Which Type of Programs Make The Most Money Online?
Written by Garry Conn on March 26th, 2008 | 20 Comments
People often wonder which programs have the most potential to make the money money online. This article is going to be very short and sweet and will give you some personal insight on how I decide on which kind of programs to participate in.
Pay Per Click - The most common pay per click program is Google Adsense. I have been very successful with using Google Adsense. The main reason for my success with the program is because it doesn’t require me to influence an action or score a sale. The program is simple really, simply grab the proper code and position it in noticeable places on your blog or web site.
The true trick with Google Adsense is traffic. Traffic is hard to get so there are a few ways to going about that. One you can promote and market the hell out of your blog or web site and spend countless hours doing so. Second way is to just build and build pages that get indexed into the search engines. Each page that gets built and indexed may get you an average of 25 visits per x time frame. The more pages you build, the more opportunity you have towards capturing traffic from the search engines.
I don’t care what anyone says, pay per click (e.g. using Google Adsense) is one of the easiest ways to make money online. You simply just need to understand how to work the program and get traffic to your pages. I have always focused on building pages rather than individual pages marketing. To me it is much easier to build a page and forget about it.
Lead Generation - This is a very promising way to make money online. With lead generation you’re in the middle between pay per click and actually selling products online. It’s like the halfway mark. It isn’t as easy as pay per click, but it sure is much easier than trying to sell products online. With lead generation programs, many of the strategies remain the same as pay per click. I build tons of pages and promote the products that pay me money to send them valid leads.
Leads are generated when a certain action is met. Commonly this is filling out an online application form. When a user completes the desired action, the advertiser then pays me money for the lead. The amount of money generated from a lead can range from a few cents up to $50 dollars.
Selling Products Online - This is difficult and I have only been successful selling products that I use myself and stand behind, such as Micro Niche Finder. To have the most success with selling products online, I suggest that you take only a few at any given time and make them yours. If you recommend and support the products you sell, more people will gain trust and buy.
If you flood your blog or web site with a million and one different products, it will quickly become clear to visitors what you’re doing. People aren’t stupid and they see right through stuff like that. Just yesterday, I received an email to a newsletter that I subscribed to. The contents of the email as a poor attempt to promote an eBook and quite honestly, this poor quality of content I received in email yesterday caused me to unsubscribe to the email list. He is a friend too and many know the guy.
Doesn’t matter though. If I am looked at as if I am a number rather than an individual, I will pay you no time or interest. If you want to sell to me, then sell to me, but don’t treat me like I am just a number among many. Again, selling products online is difficult. They way I feel about being sold it is how many people feel.
If you’re trying to make money online, think smart and act smart. Most importantly, respect the people that have your interest. Don’t abuse your mailing lists and don’t abuse the incoming traffic you have coming into your blog or web site.
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March 26th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
Great post.
Generating leads through your blog (#2 on your list) is, to me, the easiest way to make money. While I don’t have hardly any traffic compared to many bloggers, I make far more per visitor because I focus on that one aspect of my blog.
Once I have captured a lead I have the opportunity to sell them products or services over and over again.
March 26th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
Garry, quit reading my mind, I was just thinking about this.
I have probably made the biggest bang with PPC, however, something that keeps coming back to me is #3.
Years ago, I built CyberCoded.com, which is dedicated to ASP programming and then I stopped programming in ASP around 2003, but that site continues to sell the small applications I built. I have not touched that site for years (except minor adjustments) and the programs are old, and yet, I still sell several a month.
No I am not getting rich, each app sells for $9.95, but I have zero time invested in the last 4 or 5 years, and that is real Passive income.
So, if you sell products of your own, the residual sales can really add up.
March 26th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
“If you flood your blog or web site with a million and one different products, it will quickly become clear to visitors what you’re doing. People aren’t stupid and they see right through stuff like that.”
This is reason number 1 why so many newbie bloggers fail. Who wants to become a reader of a blog that looks like a Wal-Mart.
March 26th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
I agree with the AdSense part. I know people (and so do you) who are make $10K or more per month from it. The other two, while doable, seem like too much work to me.
March 26th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
@RT,
AdSense IS easy–if you can afford to make 5 cents per visitor. That means $10K per month requires 200,000 visitors per month. Capturing leads allows you to create a $10K per month income on very little traffic.
So far this month I have had 665 visits to my blog and I’ve earned $2,905.46 with a week yet to go. If I had depended on AdSense I would have made $30. Getting my blog up and going has taken more time than I would like to spend, but aside from hiring some employees this week I haven’t worked full time yet.
[By the way…if you’re curious about how I earn money without advertising I’m going to post about it the first of the month.]
March 26th, 2008 at 2:22 pm
Aaron,
Just email me when your post goes live. I may cover it on GCDC. Thanks for the comments so far. A lot of these programs come down to personal preference and level of comfortability.
I can say this, lead gen is without a doubt moving up my income reporting ranks and that is mostly due to PepperJam.
March 26th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
For me is it usually pay per click programs but lead generation programs definitely gives you a decent sum but getting it is not always guaranteed.
March 26th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
Hi Garry,
I earn a large portion of my income through selling ebooks via clickbank. I sell both my own ebooks and other peoples.
I also make a lot of money by doing mailouts to my various niche lists each month.
Email marketing is definately a big earner for me.
March 26th, 2008 at 3:43 pm
@Aaron:
5 cents a click? Oh yeah, those guys/gals that don’t use it right (the majority). I average a buck a click, but I’m not bragging because I only get a few clicks a day.
Your article will be an interesting read, nonetheless. Because of where I am and my own lifestyle, I probably wouldn’t be able to duplicate your effort, but I’ll definitely read it. I subscribed to your feed just in case I forget about it. (Ya know, age and everything).
March 26th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
I love Google Adsense because it is so simple to use, but I don’t get much clicks
I have been deciding to place the code above the post just like how you do it, but haven’t figured out how to disable it from the main page 
-Mike
March 26th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
@RT,
I didn’t say “per click” I said “per visitor” which is far different.
If you are getting a 5% click thru at $1 per click you are only earning 5 cents per visitor. (100 visitors x 5% click x $1 per click = $5 for 100 visitors.) Bounce rates are usually high for AdSense only sites meaning a 5% click thru is tough to get in most niches.
March 26th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
speaking of 5% LOL
20,471 1,209 5.91% $9.96 $203.83
Is where I am at for the day so far.
I like to stay as close to 10% as possible. Also my eCPM is very very low. I like that to be around $25.00
I am very much wanting to do more with PepperJam and even ClickBank as Ryan mentions from above…. but in my doing so, it am very much gambling with a solid thing. Well… nothing is solid. But, my feeling is why try to fix something that isn’t broke.
March 26th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
@Aaron:
Yep, I read it wrong. I’m at about half that then. I switched to search engine visitors only in January on my personal blog. Before that, it was horrible.
March 26th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
@Gary,
My Clickbank on my static blogs (ones getting most traffic from Google like http://wwwFullTiltMarriage.com) are only getting a sale on about 350 click thrus. That makes my eCPM really low on those blogs. I think the marriage site has only made about $200 this month from adsense and affiliate sales, but I haven’t paid 5 minutes attention to it this month either.
As soon as I have a chance to get someone actually working on the site I can likely make much more–heck, I even have a pretty decent lead generating system on it, I’m just not using it.
March 27th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
My main source of income on my Zath blog (which is my main site for the time being - got a few others in the pipeline) is adsense, mainly since it is an easy solution to implement, but I am going to look at private ad sales / sponsorship in the coming weeks. That said I have a few posts that provide me a few affiliate sales, but again those are at a very low rate.
I’m hoping my adsense CTR rates holds at it’s current levels for search engine visitors, I just need to keep producing more content to search on to provide more traffic to increase earnings.
For my other sites, I will look at experimenting with Clickbanks and Pepperjam and see how they perform.
Interesting post Garry and plenty of useful comments too!
March 29th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
Zath,
As I mentioned to you in instant message. You have over 7000 RSS subscribers. I would invest some time into developing a private ads business model and provide footnote ads in the bottom of your RSS feed. Advertisers will pay you money to include their text link ads at the bottom of your feed.
Start cheap and build up a client base. Also be very selective and only accept advertisements that will truly capture your readers attention and not break their trust.
If I were you, that would be my focus.
March 29th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
Zath,
7K RSS readers should supply you with from $3,500 to $10,000 per month in profit. Is this the level of income you are experiencing?
March 30th, 2008 at 6:55 am
Aaron, unfortunately I’m nowhere near those kind of figures, if and when I get to the $3500 level I’d be quitting my day job and be doing website development full-time!
I realise that my strongest asset right now is my RSS numbers and need to focus on monetising that to begin with - does anyone have any idea how much 1) a text link 2) a graphic banner could be worth on that kind of feed numbers?
I’ve looked at a site that analyses RSS numbers and it has an estimate of $300, does this sound reasonable?
Thanks!
March 30th, 2008 at 7:18 am
Hi Zath,
Ads are the single least profitable way to monetize a blog. It has the advantage of being easy to implement–even automatic with AdSense or other contextual ads–but you are going to earn a relatively small amount. Ads are a good supplement to what you are doing for your main income, but as Garry showed in his recent “March Earnings” report, they don’t make as much money as many other monetization models.
I noticed you made a comment over at my blog. I’ll fire you off an email with some ideas on how you can increase your income.
April 14th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
[…] comment on one of Garry Conn’s posts as I often do, in this case it was one that was dealing with which type of programs make the most money on a blog – I basically said that Adsense was the top earner for me, but I probably wasn’t earning quite […]