be pre launching the free report through Aweber, so if you’re signed up you’ll automatically get it.

Monetization

Unfortunately, I’m a bit of a weak person when it comes to promoting in this niche. I can sell a $10 report like the best of them… however I didn’t do it enough when I previously owned this blog.

My problem is that on this blog I interacted with people, and when I did that they became friends. I find it almost impossible to ’sell’ to friends, even if the information is useful – I’d rather spend an hour helping someone out than telling them to go buy a $47 product.

However, although I still love you guys I’m going to try and get over this irrational fear – I’ll be recommending stuff on here from time to time, although as always I maintain that a) you don’t need anything I recommend b) I won’t promote stuff too often and c) I won’t promote shite products.

This blog has a Marketing Team

As I mentioned, I’m currently in India training my employees – one of their tasks is to promote this blog. I’m teaching them about things like article marketing, blog commenting and forums… now you may notice a couple comments on your own blogs from them.

They’re still getting the hang of everything, including comment etiquette etc – they are real people, they are taught to try and add value, and they are passionate about marketing. So if you notice a comment on your blog that doesn’t sound like me… it’s from one of them and hopefully it’ll add to the discussion on your website.

Make Money Dynamo

A couple people have asked me about MMD – I’ve moved all posts to this site, although I didn’t do 301 redirects or anything too technical, just stuck up a maintenance page with a link to this blog.

MMD still has 200~ subscribers and I’ll be getting my employees to share their experiences on it, what they’re learning in internet marketing and so on in the next week or so. I’ll introduce them on this blog as well – but just wanted to let everyone know what was up.

Of course, they’ll be promoting that, this as well as a few niche websites so that’s quite a bit of work, but I see a lot of potential in all this.

Link Juice And Stuff

Due to the requests of a few spammers (or blogging friends ) I’ve decided to add dofollow and KeywordLuv to this blog (along with the already existing CommentLuv). Now I’ve added another plugin called Lucia’s Linky Love (I think) which makes comments dofollow only after 7 of them – this prevents people coming by, dropping a link and never coming back. CommentLuv is nofollow, your anchor text comment keyword will be dofollow after you’ve made 7 total (it shows your number I think although I’m not sure what it bases it on, either email/name/URL – any one of those I’m guessing ).

That’s it for now. If you’ve got any suggestions (re the theme, the blog itself or anything else), feel free to share em. I’m pretty proud that I managed to keep this post under 1,000 words, although it was a close ish one.