If you’re like me, you hate spending money… especially when there’s a chance that things may not be successful. Yes, you have to spend money to succeed online, but there’s something about logging into your Paypal account and transferring out funds to someone else that just doesn’t feel good.

One of the easiest ways to fritter away a lot of money, and fast is through PPC (pay per click) like Adwords, Bidvertiser and the like. A newbie without much knowledge can easily spend hundreds of dollars a day without seeing much (or any) profit.

What if I told you that you could get targeted traffic free?

Well now you can, through the power of blog commenting. My first post on making money with blog commenting helped people collectively make thousands of dollars so you’d do well to heed my advice.

In that post, I talked about providing a link building service for cash… in this post, I’m going to talk about affiliate marketing through blog comments.

You see, an average click with PPC will cost $0.10 – sometimes much more. Unless you setup a landing page, you only have one chance to sell to that visitor, and then they’re gone. As each ‘chance’ is costing you money, you want to make sure that as many of them convert – right?

Here’s where we use blog commenting to make money.

What you need to do… is scour the Clickbank marketplace for hot products. As an example, let’s take ‘Blogging To The Bank’ which is a well known blogging product.

The next step is buying a domain, something that looks similar. You could get BlogginToTheBank.com or Blogging-To-The-Bank.com (both will probably be taken, but this is an example)… be creative. Do not be afraid to use other extensions.

Setup a redirect on the index page to your affiliate link.

You could manually scour blogs… or you could get something like Comment Sniper, which helps you out a great deal. What Comment Sniper does is allows you to be notified the instant a blog you choose makes a new post, which means you can get in early and quick comment to be one of the first (and thus get a lot of exposure).

Add the biggest blogs you know to Comment Sniper – in this case, you could add John Chow, Shoemoney, Problogger etc. As soon as you see posts on them, you want to comment. Make sure you leave insightful, useful comments – the better your comment, the more chance people will click through.

All you need to do is be the first commenter on ten blogs and need ten click throughs per blog (which is not difficult) to get 100 clicks per day. Remember, you probably would have commented on some of these blogs anyways, so why not make money while you’re at it? Try and look for blogs with a decent amount of SE traffic as they’ll make you more money.

Products with a good sales page and a proven history of selling work well… if you wouldn’t buy it, it’s unlikely others would. If you want to get more chances to sell to your targeted visitors, you could even build a landing page that captures leads through an opt in service like Aweber.

You can do this as many times on as many blogs you want, or even outsource the commenting process – remember, unlike PPC, each comment you leave has the potential to be clicked by many people for no cost – so why not spend money on it?

Choosing a product that will be helpful to those who purchase will increase purchases and reduce refunds. You do not have to use Clickbank – you could use PayDotCom (as they have quite a few programs that you can make money with) or even an in house affiliate program of a product. It’s all up to you; but for this, all you need is a domain name and you can get started.

I have done outsourcing this fairly well in the past - I paid $40 for 400 comments… had more than 1,000 clicks and made about $500 dollars. I was promoting an info product which I had personally tried, knew it converted well. How’s that for a return on investment?

If you have any questions, feel free to post them below. Good luck!

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I’ve been running out of post ideas so wanting to give people on this blog posts that they actually find useful, so my posts over the last few days have been ideas taken from conversations had over instant messenger programs.

You see, I could spend all day talking to you guys and explaining the same thing multiple times (I do this anyways ) but if someone asks me something that could benefit you guys, I’ve decided that I’ll write a short post on here with basics (and then you guys can ask questions in the comments section). If you’ve got anything more you’d like to see me cover on here, just hit me on instant messenger.

Today I’m going to talk about email marketing… that is, sending emails to people you have gotten to opt in to a list. I have a few lists, ranging from the internet marketing niche to weight loss (hehe…) and am looking to increase my list numbers slowly over the course of the next few month - I see my email list for IM surpass the amount of subscribers to this blog pretty soon, and it’s far easier to grow an email list (that’s what I feel personally) than a blog.

An email list is far more personal than your average blog - on TUK, for example you guys are just reading words on a website (apart from the subscribers, of course) but with an email list, you’re getting advice no one else sees unless they subscribe delivered to their inbox every day. I’ve had length conversations via email with subscribers and have built quite a few relationships, including profitable ones for things like joint ventures.

I haven’t sold a thing to my subscribers so far apart from my ‘coaching class’ (which cost $0.01 …) - don’t think I will be doing so too soon as I think people are tired of being sold to; I subscribed to a few big name marketers when I started out and got pissed off seeing an email about a different product every day, each promising me millions if I ‘acted now’. I have however sold things via email to subscribers in other niches - however, building a relationship should be your first goal and making money a distant second. If you follow the former, you’ll find the latter fairly easy.

When building a list, there’s only one option for me - Aweber. There are plenty of other options, and I’ve tried a few of them - including Email Aces (which is utter sh*t) and the one that comes with hosting free, but Aweber is miles better than anything other I’ve used; it only costs $19/month and I recommend it to anyone that is looking to get into email marketing. The price is incremental but as your subscriber list increases you’ll find it very easy to cover that amount; I paid for a year up front.

What I like about email marketing is that if you work it right, every email you send makes you money (or gears you up to make money). There are some people that make a full time living off email marketing, and no - not just in the internet marketing niche. All you have to do is build a few reasonably sized lists in different niches and you’re set.

The common thought is that you need seven emails to convert a prospect into a buyer; good emails, that is. I’m not going to cover writing emails as that is a long subject, all I’m going to say is be personal, be friendly and don’t only try to sell.

Building a list is easy if you put the right amount of work in; some of the best ways to build a list are:

• Commenting on blogs with a link to your squeeze page
• Posting on forums with a well advertised signature link
• Pay per click like Adwords, YSM etc
• Youtube marketing with video
• Article marketing
• Joint ventures
• Marketing giveaways

There are a few more but the above should be enough to get you started. You can see an example of my IM squeeze page at Earners Guide - it brings me a few subscribers a day with no work on my part.

The best thing about email marketing is that you can send ‘broadcasts’ - basically an instant email to all at a time you specify, to notify them about a product launch or give them any other news. Something I’ve done in the past. You can also setup emails to go out at set intervals, so no matter when someone signs up they get the same series as others.

You need to offer an incentive for people to signup to your list; most will not without one. What you can do is offer information products - be it your own (like I have done) or even private label right stuff like scripts, eBooks or templates. Remember to offer good, useful content or else people will just unsubscribe.

Although you can’t answer every single email (I definitely can’t!) try and answer the ones where people need help; remember, the penniless guy that you spoke to yesterday may be the millionaire that’s hitting serious bank tomorrow, and he’ll remember you if you offered him some good advice to get you started.

Feel free to ask any questions you may have; if you want to start out with this, make sure you sign up with a good service.

Sign Up For Aweber

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This post is educational, nothing else. I hold no responsibility for any actions you decide to take with this information. I do not do blackhat marketing anymore and do realise that you can get banned from whichever network you are using with the below information.

When I asked people what they wanted to see on TUK I had a few people contact me on instant messenger and say that they’d like to know what blackhat marketing was and whether it was worth looking into.

First off - my opinion is that you should not use blackhat marketing; I’ve done it in the past, but have been ‘clean’ for over a month now. The thing about blackhat marketing is that it generally (note, not always) tends to be short term and there is a decent chance of you getting banned from whatever you promote (unless you clarify with your affiliate network first… some of them allow this type of marketing).

Blackhat marketing is not fraud; let me make that clear - too many people confuse it with such. Blackhat is also not illegal. For a comparision, filling out your own CPA offers with proxies and freshly generated emails would be illegal, as you are cheating advertisers and engaging in fraud (which if they sued you for you could go to jail / be fined) but something like cookie stuffing is an example of blackhat marketing; not fraud, not illegal, but usually against the terms and conditions of most affiliate networks.

In the past, blackhat used to be a term related to search engine optimization - for example, injecting links - basically ways to ‘cheat’ Google into giving you a higher ranking. Nowadays however, shady-ish ways to make money online have also been dubbed blackhat.

As mentioned at the beginning, this post is purely educational and I hold no responsibility towards whatever you do with it; I have done this in the past and know that the tips work, that is all I am going to say.

COOKIE STUFFING

Cookie stuffing is probably the easiest way for anyone looking to get into blackhat affiliate marketing to start out, as it doesn’t require a cent of investment apart from your own domain name and hosting.

The basic way to cookie stuff is by using fake images on forums; every view of your fake image would count as a click (and have your affiliate link embedded in the visitors computer). When someone buys something, you will get the affiliate commission credited to you.

What is done is people create a .htaccess file (or edit their existing one) with code redirecting images to affiliate links. So for example, it would be:

Redirect /1stimage.jpg http://www.hostingaffiliatelink.com

Now, every time you place 1stimage.jpg on a website, and someone views it - it counts as an click. The easiest way is to target niche forums and start threads related to the topic at and (so for example, starting a thread on Hostican asking for opinions and placing your image). Note that this does not hide your referrer link and thus is extremely risky; I am not going to tell you guys how to do this as if a whole range of cookie stuffers start, it will not be my fault

Anywhere that you can place an affiliate link is ripe for cookie stuffing; niche forums, your own websites, blogs etc. For example, if I wanted to (I haven’t) I could cookie stuff all visitors to this blog and they would not know it.

For those worried, cookie stuffing does nothing to you if you view such an image; all it does is embed an affiliate cookie into your computer. So if you are buying something through a friend (or your own, even)’s affiliate link, clear your cookie before you make the purchase.

There are far more advanced blackhat techniques to make money; having spoken with a few marketers I know quite a bit of them and may talk a little about them here depending on the response this post gets.

My opinion is that there is nothing wrong with doing so on larger webmaster forums, as they would buy anyways and all you are doing is netting some (easy) commission; however, it is not me that makes the rules and most affiliate networks do not like this - if you are going to try this out and want to stay safe, ask. I’d love to hear what affiliate networks in particular feel about this; if you know anyone, feel free to redirect them to this post so that we could spark off a debate

Again (it’s better I repeat myself ) I do not do this anymore and do not recommend it to newbies unless you have been told by your affiliate networks that this is allowed. If you do come across one or two (some of the bigger pay per install programs allow types of blackhat marketing) go wild, as it is very, very easy to make some short, investment-less income from this.

Let me know what you think!

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Day one of producing rock solid content begins.

As a few of you guys know, I started out this whole internet thing article writing - grossly underpaid, not much fun and very few clients… although I don’t care jobs these days as I have other things keeping me busy, I still make a decent bit per month outsourcing. A lot of people do run freelancing services such as writing, designing, coding etc and these tips will help you make more money. The best thing about freelancing is that it doesn’t cost you a cent to get started out; all you need is a computer and you’re set. If you do freelance, these tips will make you money.

What can you, the freelancer do to make more money?

Offer discounts. Creating a sense of urgency is great for driving sales, and if people know that tomorrow your price may be different, they’ll order today. You offering a lower price than you normally do to enter the market can get you your first few clients and you’ll find that some of them stick around even if you raise your prices if they like your work.

Offer bonuses. If you’ve ever been to a grocery store, you’ll have noticed that prices tend to decrease when working in bulk; you should use the same principles to get more business. With article writing, for example - offer an eleventh article free with an order of ten or more; offer a 10% discount if people order in bulk - you get the idea.

Don’t always look for the instant income. People tend to look for instant money and not wait through a spell of little activity or do note promote themselves enough because they think that they’d be better off sticking to their current regime.

A great example of not always looking for instant income is Unique Blog Designs, who contacted a few big bloggers and offered to create Wordpress designs for them free… securing a life long footer link, a huge amount of gratitude and a chunk of business. This may not work so well for writing, but for things like design and code - if you see something you think will be the next big thing, or see something already pretty decent, offer your services free in exchange for some exposure. If any brilliant Wordpress designer wants to design me a theme free for some exposure, let me know. Opportunities continually present themselves, and when you see a good one you should definitely take it.

Have samples. You need samples to show people… would you hire someone offline if you didn’t know who they were? Well, not having samples is akin to the same - if you don’t have proof of what you can do, how do people know you’re good enough?

You don’t have to have exact samples, but general ones would be great; if you’re a writer, write up some articles on various topics (you could always use them for your niche websites!); if you’re a designer, create some mockups. You get the idea.

Be easy to deal with. I hate dealing with freelancers - quite often you’ll fine that they’re a pain to work with (myself included ), don’t follow deadlines, are difficult to contact… you get the idea. If you make yourself easy to contact and constantly update your clients on how things are going, you’ll get a lot more business through word of mouth, referrals etc.

Of course, don’t let clients run your life - you do need free time, and if you are busy make it known.

Take some payment upfront. It is easy to get burned online… make sure you take some form of payment up front (usually 50% is a good number, or less for large projects) to have a guarantee of some sort. Taking the money up front not just makes sure that you’re more safe than before, but also makes sure that you’ll work harder - once you have some kind of money in hand, it’s harder to slack off.

Simple tips, but ones that will hopefully help; the idea for the post came from one of the suggestions over here. Over the month I’ll be covering topics suggested from that post as it is what you guys want to hear about, so if you want to know more about something specific feel free to comment on it. Good luck!

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I asked a few days what people wanted to see on here… quite a few mentioned ways to make money online, ways which required little to no investment. One of the biggest fields online is affiliate marketing, and I’m going to run a little case study… only if you guys want, that is.

I’ve been getting more and more into affiliate marketing ever since getting a credit card and starting to build my own list… it’s fun, to say the least. I know a lot of other people want to get started, but the misconception most people have is that you need to spend lots of money to get started, something which is quite far from the truth.

One of the biggest things newbies buy into at the beginning is doing PPC (such as Adwords) and pointing it at a landing page, or even direct linking for that matter… for me, if you have not done affiliate marketing before, starting out with PPC is akin to jumping off the top floor of a tall building without a parachute. Most people starting out know nothing about quality score, bid prices etc and it is very easy to fritter away hundreds of dollars without any return on investment starting out.

You do not have to spend anything other than a domain name and some cheap hosting starting out affiliate marketing. How? By doing article marketing. Personally, I haven’t done a lot of article marketing till now… yes, I’ve written a few, but nothing large scale. I will start, and provide you guys results based on a case study should you wish. Basically learn from my mistakes and whatnot.

I’ll post up everything on here… from choosing a product and niche to promote to how to write articles that people like to read. I have never done something like this before, so having the few hundred that read this blog as a motivator should be enough to get me started. I may fail spectacularly, but if so… I’ll be learning what not to do and you guys can learn from that too.

You see, all article marketing needs is domain, hosting and your time. Considering you can get the first two for under $10, and it takes you less than an hour a day to write an article, the only reason a lot of you (and me) aren’t doing it is because you are lazy. I’ve decided not to be lazy anymore… how about you?

I am doing this for you guys… so I will only do this if there is enough interest. If 15 unique people show they are interested by commenting on this post, I will start tomorrow; if not, no worries.

So let’s get cracking, eh?

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