I have been testing and tweaking different money making strategies on one of my blogs because I wanted to see if I could make some more money from it.

FranchiseBuzz is an Australian blog that I started late last year, worked for a couple of months and it grabbed some nice search positions and hasn’t had a new post in a couple of months – yet it has still be bringing in consistent income on a monthly basis.

Now since about February it is comfortably been making about $100 a month through Google Adsense. I had a very ugly theme with a lot of ad’s – but it was converting well.

$100 was nice, but at less than 5% of my total online income – I wanted more.

What I Did To Increase Blog Profit By 50%

1. Changed from the BlueSense WordPress theme to a much cleaner Librio theme (which was inspired by Mac OS X Leopard).

2. Placed a simple Clickbank review at the top and bottom of each post.

I spent a lot of time browsing the Clickbank marketplace to find what I thought would be the perfect product for the target audience and seems I was right with 4 sales in the last month.

So one month on from implimenting these simple changes this blog is now making:

• Adsense: $61
• Clickbank: $103

I just wanted to show why we need to be constantly be tweaking our blogs for maximum profit! There is still more tweaking to be done with this blog but I am happy with a $150 a month for a blog that I don’t post to any more.

Question:

What simple things have you implemented on your blog to see a great result?

I have had the pleasure of being a part of the closed Market Samurai affiliate program and from the stats that I have been able to achieve you will be happy to know that in 72 hours the Nobel Samurai are opening up the Market Samurai affiliate program to the public.

The conversion rates that I have been able to achieve are like nothing I have ever seen in an affiliate program.

This month so far:

50% of impressions   —> Sign up for trial

84% of signups —> Download trial software

60% of downloads —> Purchase  (48% commission)

Pretty amazing right? This is why I am sad that they are opening up the Market Samurai affiliate program, but my loss is your gain!

To be eligible for an affiliate account you must have purchased a copy of Market Samurai. This is because they are looking for long term affiliates who have actually used and can personally recommend the software. If you don’t own Market Samurai, make sure you purchase a copy ( a 35% discount is built into the trial so you can get it for just $97 once off).

Market Samurai Affiliate Program Launch

If you are already an owner of Market Samurai then you may have already gotten an email, but if you purchase now you will receive emails over the next day or two about the affiliate program launch, but let me just say that there are some pretty nice prizes up for grab!

They got, iPhones and iPads on offer and you don’t have to be a ‘top 10′ affiliate. Instead these prizes will be ‘unlocked’ as you hit certain targets.

So What Do You Do If You Want To Join The Market Samurai Affiliate Program?

1. If You Already Own Market Samurai –>> Check Your Emails For More Information

2. If You Don’t Own Market Samurai –>> Sign up for the trial of the software and purchase. Get to know the product so that when it launches the affiliate program on Monday you can really recommend the product to your blog and list.

Let me know if you jump on board, and best of luck with the launch promotion!

Considering the feedback that I received from my cheap article writers post, I am covering my face with my hands in anticipation for the tomatoes – but here goes.

I have been reading Timothy Ferriss’ “The 4-Hour Workweek‘ and one of the key things he talks about in the book is AUTOMATION and OUTSOURCING.

So I took at a look at the jobs I was doing for my websites to see what some of the tasks where that I could get other people to do to free my time and I thought ‘why not outsource link building?‘

Why Would I Outsource Link Building?

For my niche blogs my main goal is search engine traffic, because once I set it up and am ranking well I don’t have to worry about blog commenting, tweeting, or working hard to continually get new visitors.

But that means I have to spend a lot of time building the links back to my sites and in all honesty, it’s not all hard work  – it’s just very tedious and time consuming (and they are the perfect type of jobs to outsource). So I guess it is quite obvious why I would want to outsource link building.

Where Do You Find Cheap Link Builders?

Since I had such a great experience with oDesk with my seo article writers test, I had no reason not to use them again to outsource my link building.

On oDesk I put in a assignment for:

Link Builder for 10 hours  a week – with the opportunity to increase to full-time depending on results.

Nothing fancy, and I put the hourly rate to under $3/hr. (I know that sounds cheap, and to be honest I wasn’t expecting that many responses).

I Got Over 50 Job Applications!!

I couldn’t believe that there were that many people (most seem qualified) that were willing to work for under $3/hr – I actually got one offer at 57cents/hour!

Now I am not saying that all of these will be good at link building, that is why you ask for information and interview them prior to hiring them – but if they can prove they know what they are doing and are willing to work for the price you ask – then why wouldn’t you outsource link building to them?

I see this as another great opportunity to automate my online business and for a maximum of $30 a week to test this strategy – I would be silly not to try it. I will let you know my results!

Why not try oDesk to outsource link building for yourself? Start an assignment and see what type of job applications that you personally get!

NOTE: I have since sold the site mentioned in this post, and the new owner has removed the site  (including all articles).

I’ve been focusing quite a bit lately on two topics on this blog – Market Samurai and ‘cheap article writers‘.

The reason I have been doing this is because these two tools are really all that you need to create a fantastic, profitable niche blog. On the one hand if you buy Market Samurai you have probably the most advanced keyword research tool (Market Samurai review) that will not only allow you to analyze topics to find highly targeted, money making niches ( my indoor dog kennels site is already starting to get Google traffic and Adsense dollars!)

But What If You Find A Profitable Niche You Have No Knowledge In?

This is exactly what happened to me. I found a fantastic niche that I saw had a handful of keywords with niche search traffic, and not to difficult competition (I knew with a little work I could get front page of Google) – but the problem was that they keywords had to do with dogs….and I don’t really like dogs. To be quite honest, they kinda scare me. So the fact that the niche was to do with extra large dogs – I had even less interest.

But It Was A Profitable Niche!

So I bought a great keyword domain and started writing my first article – but was failing miserably. I don’t know about you, but I cannot write about what I am not passionate about. So I needed to find someone who was. But since I was only testing the niche at the time – I needed cheap article writers!

But Where Do You Find Cheap Article Writers?

I was willing to pay up to $5 an article because I knew that was about the price that they were going for if I went to the DigitalPoint marketplace, but if you have ready my SEO article writers post, you would know that I took a completely different route.

The best way to get the cheapest article writers is to get the writers bidding against each other for your business and that is exactly what I did.

If you have never heard of oDesk, you need to head over there and sign up to their freelancing website.

What Is oDesk And How Can I Help Me Get Cheap Article Writers?

oDesk is an online services marketplace that has freelancers performing over $6 million of work a month.

It is totally free to join and as soon as you have registered you will have access to 1,000′s of writers, designers, programmers and many other services that will help you focus your efforts on other parts of your online business.

All you have to do is post a job, if you are looking for cheap article writers then you will obviously post a job in the article section – you set the maximum price and then just wait for the writers to start bidding for your work.

You will get a range of expensive and cheap article writers, quality writers and not so professional writers. The good thing about oDesk is that before you have to decide which SEO article writer you will give your job to, you can view their resume and application, check out their previous work rating and contact them for a further interview.

What’s This About $1.60 Articles?

As I said earlier, I was more than happy to pay up to $5 an article but after seeing a couple of people posting writing jobs on  oDesk for about $2 an article I decided to put that as my maximum price ($20 for 10 articles or $2 each), but as the applicants came in I started to see people offering less to try and gain my job.

You have to be careful when you are selecting candidates that English is their first language. But you can set this as a requirement in the job description.

)ne lady’s application caught my attention, because she was American (so English was her first language), she had and loved dogs, her sample articles were fantastic (extremely personal writing style) and her bid on the job was just $1.60 per article!

I made the decision to approve her application, sent through the keywords that I wanted articles written for and as they say, the rest is history.

So, I guess the whole point of this article was to show you that creating a niche website doesn’t have to take a lot of time or money. For me it took some keyword research using Market Samurai, and hiring cheap article writers to create my content for me. Now all I have left to do is perfect my monetization strategies and do a bit of link building!

I found out about these ebooks from Tom at BuildThatList.com.

To thank him can I recommend you subscribe to his blog or download his free squeeze pages?

Jason Fladlien is one very smart internet marketer.

You see, pretty much every website I visit that is selling an information product always focus on trying to grab your email – subscribing you to their list.

They always offer you an ebook or ‘leaked first chapter’ to try and convince you. But Jason does things a little bit differently.

He still does the ebooks, but you don’t have to opt into an email list and he gives you the actual PDF link on his page.

Now don’t get me wrong, he is still marketing his products, he just decided to put a few links in each ebook to his products – and you can decide whether you want to learn more about them or not. However, he does not fill his ebooks with links – there are actually some fantastic tips in them (so I decided to share a few of my favourites with you!).

So let’s get straight into the free internet marketing ebooks.

The Great Article Marketing Hoax

Jason writes about a few methods that you should consider instead of just writing articles for EzineArticles. Has a few great ideas (one that was making him $40 an hour).

=> Download The Great Article Marketing Hoax

Email Marketing Genius

I gained a lot from this ebook about how to write email headlines that will make people open your email to great strategies to get a better click through rate.

=> Download Email Marketing Genius

The Case Against Video Sales Letters

With the recent increase in video sales letters and squeeze pages, this is a timely reminder to to just do things just because everyone else is.

=> Download The Case Against Video Sales Letters

Instant Action On Info

In what seems counter product to the sale of his products, this free ebook actually looks at how people spend too much time studying information products and not enough time acting on them. If you struggle with productivity, you may want to consider checking this one out.

=> Download Instant Action On Info

Feel free to take advantage of the free internet marketing ebooks, because even if you can learn one or two small things from each one it will make your blogs and email list more profitable.