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Before I start this post I would like to appologise to our readers for my long absence from payment blogger. I am in the army for the last 3 months (and I will be there for 9 more months) so time is very limited.

Anyway, enough with me, let’s talk about making money with forums. In this post I wont tell you how to monetize a forum web site, but how you can earn money by selling services and products on other forums. Personally I use these techniques frequently with webmaster forums to sell sites or ads. It doesn’t matter if you are looking to sell a site, an advertising package or some ebook you wrote there are a few things you should take care of.

Reputation

Everything in the business world is reputation. In forums this is even more important as reputation is “trackable”. Most forums have the reputation badge, while others (like DP) have a specific user rating for transactions with other members called itrader. So let’s say you start right now with a forum, you have registered an account with the forum and you are ready to sell your product/service. At that point I would suggest you to stop what are you doing and pay attention to your reputation. Without a strong reputation in the forum it doesn’t matter if you give gold for free because none is going to buy from you.

Building a “name” in the community

Ok that part is time consuming, but it is very important as long as you wish to earn some money in the forum you have just got in. Bellow are a few things that you have to do before posting any offer:

Post in the forums

A member with no posts is not a member. You need to make as much posts as you can. Don’t post stuff like “Thanks, I like this” but try to be informative and helpful to the other members. By showing them that you know about what you are talking will create trust from the community.

Give something for free

People is going crazy when you offer them something for free. It doesn’t matter if this is a 2 page ebook or a descriptive article on a technique you are using. If you give them something for free your reputation will increase so give it a try.

Buy stuff from the marketplace

If there is a marketplace with itrader, then you should buy a few things before try to sell something. This is because this way you will be able to have a positive feedback itrader that you make you look more trustful to your future buyers.

Time to make some money

Ok now you are a well known member in the community with reputation and itrader, so you can post an offer. At this part the most important factor is of course the product you are selling, but still there are a few things that you can do to maximize your chances:

• Try to be as descriptive as possible
• Rate your own thread (yeah people like to see 5 stars in the top of the thread)
• Make people bump your thread. How? Just leave a bit of information for pms so everyone will post “Please pm me details”

That’s it, I hope this article was helpful enough

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Sorry for the vanishing act, a period of being unwell and of course Nick in the Army now! means we were a little light on posts.

Which one is the devil?
Unless you have been living under a large stone for the last week you couldn’t have failed to notice to massive corporations signed a rather large deal. As of last week limited tests were being carried out to provide PDF writers the ability to embed adverts into their PDFs. The adverts are provide by Yahoo and are on a PPC basis, if you happen to live in the US you can run along and join the beta program for the rest of us we will have to be content with the information on the Adobe Labs site.

So how does it work?
PDF writers upload their finished works to adobe site, the PDF is then scanned and adverts inserted into the PDF. These ads will then display in the right hand side of Adobe Reader see a screenshot. A couple of obvious limitations jump out of you, the ads will only be displayed in Adobe Reader, and no doubt will make your PDf unusable in other readers, what happens when the Ebook is read offline? I know it might not have occurred to Yahoo but we don’t all live in a connected 24/7 world.

So will it work?
Well Ebooks have something of a bad image indeed Jon the admin at Wickedfire went so far as to create a thread providing backdoor access to some of in his opinion worst Ebooks out there. The idea was if people saw how bad these books were people wouldn’t waste their money do I condone his actions? Not really but I have even less sympathy for the Ebook writers many of whom are scam artists. On an interesting aside the stunt has sort of backfired with the thread becoming one of the most popular threads on the board with people requesting books not as Jon hoped to see how bad they are but to save buying them. Advertising in Ebooks is normally done through affiliate links, sponsored pages etc in much the same way as traditional magazines use advertising. The medium doesn’t allow much flexibility so this new revenue stream may tempt people to drop or remove prices from their Ebooks this for many books would be a good thing but ultimately you are placing your faith in a locked system which many people will not be part of, it is like having your advertising running through an ActiveX control.

PDFs in Search results
One indirect benefit of this hook up will be the technology used to scan documents to determine what ads to place this could have a direct effect on how Yahoo Crawls and ranks PDFs in search results, this could mean an increase in PDFs on the front page of SERPs. Many people ignore PDFs and other media in their search strategies but it maybe time to re-evaluate this.

Final thought
Currently Adobe and Yahoo currently only plan to show ads on PDFs that have passed through their filter system but the functionality will be (or is) built into every Adobe Reader how long before they press the button and include ads in all PDFs? If that is a scary thought have a look at Foxit PDF reader as an alternative for windows.

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We recently discussed a simple way to get highly targeted traffic through Stumbleupon based on stumble ads, well Stumbleupon is not the only Social Media site offering this level of targeting Facebook is also offering targeted advertising.

Walled Gardens

At first glance Facebook is offering just another PPC service for advertisers and while the rates are currently cheap they will no doubt rise quickly. So why is advertising on Facebook a good idea for affiliate marketers?

Facebook is a huge walled garden full of unsuspecting people easy pickings for a marketer at least it is at the moment, Facebook Ads launched yesterday and since then 100,000 ‘ad pages’ have been created an ad page is the free part of Facebook ads, its the second part we are interested in. However this says that we are not alone in seeing the pickings in the garden and to get maximum benefit you will need to work fast.

Getting your Mini Site ready

Lets take a simple example site (please note unlike the Stumbleupon post I’m still testing and have no accurate figures) same principle as before, aim it at British males in there late teens early 20s with the same style submit and site. For more information on the case study see the previous post.

If your lucky you already have several of these style sites ready to go and maybe you were testing Stumbleupon ads. If not get going I know I spent some money but even with $50 or less you can get up a half decent site.

Setting up a campaign

So lets get going, Like the Stumbleupon ads we want to geo-target as our Email submit is also geo-targeted. We also want to define a gender and age range, though we are less worried about picking subject matter this time as we will be writing an actual ad.
Getting an ad up is a 4 stage affair

1) Provide a URL of the site or page to send users to, notice you can also choose to target Facebook pages as.

2) Target users, selecting location, gender, etc notice you can also define right down to if they are in college and year shame its very Americanised so is not really helpful for us

3) Create an advert, if you have ever done any PPC you will know the deal, the important difference is Social actions, by clicking this you can create handles which have the potential to bring indirect traffic also notice you can attach an image, hmm I wonder what we will use?

4) Select if you want to run a PPC or impression campaign, again this should be familiar to anyone who has used any PPC before, bidding is currently very low but expect it to shoot up.

Start the campaign off, job done your bringing in highly targeted traffic I would at least while the prices low pay purely for PPC. Facebook has opened a huge door and no doubt the price will shoot up very quickly if you can be an early adopter then this is a huge opportunity.

What’s been your experience with Facebook ads, have you previously used Facebook flyers? which converts better for you?

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Today a new advertising network, WidgetBucks has been announced. This looks as a good opportunity for publishers, as their ads look very clickable as they don’t look to what we are used to think of as an advertisement.

Why to use WidgetBucks ads

The best reason is that their ads have high CTR. Now according to their site you earn $3-6 CPM which is a great amount (if that is true of course ) They pay through cheque and the lower payment is $50 which is very reasonable.

The adverts are separated into 13 categories with each category having several sub categories, their is also the option for a pseudo contextual advertisements which they have called ???MerchSense??? widgets themselves come in a range of sizes and colours which can be used to match a site or to make the widget stand out.

$25 bonus for signup

As an opening promotion they are offering $25 just for sign up, which makes the target of $50 much easier.

Last comment

I always look into testing new programs and this looks very promising. So I am going to test it and give you a full review later this month. In the meanwhile here is how their ads look like :

With a $25 promotion its worth signing up even if you later take it down as the offer is part of their initial opening and may not be around for ever to sign up to WidgetBucks takes just a second or two.

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The idea that I am promoting the best web browser, and in the same time help to make internet a better place was always fascinating me. The bad thing when you promote Firefox affiliates from the adsense program, is the low conversions. First of all let’s try to see what are the reasons that cause this problem.

Why people don’t install Firefox from your site

• People usually don’t submit an offer because of a banner. You need more than that in order to convince them
• Some of your visitors already use Firefox, why display the firefox advertisement to them?
• Lack of motivation. IE users already use a browser that works for them. You can’t explain to the average user that IE don’t follow W3C standards. This is information useful only to web designers and web developers

How to promote Firefox

In my honest opinion in order to promote firefox you need to be intrusive. The first rule is that you don’t have to promote Firefox to any other than internet explorer users. To do this you will need to use a small fragment of code in HTML like :


<!--[if IE]>
Show the ad here
<![endif]–>


or if you prefer the php way, something like :


if (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], ‘MSIE’)!==false)
echo ‘Your firefox ad here’;


The second thing you have to think is how intrusive you are going to be. You can display a landing page to every IE visitor - instead of your regular content - and ask from them to install Firefox because IE has many security problems, etc.

This way works the best but you will lose a lot of loyal visitors that use IE. Of course this is your decision, and if you like to play with landing pages for IE users, then I will definitely recommend you to check the Explorer Destroyer, a web site dedicated to destroy Internet explorer

Now if you want to be less intrusive, but yet having conversions, here is how you can do it. Open your template file and after the body add this line of code:


<!--[if IE]>
<div style="width:99%;border-bottom: 2px solid red;background:gray;padding:5px;color:#FFF;">
<strong>Warning</strong>: You are using Internet Explorer. <a href="http://getfirefox.com/">Get Firefox with Google Toolbar for better browsing </a>
</div>
<![endif]–>


Of course you will have to change the link code with your affiliate code. I’ve took this style from blows hard and it still has some good conversions. Bellow you can see how it looks like :

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