Web Empire

I can’t think of a better deal than one that pays you to do something you would do anyhow. If you have an existing Internet business, you spend a lot of time online, and probably spend much of that time searching. Now there is a new social media style search aggregator that adds a simple new twist: they reward loyal users with cash.

This new player in the social media field is called SCOUR and it works something like this:

You join, and earn points for referring friends, using their search engine, voting in favor or against sites in the search results, or leaving comments about those sites. Since the site aggregates results from the major search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN), you are getting the best results from all of those at once, which is a convenience to begin with. But also, by rating sites, you and I and all the other users have a say in how the sites rank, so in time the sites that really are best will rise to the top (rather than just those with the best SEO).

Now I like the idea of having real people involved in ranking sites, rather than just computer algorithms. I’m sure the concept will draw scammers, but the site claims to have controls in place to detect and discount any problematic users. With enough honest input, the junk that gets in should be overwhelmed, one hopes.

Not only do you get credit for each action you take on the site (with results shown in real-time by a counter in the corner of the page), but if you refer others, as I am doing, you will also get 25% of points they earn. That should add up fast if you produce a lot of referrals.

You only get one point for searching, two for rating and three for commenting, but if you are active in your searching it should be easy to wrack up a hundred points a day. If you have ten referrals doing the same, that is another 250. You need 6,500 points to earn $25, so at that rate you would get $25 every  18-1/2 days. Even if you get no referrals you get $25 every couple months. Certainly not a way to make a living, but it’s like free extra pocket money, since you earn it doing something you would do anyhow — searching the web! Go forth and SCOUR…

I recommend following your statistics for all sorts of factors and variables, but must admit that I have not always taken the time to follow my own advice. I need to make the process more systematic … but in the mean time, I finally got around to analyzing my Adsense income for the preceding 12 months about six weeks ago.

Several of my sites showed very poor results. Some had terrible click-through rates, while others had a fair number of clicks, but they were so poorly valued that the results were insignificant in regard to my total income.

So I decided to replace those ads that were not producing with more profitable links. Nothing new there, many people have recommended that. But having built a Web Empire, I did things a bit differently.

For the pages with poor click-through rates, I simply found other advertisers that pay for static text links. But the higher click-through folks caught my attention. These were people paying attention to the ads, and clicking on them — but I was getting next to nothing. Rather than send such valuable customers off to some text link buyer, I decided to keep them by replacing the Adsense with links to my own sites — particularly those sites with the best pay-per-click performance, be it Adsense or one of the other PPC ad programs.

These people are only going to click on my ads if they are ’surfin’ with no clear destination in mind. My other sites are mostly not directly related to the sites the pages the ads are on, but may be in the same general field or some variation on a larger theme. Those who do click-through to one of my other sites are highly likely to continue ’surfing’ by clicking on one of the higher-paying ads on that site, after they digest the information on the landing page.

And that is in fact what happened. I found that ad revenue on the targeted pages went up by far more than I lost from removing the ads from the low-producing sites. In comparing those sites where I redirected to my sites, with pages where I sold relevant text link ads — the redirects to my own sites were much more profitable. In part that is because I only redirected the ‘cream of the crop’ to my own sites … but still, the lesson is well learned. Profitable advertising can be directed within your Web Empire as well as sold externally. Plus the new links will help those target pages (usually not the main page of the site) in the SERPS.

There are lots of ways of making money online — here are my brief definitions for some of the most common:

• Sell Advertising — that is where people pay you to steal away your visitors
• Affiliate Marketing — where you try to convince people to buy a third-party product through you rather than one of the other ten-million affiliates for that product
• Multi-Level-Marketing — requires trying to get others to sell the same overpriced junk you sell
• Product Sales (1) — where the product is not of your own production, is where you try to get people to pay more for something than you paid for it
• Product Sales (2) — where you create your own product, requires convincing people they need another ebook of money-making secrets so you can begin to actually make money
• Subscription Sites — just convince people they should pay to read the stuff you copied off the Internet
• Get Paid for Work — become a virtual assistant, write content, make websites, etc., at prices competitive with third-world economies

Despite my sarcastic tone and somewhat pessimistic summaries, all of these techniques really do work — people make money on each of them, and some of us even earn a living from nothing but these methods. The reality is though, you can only make money if you can offer something of value. It is difficult to find those value-laden products and services, but not impossible. There are no instant riches, but hard work that is intelligently directed will, in time, be rewarded.