Auctionads

Many of you may heard about Auctionads, but do you know what Auctionads is and what it does? Auctionads is basically an affiliate marketing site for Ebay. What they do is they utilize the API from Ebay and turn it into very nice and pleasant looking ads for you to display on your site.
After you copy and paste the codes which Auctionads give you, you're live with their ads! So, let's say that you have chose to display ads about kids in your website which happens to also talk about kid related topics, the ad will display listings from Ebay based on products that are categorized with the word "kids" and display them onto your website. The looks of the ad itself is a combination of the pictures from the acutal auctioned item which the owner is selling and the name of the item which is displayed beneath the picture.

What happens is when a visitor visits these ads coming from your site and they bid and wins the product, you will then get a cut of the profit from Auctionads. Now, this part is actually not easy. Just think about how many times have you actually bid on a product but just to gave up later due to the amount of bids involved for the item? What I have found to be a more effective way to promote Ebay goods is to target your products that are cheap and is in high popularity with the general public. Personally, I have found goods that range between $0-$20 performs the best from my own experience. I think the reason behind it is that most of us don't mind spending a buck or two on a few items and most of the time, the item isn't expensive enough to really bother us at all. However, once the price is hiked up we tend to shy away or the interest level becomes target oriented. It is like buying an ice cream in the street for $3.50, sure it's more expensive but most of people would not feel uncomfortable with the price knowing that it's more expensive because they expected it. If the scenario switches to a LCD TV that cost $500, you would think twice about buying it and most of the time compare prices with other places or even brands of TV that's available for that price range.

I have heard success stories about people utilizing Auctionads on an investment property or related site. Although the visitors in this case is being advertised properties that are available to be purchased in a much higher price, but most of the time these visitors are injected with the idea that it's a smart investment therefore they are more prone to do so. I have not personally tested this concept but I can definitely see it having potentials of becoming successful if it is properly marketed.

Now, the most important part of today's post. The payout! How much do you get paid by Auctionads? Well, you get paid 75% of the revenue that Ebay makes and not the ended auction price! So really, it isn't that much per listing. The good news is that their minimum payout is $10 so it's one tenth of Google Adsense. Personally I make about $150 with Auctionads per month in one of my most traffic site, so I think it's not too bad. So check them out and see how it performs for you. -Swapw


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Google Referral Ads

Google has newly introduced an ad system called Referral Ads under Adsense. From its first view, it's quite clear that it's an attempt by Google to poke into the affiliate marketing niche which has already been congested with many other competing companies. Why? Because affiliate marketing is actually one of the hottest segment over the web today.

How Referral Ads work is pretty simple. Basically like the regular Google Adsense ads, referral ads display items which you the owner of site select to display. For example if your website is about bike and you prefer displaying ads about bikes they will display exactly ads for that and nothing else. It also provides you the option to display various other ads and you the owner of the site can let referral ads autopick as to which ads "convert" the best. When I say the word convert, I mean a customer either signing up for a product or buying it. This term is defined differently with various types of advertisers, it just depends. The payout is based on the amount of visitors that actually buys the product that your site is advertising through referral ads, whenever a customer buys something you get paid a certain percentage as the result.

Now imagine if a visitor that goes to the ad displayed on your site and buys a tv and let's just hypothetically say that the payout is 3% and the TV is $300 you have just earned $9 right on the spot. Instead of you getting paid on pennies on the dollar per click with regular Adsense this program seems to be paying a lot more and in many ways better in comparison right? WRONG! Dead wrong and the here's the reason why. With your regular Adsense you get paid per click from your visitors going to the advertiser, however with referral ads you don't get paid for that and that is a very big deal!

Now, let's do some math together. How much are you currently getting your clicks with Google Adsense? If you blend in your ads and optimize it, you are probably sitting at 1-2% tops. The percentage is awfully low. From these percentage of people, how many of them do you think would actually buy something or sign up with someone? Extremely low and you're looking at something close to 1% but less than that. In another words, every 1000 visitors that come to your site 10 visitors will visit your ad and close to none will sign up. To get any sign up with our math, we are looking at at least 10000 visitors.

I have tested referral ads in one of the site that own that is filled with visitors. You are probably curious as to the results right? Out of 9000 unique visitors in the day that I've tested it, only 9 people have actually "clicked" on the ads and obviously no conversions. If you are considering using referral ads, I would suggest looking elsewhere to make your money online! -Swapw


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Stumbleupon

What's Stumbleupon? Stumbleupon is a popular social web site that has a combined idea of Digg and Myspace. Not only will users be able to customize their own spot in Stumbleupon their most fascinating feature to "stumble" really has caused a lot of buzz.

Seems like a lot of web gurus have already been talking about them for sometime but I thought I take sometime to dig into them today for you in my personal experience and why I really think they're a great way to drive your traffic. Let's first look at one of their most unique features which they offer is called "stumble". What is stumble? It's kinda like a voting system where users vote for each other on sites or pages and even images which they like throughout the net. Like many other sites that provides users to vote each other Stumbleupon pushes the most voted or popular page in the front page of their website. Obviously as you know, any content that sits on the front page gets viewed by everyone that visits simply because they are the first thing that you see when you come into a site.

How do you "stumble?" Stumbleupon requires users to first download a "stumble" tool which is just another tab on the already cluttered navigation bar which you'll have to install. This is actually the most annoying part for any internet users but if you want to get involved Stumbling others I guess you don't have much choice. The good news is that you can customize the icons being displayed so you can minimize the buttons that you'll have to place in your navigation bar with only the necessities so it won't clog up more spaces then it actually needs. To Stumble on someone's page you have to click on the hands up hand which says "I like it!". By doing so, you have just stumbled on a page or gave the page a vote. Obviously if you don't like a page you can just give that page a hands down which will push the page further back. With this technique you can do it on both the pages you enjoy and the images you enjoy as well. Stumbleupon also offers a regular widget similar to Digg and that just simply enable you to have that function within a post for others to Stumble you as well.

Stumbleupon is currently testing their video aspects of the feature and just imagine if it's available on how amazing it would be for video sites like myself to have it being Stumbledupon? Now just get your buddies to start stumbling one another and like I said previously the more buzz you create the more opportunities it will be for you to appear on the front page of Stumbleupon. Before you run out and start going crazy to have others Stumble be sure to first survey the audiences of your niche. Currently, most users of Stumbleupon are quite young so if you are aiming at marketing products for an older group of audience, this is probably not the best idea.

Any site like I've said it many times are as good as the visitors that do come, so if your site is well made without visitors go and start stumbling!! The more visitors, the more money you make. That's the game of the internet and that's how you make money smart with advertisements, etc. The best part of having a blog is that it's all free from our end! -Swapw


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A glimpse in the life of Swapw

Part 1 of 2



Part 2 of 2

These videos were filmed at a farewell party for one of my best friends. These video you will see the real me in action in a rare glimpse. Of course, Swapw whoops ass not only in his blog to making money smart he also wins in wii. -Swapw


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Online payment services

As more and more people shop and engage with one another over the internet, the options and availability of online payment services are becoming more prevalent. Besides just the regular payment services in your local currency, there are also several "online currencies" available as well. Which one of the service should you be using?

For those of you that have been reading my blog, you would know that I am not a very big fan of online currencies in general. A short explanation to those of you who has not read my post in the past, I'm simply not a big fan of anything that's not established or recognized globally. Because online currencies have yet to be recognized by countries globally, therefore any unethical actions taken by the online currency company itself is hard to be seriously examined or regulated. I'm not saying they are not legitimized companies, however the risks are there and I will not take it nor recommend my readers to take it. Look at it as monopoly money, would you seriously use it as real money? Probably not.

Moving forth to general online payment services, including big names like Paypal are great ways for buyers to purchase goods in a secure manner. Especially with Ebay products, Paypal has inplaced with a program of buyer's protection which is great for buyers like you and I. For general payment services where you deal directly with a company, they are definitely a great company to use.

Now, here comes the tricky part. How do you pay someone within the internet? There has been a growing number of forums out there today. Many of them provide users a platform to exchange, buy, or sell services and goods within one another. Which payment services should you use? Many of the online payment companies out there do not provide protection to these types of transactions. Why you ask? The reason is because that it's really difficult to discern who's right and wrong. Not online is there a lack of evidence, most of these transactions are verbal. Not only is it only difficult for these online payment companies to discern, it also takes a lot of time involvement as well. There can be numerous exchanges without much results and to read them in a thorough manner, it can take hours at times depending on the amount of exchange and the dispute.

So, what service should you use in these types of exchanges when you deal with someone over the internet in any number of exchanges? I would personally recommend checking out Escrow.com. Escrow.com helps both buyers and sellers deal with that exact problem that I've just mentioned. They provide a platform acting as the third party bank which both parties are involved. After a certain agreements have been set and completed, Escrow.com then releases the correct funds to the right party. The service fee is not cheap, however when the amount of money gets involved are higher I definitely believe its significance and role becomes huge. I have actually used Escrow.com a few times and I would highly recommend it to everyone out there. -Swapw



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