The Blog Of Oussama Messaoud - Ways to make money online -

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As I mentionned in my previous post, there will be weekly RSS winners on my blog, that will be picked up randomly from the existing subscribers, every Friday. This week’s prize is 1000 ECs ($6 value). If any of you is not an Entrecard member yet (which I doubt), you can sign up for free here. EC is a great way of increasing traffic to your blog and interacting with other bloggers.

When you are a new blogger, you (generally) don’t have the capital to start. Well, not everyone needs a starting capital. But if you are serious about making money online, then you just might need some cash for at least a domain name and a hosting plan.

When you start, you don’t need a lot of money, but you need it fast. So you need to focus on programs and sites that have low (to no) minimum payout and that pay you to do simple things. If you want to use AdSense to earn that first amount, when you are just starting, you are probably going the wrong way. On the other hand, PTC (Paid-To-Click) sites are the way to go, but not only.

I have compiled a list of sites and ways to use in order to earn some money to get you started :

1 - Quickrewards : I discovered this site not so long ago. It pays you to visit websites, to take surveys, to sign up for free offers, and a lot more. And the great thing is : IT HAS NO MINIMUM PAYOUT whatsoever. With surveys alone you can make $2 to $3 daily, that you can transfer to your PayPal account right away. Ideal for earning some quick money to get you going. I highly recommend it.
2 - Bidvertiser : It is a substitute to AdSense. Why I mention it is because it has a low payout of $10 that you can quickly reach.
3 - ProjectWonderful : It allows people to advertize 125×125 buttons on your blog by bidding. You earn small amounts in the beginning but it also has a low payout of $10. Another good thing is that you can immediately reuse the earned money to advertize your blog on other blogs and generate more traffic. Needless to say that more traffic = more money.
4 - My Home Page Friends : This program pays you to search. You perform Internet searches as usual and instead of earning absolutely nothing, you earn some cents per search. The minimum payout is £20. (Yes they pay in GBP, which is great when conversion to USD is made ) With a searching activity of 30 searches per day, you can reach the payout in a month or so.

Once you have a little starting capital, you can reinvest some of it to even generate more money with programs liks :
5 - Dollars for life : It costs $19 to join. Then you earn $9 per referral and you earn random $5 payments.
6 - Income 4 Beginners : It costs $40 to buy a branded e-book that you can resell again and again to generate recurring payments of $40.

I hope this helps.

PS: You can join the RSS contest I am holding for a chance to win $10 or free advertising. It is also a great way of earning some cash. Only one week to go, hurry and secure your entries. 

This won’t be long. Eventhough I mentionned again and again that offers should not exceed what I could get the 1000 ECs for from Entrecard ($9.75), all offers were around $10. So I guess, I will have to buy them directly from Entrecard. Thanks everyone for the offers anyway. 

On another note, there were some referrals from freebies4webmasters, after my last post. Which means a potential extra revenue if my referrals get approved and include the ads on their sites. This program apparently has potential for some free cash that can be very helpful, especially for new bloggers, to cover hosting and own domains costs.  

This was just a quick update. Stay tuned for more.  

PS: During the month of September, a blogging tip with every post for RSS subscribers.

After 2 days of being down, the blog is back online again. I sincerely apologize for this little problem due to some technical issues. We are now back for good. September is here and this is what’s coming up :

- The last post of the series “Best WP plugins“. (DONE)
- What I did during August and the results of that
- The entrecard experiment
- September : The RSS subscribers month : Already started something in regards to this. As mentionned in my last post, every new article during the month of september will contain a blogging tip, visible only for RSS subscribers. And it is starting with this very post If you are not subscribed yet, you are missing it. You can avoid that in the future by subscribing now.

This was a small update. More coming next. 

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After Mohamed Gammoudi, who was the 1968 Summer Olympics Champion for the 5000 meters, swimmer Oussama Mellouli gave Tunisia a Gold Medal at the Beijing Olympics, yesterday August 17th, 2008, becoming the second Olympic Champion in Tunisia’s History. He won the 1500 meters freestyle final, in front of the double Olympic Champion and multi World Champion of the discipline : Australian Grant Hackett (He won the discipline in the two last Olympic Games).
This is a great event in Tunisia. With only 23 athletes in its delegation for the Olympic Games in Beijing, Tunisia managed to give an Olympic Champion. All Tunisians were so proud listening to the Tunisian National Anthem being played in the National Aquatics Center in Beijing.
If an American or a Chinese is reading this post, (s)he might think that this is exagerated, given the number of Gold Medals won per day by those 2 countries. But for the Tunisian sport, this is huge. Tunisia is a small country of 10 million people, and the Olympic Medals we won are few.

Here are some photos of Oussama Mellouli from the Beijing Olympics Official Web Site:

I thought I would share those 2 easy-to-enter and laid-back contests, so you could participate and I could get some more entries (what did you think?) . So here we go :

1. Win $27 from the John to the Chow : John Chow. He is enjoying his time in Boston for the Affiliate Summit East, and won $27 in the MarketLeverage Cashinator that he wants to give away. To enter, just comment on the contest’s post. You get more entries if you blog about the contest.

2. Win Up to $50, entrecard credits, free advertizing and more on (Not)Another MMO Blog (that’s actually the name of the blog). All you have to do is comment on the contest’s post and/or blog about the contest.

Two easy contests that you can enter in 5 minutes and maybe win some cash or other prizes. Worth the try, especially for the rest of us, the “little-earning bloggers“, a.k.a the noobs. So hurry up.

John Chow often says : “Don’t put all your eggs in the same basket”, or something meaning the same thing. I am not sure. Anyways. This means that you need to have different sources of online revenue, in order to decrease the risk of failure and increase the paths from where money comes, and consequently increase the overall income you earn from your online activites.

This said, whether you are a new blogger looking to launch your first ever blog, or an existing blogger looking to diversify blogs and getting bigger, the first question you need to answer is : “What niche should I go for?” I myself asked myself (again?)  this question, since I am considering launching a new blog soon. I am still at the stage of finding an answer to that question. What niche? Quelle niche? (Oh this is French, sorry) Certainly not in MMO, which is getting busier and busier, but I needed some raw figures and information to see clearer. I don’t mean to go through a tough Market Analysis, but at least have a hint. I somewhat needed to get a complete (or as close as it can get) list of possible blog niches, and one name bumped into my mind : EntreCard.

EntreCard gives a list of 52 niches and gives you the number of blogs subscribed to EC under each niche. EC is for sure still quite new, but is becoming a key service for blogger and gathers a significant number of blogs, so I thought it could be a great resource to establish a rank of the most populated niches. After 15 minutes of work (quick huh?), here’s the result (as of August 7th, 2008) :

Summary : 23150 Blogs split among 52 niches

Top 10 Most Populated Blogging Niches :

1. Personal Diary (1908 = 8.24%)
2. Computers and Internet (1348 = 5.82%)
3. Make Money Online (1304 = 5.63%)
4. Blogging resources (1139 = 4.92%)
5. Art (1093 = 4.72%)
6. Entertainment (1086 = 4.69%)
7. Mixed Bag (972 = 4.19%)
8. Technology (935 = 4.03%)
9. Business (788 = 3.40%)
10. Parenting and Family (771 = 3.33%)
11 To 52 : The Others

11. Internet Marketing (719)
12. Health and Medicine (704)
13. Lifestyle (638)
14. Finance and Investing (555)
15. Travel (552)
16. Humor (514)
17. Gaming (495)
18. Music (428)
19. Hobbies (395)
20. Web Development (393)

21. Fashion (390)
22. Sports (387)
23. Education (380)
24. Writing and Literature (379)
25. Self Improvement (378)
26. News and Media (340)
27. Cooking and Dining (332)
28. Photography (313)
29. Women’s interests (310)
30. Religion and Spirituality (292)

31. Celebrity (274)
32. Marketing (225)
33. Pets (216)
34. Politics (214)
35. Home and Garden (205)
36. Automotive (193)
37. Books (171)
38. Career Jobs (157)
39. Environment (153)
40. Graphic Design (139)

41. Romance (127)
42. Real Estate (124)
43. Movies (109)
44. Philosophy (89)
45. Men’s interests (85)
46. Trends (82)
47. EntreKids (81)
48. Web Comics (68)
49. Science (76)
50. History (53)

51. Law and Legal (41)
52. Expat (30)

What I can see from this ranking is that the Top 10 niches cover almost half the market with a cumulated percentage of 48.97%. It also confirms that MMO (3rd in this ranking) is a niche that is becoming more and more crowded and where it would probably take a lot more time to realize the same profit as in another niche. It is not a surprise that the Personal Diary niche has a frank lead and ranks absolute first, proving that whatever happens, (we)blogs maintain their primary role as online personal logs, where people just share personal thoughts about their life and other random stuff. Computers and Internet logically come 2nd with the increased need of technological information and the quick developments that happen in the IT sector.

Conclusion :
So what I will probably do is avoid the Top 10 guys, maybe even the Top 20 (30?). There are niches out there that are virtually virgin : History, Science, Trends, Careers, Books and what have you. It may be a good choice to go for one of the 31 to 52 niches based on your skills and preferences. After all, it’s a matter of what you are interested in and what your readers are interested in. There is no point of going for a niche just because it’s less populated. But I think it’s important to take that into consideration when making a decision.

I would love to hear your opinions about this. How do you analyze the ranking? What learnings can you get out of it?  

This is a guest post from AffiliateTips.com - a site where you can find affiliate programs to make money online.

Anyone who has an income-producing affiliate marketing website wants to optimize traffic to that site. Obviously, if people don’t visit your affiliate site, there is no possibility that a sale will be made. In order to drive people to your affiliate site, there are a lot of techniques that can be employed. One of them is link building or external search engine optimization techniques.

When someone is looking for something on the internet, they will generally go to a search engine page. Let’s use Google as an example. They will type some keywords into Google’s search engine and let Google find them some relevant websites. Will yours be one of them? Well, that depends if you’ve optimized your affiliate site for a maximum number of Google “hits,” or occasions that Google will find your site among the very first when someone types in a relevant search term.

Optimize with Relevant Links

There are many ways to optimize your affiliate website for Google hits, but one of them is to provide lots of relevant links to sources outside of your web pages. Google will generally rank sites higher when they provide lots of external links, but ONLY if those links are relevant. Google software has gotten pretty sophisticated over the years, and it will often actually penalize websites that offer dozens of unrelated links from its pages.

Not only will Google penalize websites, may it be an affiliate marketing site or not, whose external links are not relevant, but the users of your website will quickly become disenchanted with your site if every time they click on what they believe is a link that will take them to further viable information about their topic of interest, they might wind up on a totally unrelated site selling something they have absolutely no interest in. Using lots of unrelated links will lose far more customers than your affiliate marketing campaigns are trying to generate.

Links should be carefully chosen for the relevance not just to your site as a whole, but to the individual web page on which they reside. For example, one of the pages on your site may sell books relevant to the subject of your web pages. Maybe you have placed an external link on that page to the personal website of the author of one of the books you are selling. The link will provide interesting information for customers who may be interested in purchasing that particular book from you. Linking to the author’s site will give your customers something extra, and then a return link on the author’s site will send those customers back to you if they wish to purchase the book.

Placing external links should be very carefully considered. You don’t want to link to competitive sites that could actually take business away from you. You only want to link to “value added” sites where your customers can find something they can’t find on your site, such as some added information or perspectives on their subject of interest.

Always Get Something in Return

External linking should be a two-way street whenever possible. For example, you may link to someone else’s site if they return the favor and link back to yours. As in the case above, with our author, it would only be wise to link to his site if he did not offer any competing links for purchasing his book. For example, you don’t want to send people to his site, only to have him link them to Amazon to purchase his book.

All external links should be routinely updated and verified. Maybe at the time you linked to that author’s site, he did not offer an online shopping cart for his products. But a few months later, he decides to upgrade his site with those items. You don’t want to still be linking to his site if he’s going to be stealing your customers once they get there. So, make it a routine practice to check out all links every month or so to make sure they are still acceptable to your site’s overall purpose.

You also want to ensure that those links are active. Nothing is more frustrating than to link to a site that no longer exists. You don’t want to put your customers through this frustration, so respect their time by verifying any external links appearing on your site.

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After a crazy month of July, Blogging Idol competition is over. Eventhough I didn’t win the competition, I won 15 new subscribers which is an incrase that never happened before, moving from 7 subscribers to 22. If my numbers are this low in terms of RSS, it’s because I didn’t give this blog what it deserves in terms of time and commitment. Last 2 months were crazy with a lot of new things happening on both the professional and personal sides. Now things are getting calmer and calmer, I think I should concentrate on making this blog a nice place to be, with useful information, ideas, tips and a pleasant place where interested readers can gather to discuss hot topics. The Blogging Idol proved that with a very very small effort (close to nothing), I managed to triple my RSS count. I guess if I commit and dedicate enough time and energy (dedication again, right Javo?) , nice things can be done on these very pages.

Goals for the month of August 2008 :
For the month of August, I am setting some goals :
-> Reach and exceed the milestone of 100 RSS subscribers, finally : I have been struggling with the RSS count so much and it’s the blogging idol that motivated me to do the effort. Now I don’t want to stop in the middle of the road. I need to work on this crucial aspect.
-> Reach the Top 200K in Alexa : I am now at 874k. Two months ago I was at 300K, but with my procrastination and laziness, I dropped to 1 million plus. Now it’s getting on the low again and I am planning to move things faster in the same direction.

As you notice, I put no revenue goals. I must first manage to get the basics before I move to setting goal on revenues.

I will share all my techniques and strategies here on the blog, so that everybody could benefit from the positive and negative learnings. So I encourage you to subscribe to my RSS feed to be sure to miss nothing from it. (This is already one of the techniques, I hope you’ll make it work :))

I would be very happy to hear from you on what strategies you are using if you have similar goals, or even if you just wish to share what you know.

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It happened July 20th, 2008. First time ever I win a blog contest. It’s called Exposure Contest and it was held by Mr. Javo. Here is the announcement :

It feels good to be among the winners. And the text link I won is worth $10 which is the price of such a link on Mr Javo’s blog.

The contest was launched by Javo in order to increase his RSS subscriptions for the Blogging Idol contest. It’s a scrambled word contest, where he sends a new letter of a 10-letter word to discover with every new post, and this letter is only visible through the RSS feed. So all I did was  putting the letters together after 9 posts and guess the word : DEDICATION. And I was among the first 3 to guess right.

So thanks to “dedication”, I actually won. Which is a nice life lesson given by this contest and Javo. Dedication is what makes a loser a winner and what makes difficult endeavors easy. And it’s very true in blogging as in general life matters.

This also drives me to talk about the contest as a powerful tool to reach punctual goals. Javo is doing great in increasing his RSS count and I think the contest contributed a lot.

Anyone has something to share about how dedication made him succeed in something? Or about contests and how they helped achieve some goals?

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