One of the things you need to sort out is identifying the things in your business that make you the most money and then do more of them. Here's my general rundown of tasks and their values in my business to make money online.

1. Burning, packing and shipping product. My value: $5-10 an hour. A local high school kid or a stay at home mom could do this for you fairly cheaply. Or you could automate the entire process (see PayPal Kunaki Integration Software). 
2. Online marketing after a product is launched. My value: $5-15 an hour. This includes blog carnival submissions, article writing, social bookmarking, article submissions, link building etc.  I'd say offload this as soon as you can because there are better ways to spend your time.
3. Technical support and technical jobs. My value: $10-50/hour. This is anything that requires dedicated skills to do. Fortunately you can get fairly cheap labor online that specializes in these types of jobs. Open a job on oDesk or one of the many other sites and forget about it.
4. Product Development. My value: $50-250 per hour. You'll start to want to do keep these inhouse as the value increases. Teach yourself how to edit video using Sony Vegas and capture screen video with Camtasia Studio and you're on your way. You'll need to establish your own product with your own flair using the specific market research you've gathered to deliver a product perfect for your customers.
5. Copywriting. My value: $100-1,000 per hour. Great copy will convey the specific benefits of your product and make them open their wallets. It's of no use to have a fantastic product that people want and need, but don't buy because you don't convince them of it in the sales letter.
6. Marketing Research. My value: $1,000 per hour.  It's been said (I don't remember by whom) "It's easiest to sell to a hungry crowd." You have to get into your customers mind and understand what they want. Do keyword research, do surveys, do phone interviews and then analyze all the data. Figure out if you can reach people in a cost effective enough way to break even. Do all this before ever getting into a market because all the other tasks in the list above will be a waste if you aren't selling what people want to buy. Money spent here is worth 10x the cost down the road.

So there you have it. Where should you spend your time? On the more valuable tasks!!!! Market research, copywriting and product development. Of course when you start out you'll probably have to do everything, but slowly start outsourcing or hiring staff to do the stuff from the lowest cost to the highest, so you can get on with more and more of the higher priced stuff. And that'll allow you to make money online exponentially.

Popularity: 12% [?]

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or sign up for my blog announcement list over on the right. Thanks for visiting!

I have been spending quite a lot of time lately on my make money online business in trying to improve my search engine optimization for various other websites that I have.

I had been using the ranking tracker from SEOBook to view and update the results from the search engines but a few weeks ago I found a free tool that allows me to see the rankings in a graph over time for any number of keywords for any number of domains. This was something I wanted so bad I was considering developing my own software to perform the task.

It's the keyword tracking tool from Digital Point.

In addition to tracking ranking for various keywords and sites, you can also track how many backlinks you are getting as a result of your link building efforts. And for SEO purposes, incoming links are the most powerful way of gaining high rankings.

Go check it out and sign up for free here: Digital Point Keyword Tracking

Popularity: 30% [?]

From the Google Keyword Tool, you will see the millions of searches done to a certain keyword. When these keywords are typed on search boxes of search engines, indexed websites containing articles with those keywords will be displayed. And this is what leads traffic to websites with keyword-rich articles. Content is king online and written articles are still the best way to provide indexable content.

Content is king. Content is king. You can't say it enough. Content is the reason why writing articles is one of the best and most used techniques in internet marketing today. Web surfers can't get enough information about what they are interested in, whatever that may be. Providing timely, useful information to surfers is a guaranteed way to herd targeted, interested traffic to your website or blog.

Why is this the case? Here are a few benefits article writing can give to your online business and help you make money online.

1. It's absolutely free.
   Too good to be true? Not really. Okay, you have to pay for your Internet Service Provider. That's it. All you need is your thoughts, your computer, and your hands. If you have those, nothing will stop you from typing words that will make you complete that article for your website. On which aspect of that process did you really shell out any cent? Maybe later when your electric bills come.
2. It takes very little time to get noticed.
   Submit that article of yours to article directories that get the most web traffic and in no time your web site will be crawled. That is if you don't forget including your resource box or byline.
3. Obtain back links automatically.
   When you submit your articles to directories, surely, other websites will make use of your article too. With the copyright terms of your articles, the URL of your website will still be intact and will subsequently direct more traffic to your website.
4. Improve your standing.
   As an internet marketer, if you boldly display your products and services on your site, you will not have a very high conversion rate. Traffic resulting in a sale is a conversion. To get your conversion rate up you have to show that you are knowledgeable in your chosen field. There's no better way than by writing informative, useful articles to establish yourself as an expert.

Just make your creative juices flow and jot down or key in those ideas quickly to jumpstart your article writing momentum. With those benefits listed above, a writer's block is the last problem you want to face.

To aid you in your efforts to make money online with article marketing you can get my free article marketing software.

Popularity: 51% [?]

Ever hear of affiliate programs? These are forms of online advertising that rewards others for sending a product developer traffic which result in sales or leads. The product developer pays the affiliate to place a link on their site or promote the site in other ways and this generates traffic for the advertiser. To put it another way, it's paying commissions to people who generate sales. You don't have to pay anyone until you start making sales.

Affiliate marketing has its ups and downs. It could be draining if you are not armed with updated information and the technical how-tos. But this article's sole objective is to reach out to you and not to badmouth affiliate marketing.

Here are some reasons on why web marketers go nuts over affiliate marketing as a form of internet advertisement.

1. Low cost upfront
   Many people are frightened of starting a home based business because of the money required upfront. In affiliate marketing, you don't have to invest much to start seeing a return.
2. Inventories not included
   Product management fuss could be very stressing. An inventory is not asked to be maintained. The merchant does the maintenancerequired.
3. Leverage provides unlimited income possibilites
   When you have a regular job, your income is based on you showing up to work on the days your supposed to. With affiliate marketing, your affiliates can send you traffic without you having to do any work after you have created the ad copy and links.
   Though not all internet marketers earnings are limitless, it is still possible for the advertiser or internet marketer to be highlysuccessful.
4. Go worldwide.
   With affiliate marketing, you get to deal with a worldwide marketplace. All you have to do is develop a specialty product, then prepare the necessary links, sales pages and tools for your affiliates to send traffic to you from anywhere.
5. Little risk
   The biggest reason for most internet marketer's enthusiams with affiliate marketing is the tiny risk. For those with a small budget for advertising, affiliate marketing is best way to do it on the cheap.
6. Open 24/7
   In addition, your affiliates will be sending you traffic every single second of every single day while targeting a global market! What could be better than an army of people constantly sending you traffic?

But all of these will be put to waste if you don't have the right niche product and all the other important tools to make it big in affiliate marketing, i.e., well positioned product, good sales copy and automatic product fulfillment process. So better work on these aspects first before ever considering starting an affiliate program to make money online.

If you're looking for a program and some great products to promote, you can join my affiliate program. I pay out 51%! Or if your looking to learn how to promote your own affiliate program, I cover this in my online business intern program. It's free and all you have to provide is a little "sweat equity", so to speak.

Popularity: 55% [?]

Is there an easy way to retrieve news articles and blog posts so I can focus on making money online instead of surfing the web?

Yes, there's a really easy way to monitor news articles and blogs. It's called Google Alerts. With Google Alerts you enter a keyword you're interested in, for example I'm always looking for people who are talking about Kunaki. So I enter kunaki and fill out the rest of the form and viola whenever kunaki comes up in Google's index I get an email.

In order to set up each of your Google Alerts keywords, you'll need to complete each field in the form.

• Search terms - the keywords you want to monitor. Enter something similar to “kunaki”, or “make money online”. I have alerts for my name, main keywords for my products, potential products and names of competitors products.
• Type - Choose what areas of the web you’d like to monitor for your given keywords. These follow the general lines of google's specialized searches.
  • News - covers news outlets - you'll be notified when they publish an article with your keyword.
  • Blogs - monitors blogs for mentions of your keywords. Great for getting in on a discussion about topics on related to your products - you might even get some related pages backlinks if you comment on the blog. Don't spam them though!
  • Web - covers general websites. Anytime a page is indexed that contains your keyword, you'll be notified.
  • Groups - monitors Google Groups for mentions of your keyword.
  • Comprehensive - notifications come for all of the above.
• How often - do you want to be notified immediately or get digests daily or weekly.
• E-mail - You receive the alert via email - so enter a valid email address here.

Once you're finished filling out the form, click on create alert and you'll be taken to your google alerts management page. Here you'll be able to view, update and delete all the alerts you have.  If you're not logged into google there's a double opt-in process to confirm you want to receive the alert.

Now you can concentrate on making money online instead of pretending to work while surfing the web!

Popularity: 60% [?]

Alright, so this isn't about making money online, but it is about something you can do to improve the world a tiny bit and you don't even have to do much work!

You can help find a better strain of rice or cure cancer or help with proteome folding or fight AIDS. Maybe you'd like to help research nanotechnology or work on malarial control or protein mapping. Maybe global warming is your big thing - you can help with that too! Sound a bit crazy?

Let me ask you this: do you leave your computer sitting idle for periods of time? Overnight or during lunch or during a midday nap/walk? Well, that's just the perfect time to allow your computer to save the world. It can do all these things with a simple installation of BOINC.

Just go to http://boinc.berkely.edu and download the software. Choose a handful of projects (World Community Grid and Rosetta@home and Spinhenge@home are the three I'm working with right now) and allow your computer run them during idle time.

The default setting for boinc is to run in the background constantly. You'll probably find that a little annoying because while it is only using unused resources it sometimes takes time to free up resources it is using if you suddenly have big need of resources in what you're working on actively.  (To make more sense of that - you'll probably notice a slight slowdown in your computer.)  To change it so that it only activates when you've been away for a few minutes you'll need to go to Advanced View -> Advanced -> Preferences -> Processor Usage. Deselect the box marked "While computer is in use" and set the amount of time to wait before starting the program in the box below it.

Once you have that all set up, when you're not busy making money online, you'll be saving the world - one clock cycle at a time.

Popularity: 69% [?]

In your quest to make money online, you're eventually going to come in contact with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In a recent post on SEO, I stated that I had been told that your domain name seems to have little effect on where you rank with the search engines.  I have some ancedotal evidence that suggests otherwise. It seems that spending some time choosing a domain name is worth the effort. I had recently put a brand new domain up and posted just a couple of articles to it. 1 week after getting indexed, I now rank in the top 5 for 4 different keyword combinations that are also part of my domain name. But for some reason, not always - sometimes they are exact search phrases and sometimes not.

#2 for stop foreclosure guide

#1 for "stop foreclosure guide"

Not top 10 ranked for: help stop foreclosure guide

#1 for: "help stop foreclosure guide"

#3 for: help foreclosure guide

Not top 10 ranked for: "help foreclosure guide"

While I cannot explain why some of these are ranked in the top 10 and the others are not, it does seem that the domain name has propelled this site up to fairly high rankings (though for very low competition keywords) in a short period of time. If you are going into a highly competitive area to make money online, then you will need every edge you can find. It seems to me that you should do the a wise thing upfront and make sure you give yourself every advantage by picking a good domain name.

If you're having trouble coming up with a good domain name, then I suggest you go to MakeWords.com for good domain names. It's the best resource I've found for choosing a domain name.

(And if you've ended up here because now this blog post ranks highly for some of these search terms - you can get Help Stop Foreclosure Guide there)

Popularity: 76% [?]

No matter how much of a grown up you are, most of us dream about doing something they love to make money. Well, for me that dream would be to make money playing games. I grew up with gaming in my blood, so to speak. Here's a rundown of ways to make money playing games.

1. Testing Job – Testing is the easiest way to break into the gaming field. Having said that, it's still very, very hard to get one of these jobs.
2. Win Gaming Tournaments – Many online gaming tournaments give away some serious cash and prizes. If you're good enough, you may get ahold of some of that. If you're not, you may be left with nothing. You'll find all kinds - cards, backgammon, shooting and driving games are some of the more popular.
3. Buy In-Game Real Estate – Thanks Second Life! Ansche Chung is a millionaire in real life by trading virtual real estate for real cash. Quite simply, buy and develop the real estate in the game and find someone to buy it.
4. Open an In-Game Store – There are many merchants in games, especially Second Life. You can sell T-shirts, mugs and even virtual clothing and software. For these real world and virtual items people will pay you in real world money.
5. Farm Gold – Most online games, called MMOGs, have currency in the game world. And like the real world there's always people out there who want it without doing the work for it. You can earn online gold and sell it for some real world dough. It may be illegal in the game world, but it's not in the real world. I would recommend that you make enough to cover your subscription fee though!

So there you have it, 5 ways to make money playing games online. If you start making some serious money, drop by and let me know how you're doing!

Popularity: 78% [?]

Do you split your visitors into different groups? Do you treat them differently. If you aren't then you'er probably not making as much money online as you should be.

There are basically 2 distinct groups of traffic. (That reminds me of the saying: There are 10 types of people. Those who understand binary and those who don't. Sorry - geek joke, couldn't resist.)

• The web surfers. You'll get these from social media types of sites like:Blue Dot, BookmarkSync, del.icio.us, CiteULike, Connotea, Digg, Diigo, Furl, GiveALink.org, Linkwad, My Web, Mister Wong, Mixx, Newsvine, oneview, Propeller.com, Reddit,
  Simpy, SiteBar, StumbleUpon, Ma.gnolia. You'll also receive these types of visitors from the search engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN. These are mostly people who are surfing or looking for something in particular. They quickly go through one page or another and usually don't stick around too long, so your bouncerate with them will be pretty high. You might get a couple to come back later, but it's fairly unlikely. Google Adwords and the other PPC services will produce these types of visitors also - if you're paying for clicks to a site, you'd better be capturing their informaion so you can do some follow up email marketing.
• The loyal readers. These are the people who have found you (probably from the above) and have decided to frequent your blog. They've most likely signed up to your RSS feed or to your blog announcement list. They read everything you write and comment frequently. If you have a blog, you'll know just who these people are.

The first step that most of you are doing is to try to convert these web surfers into loyal readers. There's usually a popup with an offer to subscribe to your email blog announcement list.

The idea is to treat these two types of blog traffic differently - because they are different! The reason for showing different ads and treating them differently is that your regular readers are much more likely to spend money on your products than random people visiting your site. By having the ability to separate out these two groups, you increase your chances of making money online.

Here's 2 WordPress plugins that I use to separate the two distinct groups.

• WWSGD WordPress plugin (What Would Seth Godin Do). Use this plugin to post a reminder at the bottom (!!! - make sure of this or else google may use this as the extract instead of the content of your post as a description and your search engine rankings may suffer as a result) of each blog post for them to subscribe to your RSS feed or email announcement list.
• Ozh's Who Sees Ads. Use this easily configured plugin to set rules on who see's your ads. You can have ads for your own products, AdSense, banners and most any other kind of advertising coming up in posts, sidebars, headers and footers. One of the rules it has is that it will or won't display the ads to regular blog visitors. So you can show different ads or no ads at all depending on if the visitor is a regular or a web surfer. You might show AdSense to surfers and nothing to regular readers. Or vise-versa.

These are just 2 plugins I have found for WordPress that let you customize the users experience based on the number of times they have visited. If you know of any other's please let me know in the comments. I'm always looking for ways to make money online!

Popularity: 87% [?]

The more and more time I spend trying to make money online, the more I am realizing that it is a numbers game. You can't sit on your laurels with a single site or blog or product. You have to be constantly increasing the numbers of products and revenue streams all the time.

I've spent most of the last 1/2 a year not producing. No new sites, no new products. There hasn't been any progress to report. The business has held steady - which isn't what I wanted it to do. I was hoping to increase traffic and increase revenue. But for the amount of work I've been doing, it's still okay as to what has been happening.

I suppose I could tell you I blew a fair amount of money on AdWords. I guess some times when you're trying to sell a stinker, nothing will save it.

With a lack of progress and the impending end of my mini-retirement. I've been spurred into action.

Over the past week I've managed to put out 6 new sites. None of them are online business related, so there weren't any launches announced here. There will be more to follow this week. I'm trying to nail down some niches that are worth the time.

On the online business front, the Ebay Kunaki script was being tested, but the products I was trying to sell didn't sell! I guess nobody is looking to quit their job and spend more times with their kids when their kids are home all day! (The I love them when they're gone and out of my hair syndrome.)

So I guess I'll keep listing it until I get someone to bite. Until then, I'll keep you posted on the progress.

Just so you know, I've made some blogs and am trying to get them to rank high for certain competitive search terms, just to see if some ideas I've been presented with work. I don't want to spew out all the 'normal' SEO crap if it doesn't work… I'm also tracking the progress of a linking system daily with my existing sites just to see if banklinks or content is the key to getting high rankings. I'll have a summary of all this a little later.

And of course, the side affect of all this testing is that I'll eventually figure out some way to make money online that works for me.

Popularity: 82% [?]