Get Paid for Your Art

Revenue sharing has come to the world of computer graphics. CGShare is offering to pay professional and amateur artists who join its community and upload their images, animations, or 3D models.

Another excellent reason for joining the CGShare community is that, even if you aren't an artist, is that everything uploaded by those with the talent is free.


If you're like me, you're always on the lookout for collections of free images for your websites, so if this community grows, it could become an excellent resource. And possibly a nice source of additional income for the artists who share their creations .

Don't Risk Your Adsense Account

Click attacks can cost you your Adsense account. That's what Brian Thibault found out when he discovered that he'd been banned from Adsense after an unexplained spike in traffic (and clicks on his Adsense links, presumably) to one of his websites. From his own description of events, it doesn't sound like he handled his appeal very well, but regardless, the point is that Google can, and sometimes will, close your Adsense account if they find anything going on with your account that they consider suspicious.

And based on Brian's case, it doesn't necessarily require that you're the one doing anything wrong.

This is something that should be of concern to everybody with an Adsense account, but I think it could be an issue in particular with people who are involved in any sort of incentivized traffic. Whether it's traffic exchanges, or purchased traffic, webmasters need to keep in mind that a sudden spike in traffic could result in a spike in clicks. Particularly if your visitors think clicking your Adsense links is likely to benefit them -- either through a sort of "you scratch my back" mentality with traffic exchanges, or because of their belief that if they click your Adsense, you'll buy more ads from PTR sites.

Another thing to keep in mind is that Google is not looking favourably on incentivized traffic at sites with Adsense ads.

Make Money at Amazon Mechanical Turk

Anybody looking for something different in terms of online earning, or if you'd just like to see what kind of "work" gets posted at Amazon's Mechanical Turk ought to drop by and have a look around.

I was pretty active when it first came out, then it seemed every time I checked in, there were few if any HITS (individual "work" units) available. But I got an email from the the other day that reminded me to have a look, and there were heaps of different assignments available.

Most of the HITs pay between 2 and 10 cents each, and take anywhere from a few seconds to 5 or 10 minutes to finish. Some recent HITs I did included viewing blogs and providing keywords to describe them, and identifying road signs in photos. Some of it's fun at first, but a lot of it gets tedious pretty fast. But if you've got some time to kill, and want to kill it while making a bit of pocket change, the Mechanical Turk isn't a bad way to do it.

You can have your earnings transferred to your U.S. bank account, or to your Amazon.com gift certificate account. So far I've transferred about $20 to my Amazon account thanks to the Mechanical Turk

Affiliate Marketing Isn't the Same as Selling

Sapphire has a great post at her Affiliate Marketing Journal. Not only does she do an awesome job of explaining just why so many would-be affiliate marketers (like me!) have making enough sales to justify the effort. And even better, she explains some of the changes she's making to try to improve her sales.

I have to remind myself you don’t really need to sell your visitors something from your pages. You can’t, really, because even if you do, that click is going to take them to the merchant, who can totally un-sell them if they don’t like what they read there. My job, as an affiliate merchant, is to get people to the store, so the store can sell them.

That means I need to pick stores I can imagine buying stuff from. They need to give details, not hide the shipping and taxes info, have clear and reasonable return policies. They need to have good photos of items. They need to have a site that loads before tomorrow. They need to look like someone I’d give my credit card info to.

These are, in my opinion, two of them most important things to remember in affiliate marketing. Market companies with sites that you yourself would buy from. Then let them do the selling, while you focus on your job of engaging and connecting with your readers.

Mike's Money Making Mission

A few weeks ago I discovered Mike Perry's blog, Mike's Money Making Mission, and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. Mike's mission is to make money online, using free blogs and without investing any money. And he's taking his readers along for the ride, telling them exactly what he's doing, and whether it's working for him or not. He even includes a Weekly Report, with a breakdown of some of his site stats, as well as his earnings. Sweet!

Digging through the archives, I found out that he's gone from making 84 cents in his first week (back in September 2006), to averaging over $50 a week for the last month or so. That's an excellent result, especially when you remember that he's doing all this with $0 investment. Zilch. He's not paying for hosting. Or How to Become an Adsense Zillionaire! e-books. Or special software. And he's been at it for less than 6 months.

If you're interested in trying to launch a similar mission, you'll find lots of help if you go back to the first post and read Mike's blog all the way through to his most recent posts. And I'd especially recommend that you read his post from just before Xmas last year, titled How I Should've Started My Money Making Mission. It's a great post that looks back at what he did, and then talks about what he should've done. Learning from experience is such a crucial part of success, and I think it's awesome that not only has Mike learned from his own mistakes, but he takes the time to point them out and help his readers avoid them.

More Free WordPress Themes

If you can't find a free WordPress theme that you like at WordPressTheme.com, the WordPress ThemeViewer, or Alex King's Wordpress Theme Browser, you might want to check out 83 Beautiful WordPress Themes You (Probably) Haven't Seen, discovered, selected, and presented by Smashing Magazine.

101 Ways to Make Money Online

Experienced People, a UK site that focuses on business opportunities (some legit, some not), has a big list of 101 Ways to Make Money Online that's worth taking a look at.

Some of them are funny, like Number 3 -- Make Money Online by Telling People How to Make Money Online. As they point out, it doesn't really matter if you know what you're talking about or not. There's one born every minute, and some of them will cough up the cash to pay for whatever snake-oil you're selling. A quick look around the net shows that plenty of people have taken this route before.

Some of them are repetitive variations on a theme, like Numbers 5 through 18, which are all based on buying and selling domain names. But again, based on the number of people doing this, I think it's clear that there is money to be made doing it.

And some of them are about creating real online businesses, like Number 22, which is about bidding for freelance contracts at sites like Guru and elance. If you've got skills in writing, programming, design, business consulting, or similar, these sites can be a good way to start building your online reputation and getting some initial clients. Or Numbers 24, 39, and 50, that involve creating and selling website or blog templates, logos, icon sets, MySpace backgrounds and icons, etc.

Number 35 covers blogging about subjects in which you have some expertise, and Number 36 covers blogging about what your cat had for breakfast. It's possible to make money doing either, but I recommend 35. But that's only because I don't care what your cat had for breakfast.

There are also online earning opportunities like writing an ebook (#47), affiliate marketing (#52), running your own porn site (#56), doing paid surveys (#27), mystery shopping (#58), becoming a hosting reseller (#79), selling on eBay (#85), and of course Adsense (#100).

Some of them are risky, and some are highly unethical. And some of them are just insane, but definitely good for a laugh. But there are some good ideas in there amongst them, often with links to useful sites to help you learn more.

So if you're interested in making money online and you're not sure where to start, read all my archived posts. And then when you're finished, go read 101 Ways to Make Money Online.

Disclaimer: This post is an example of a 102nd way to make money online -- Write Blog Posts Sponsored by Advertisers Through PayPerPost.com.

Search and Win at SearchChips

SearchChips is another search engine, like Blingo, that gives members a chance to win prizes for searching. But it also works like a rewards site, letting your earn chips for doing things like making purchases, searching, getting other people to sign up, completing offers, etc.

Instant prizes include Amazon and Fandango gift certificates, iPods, PSPs, etc. and the prizes available in exchange for chips include iPods, a digital camera, or a PSP.

So the prizes are pretty cool, but they wouldn't be worth it if you had to spend all day wasting your time (and possibly involving yourself in a click fraud scam) doing search after search after search at some lame PPC search engine. SearchChips is powered by Ask.com, and delivers results that help you find what you're looking for.

I've also created a search plugin for Firefox if you'd like to add it to your search bar. Just download the script file and the graphic file, add them to the searchplugins folder for your Firefox profile, and you'll be ready to start earning chips as soon as you restart Firefox.

Payments for January 2007

January is the big holiday month here in Australia, and we had a very enjoyable, lazy, relaxing month, we still managed to make the occasional sale on eBay as well.

eBay $94.21
Total $94.21

Yearly Total $94.21

Sooooooo close to $100 profit for the month, but the eBay fees pushed us back further than I'd planned. Still, that's not a bad profit for $284 in sales.

Our margins are still good because we've got a reasonably popular product and no real competition. But we're still pretty much a one-trick pony. All the eggs in one basket. And that ain't good.

When we unexpectedly ran out of stock on one item and found out our overseas supplier was also out of stock until a manufacturing problem was sorted out, our vulnerability became extremely obvious. We're looking to expand our product range so we can reduce that vulnerability.

No Adsense If You Get Incentivized Traffic

A good reminder from Mike, at Mike's Money Making Mission, about Google's Adsense policy regarding incentivized traffic. He got a friendly reminder notice from them because of some invalid clicks that they believe were connected to incentivized traffic to his site.

The bottom line is, if any of your traffic comes from paid to read sites, traffic exchanges, or anything else like that, it's probably in your best interest to remove your Adsense code.

When Harry Met Sally - (recut)

Came across a link to this (at BoingBoing, I think) and thought it was awesome.

I haven't really gotten into the whole YouTube thing that much, but I think the people making and uploading these kinds of things definitely deserve to be rewarded via a bit of revenue-sharing.

Will Microsoft Launch an Alternative to Paypal?

From CNNMoney.com:

Microsoft...is developing on an online payment system that will be cheaper than credit card transactions, making it possible for companies to charge small fees for Web-based content and services they now offer for free.

Microsoft's move into Internet payments could threaten credit card companies' online profits. Gates described a system that would undercut credit card fees, making it profitable for an online newspaper to charge small fees for individual articles, for example.

"If you want to charge somebody $0.10 or $1 a month, that will just be a click...you won't have to manage some funny thing or pay some big credit charge, where half of it goes to the clearing," Gates said.

Sounds interesting. I wonder if it's only meant to be a sort of micro-payments system for content publishers, or if it'll be an online payment service similar to Paypal? I mean, it'll be cool if I can create "premium" blog posts and charge people 5 cents to gain access to them, but it'll be even better if I can save up all those nickels and use them to pay my hosting bill. Or even use my MSPAY (or whatever they want to call it) debit card to buy writing supplies.

Work From Home: Get Paid to Launder Counterfeit Money

From GoogleWatch, via TechDirt, is another excellent example showing why it's important for people looking for online earning opportunities to be careful, and to use a bit of common sense.

The report involves an international work-from-home scam that was busted by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement division of the Office of Homeland Security.

The GoogleWatch article goes into a fair amount of detail, but the gist of it is one person gets paid to receive FedEx packages containing counterfeit AmEx Traveller's Checks and USPS Money Orders, and send them to other various addresses provided by the scammer. The packages may get passed around like this a number of times (making the whole operation more difficult to track) until eventually, somebody is instructed to cash in the traveller's checks or money orders, keep 10% as their payment, and send the rest of the money on, until it eventually winds up in the hands of the scammer.

As the TechDirt article points out, you'd think the people involved would realise that getting paid to move money around had to be connected to some sort of scam or other shady activity, but if so, they don't seem to care. As long as they get paid.

Sound familiar?