Since Twitter is a super hot hot hot microblogging service, it’s no doubt that you can make more money from it than making money from a conventional blog. Now, JohnChow.com has shown you how you can register for a Sponsored Tweets (SponsoredTweets.com) account and what the basic requirements that you need to get advertisers to buy sponsored Tweets from you and let you make more money from the advertisers.

Sponsored Tweets in short is almost like PayPerPost or ReviewMe in the past which Advertisers paid Bloggers to write sponsored blog posts or reviews. Instead of Blog Post, Sponsored Tweets allows Advertisers to sponsor you to write micro-blog messages. Amazingly, a sponsored Tweeter can make around $300 to $7,500 an hour, which is really huge huge amount of money. And of course, you will need to meet a number of requirements in order to get more advertisers to buy Tweets from you. The basic things are lots of followers, and high influentiality, I hereby summarize the 10 points listed on JohnChow.com, which you need to get ready to be a successful Twitter money maker.

1. Experience, with a Twitter account at least 120 days old You must have an account at least 120 days old as advertisers will not order Tweets from accounts younger than that.

2. Have a complete Twitter profile With complete info on your Twitter profile telling who you’re. Best you have your photos uploaded.

3. Add Sponsored Tweets to your advertise page Have an advertise page and tells the advertisers that you accept Sponsored Tweets.

4. Show Tweets click stat Publish your tweet click stat, so advertisers know that your followers click on your Tweets. Hootsuite.com is the online tool allows you to measure Tweet clicks

5. Clickwatch Clickwatch is a feature in the Sponsored Tweets that allows advertisers to track the performance of Tweeters.

6. Monitor competition You have to monitor if your paid Tweet price is too high or too low and adjust accordingly.

7. Good followers to friends ratio. You must have a high Ratio number of followers to the people you follow. The higher number shows you have followers who’re simply wanna listen to you. (Some can use bots to follow others and in return to get back with their followings.)

8. Klout scoreSign up for Klout to measure Klout score, which is the measurement of how influential you’re in the Twittersphere.

9. Build real influence – You must work on your Twitter account, don’t simply use bot to follow and unfollow a big list. It must be genuine followers then only it’s worth for Advertisers to buy Tweets from you.

10. Apply for celebrity status Sponsored Tweets show the big stars or celebrities first when advertisers search for tweeters to advertise with!

Read more:10 tips to make more money from Sponsored Tweets

There are a number of reasons that why you wanna get your blog with more search engine traffic

1. Survey has shown that most visitors come from search engines have higher tendency to buy or commit a sale or service on your blog.

2. If your blog carries some advertisements such as Google Adsense and Chitika Premium, visitors come from search engines will also tend to click more on the ads on your blog than what the returned visitors, frequent readers or those coming from social networking sites will do.

3. If you tend to acquire new customers or their email addresses (which can then use as follow-up and send them your promotions and products.) Visitors come from search engines also have higher tendency to commit the registration and giving you their emails. As visitors search on search engines and then come to your blog are carrying a hope. And if your blog offers something such as newsletter that can provide what they want, of course they will register their emails.

Then, How To Get More Search Engine Visitors/Traffic?

Basically, there are simply only two ways to get more search engine visitors: 1) You pay search engine advertisement network, such as Google Adwords, which displays your ads at the right hand side of the Google searched results. And you pay at a per click cost, when someone clicks on the ads. Please note popular keywords could easily burn you $20 per click, if you wanna have hundred clicks per day that may convert only 10-20% (or even lower) into sales, it’ll burn your pocket of at least $2,000 per day.

2) Therefore, in order to get more visitors from search engines, you have to work on the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for your blog, and once you’ve done so, you must also continue to add more quality contents yo your blog. SEO ready is the first essential thing to get your blog more friendly, easily and quickly indexable by the search engines. If you’re on a Wordpress blog, you just need the two Wordpress plugins below and a simple setting that will get your blog more SEO ready.

The two Wordpress plugins are

1. All-In-One SEO pack – The All-in-1 seo pack can be downloaded here, which is a plugin that adds the appropriate page title (within the pair), meta tag description and keywords (i.e and respectively) that are loved by search engines including Google, Yahoo, Bing (MSN) and Ask.com etc.

2. Google XML SiteMap – The Google XML Sitemap plugin for Wordpress can be downloaded here, it lets your blog generate a new sitemap in XML format and also notifies the search engines’ crawlers for the pick-up of this new sitemap, whenever a new content is updated or added to your blog. If you wanna get indexed by Google as soon as possible, get this Google XML SiteMap plugin for your blog, and register for an account in Google Webmaster Tools, and submit your sitemap there. Your blog shall appear in Google index in a few days’ time. You can verify by typing site:yoursite.com in Google search box.

The one setting

The one setting that you need is to get the permanent URL of your blog post to be search-engine friendly. This can easily be done by going to your Blog’s Setting -> Permalinks -> Custom Settings – use custom, and lets the URL of your blog post is made up by the post title and a simple structure. e.g. /articles/%postname%/. Read more about it: SEO ready plugins for Wordpress blog

After you’ve got these three basic things done for your blog, you must then continue to add in quality contents to your blog then you will have more blog posts or pages indexed by the search engines, which will then bring you more you more traffic.

If you’ve tapped on the way of how to make money online and you’ve been making quite a lucrative income from the Internet, then you should have been safe from getting all the shit such as hectic lifestyle which you’re always on the run and traveling and the risk of getting infected with H1N1 Influenza A.

As bringing in a lucrative stream of income from Internet reduces the need to interact with people face to face and lower chance of getting infected with H1N1 virus. Yeah, you can stay at home if it isn’t too boring for you, what you need is a computer and a high-speed broadband connection.

Occasionally when you get little bored, you can go to StarBucks or CoffeeBean cafes to continue your work. The next topic of SmartBorneo here will cover how you can create a few or more niche blogs and how to make each of them to make at least USD $1,000 per month for you. Imagine if you have ten of these niche blogs or online stores and each makes about USD $1,000 a month for you, then you will get about USD $10,000 per month. This is either equivalent or much more than your current high-paying job which needs you to travel a lot; getting exposed to risk of getting infected with H1N1 and being away from your loved ones always.

Please note: Making money online is not instant, you’ve gotta be disciplined and strive through it over a couple of months and years, and you need patience and passion. But you can see a lucrative stream of income if you’ve managed through it. It guarantees the return is much better than your current job that always brings you hectic lifestyles. Stay tuned, will gradually feed you the ways on how to achieve it.

Now big thank you to JenSense, who has contacted Google and she’s got the answer for you, when you’re in the dilemma whether to use 3rd party software to track your AdSense clicks or performance. The answer is NO NO NO and Google DOES NOT recommend that you use 3rd party software to track clicks of adsense. Below is what the recommended methods to protect your AdSense from invalid clicks.

We understand that it’s not always possible to control the behavior of your users, but you can be proactive about monitoring your traffic, and you can take steps to ensure that your site provides a helpful and safe environment for users and advertisers. Here are some top tips for keeping your account in good standing (which you may have seen before): https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=23921

Expanding on the tip “Be aware of how your site is promoted.”, we’d like to remind you that, should you purchase traffic to promote your site, you do so at your own risk. There are many site promotion services out there that appear to be legitimate PPC advertising companies or search engines, but actually may be sending artificial traffic to your site for their own gain. (For legal reasons, we’re not allowed to disclose the names of such services.)To combat this, we highly recommend that you use channels to segment your traffic by source (e.g. a channel for your site’s Google AdWords traffic only). If one channel’s reports look particularly suspicious, you may want to consider unsubscribing from that traffic service. We also recommend using Analytics to slice and dice your traffic reports further to ensure that you’re receiving clicks from users who are genuinely interested in your ads.

Though we encourage you to be proactive about monitoring your site and ad traffic, we highly discourage the use of click tracking via third-party software or custom ad implementations. These methods may: inadvertently disclose sensitive information about you or your site to a third-party
disrupt Google’s ad delivery or click logging in a way that violates our Terms and Conditions
In addition, click tracking may not provide you with significantly more information than you can already find in your AdSense or Analytics reports. We believe that the creative use of channels can help you gain detailed insights into your account.

If you see unusual activity on your account, feel free to submit this form to let us know: https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/request.py?contact=invalid_clicks_contact Please note that we will only respond if we find a significant issue with your account.

Invalid clicks can come from many sources, as described at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=16737. While we’re unable to go into the details of our monitoring system, you should know that invalid clicks don’t always mean clicking on your own ads or using click bots. Our Ad Traffic Quality Team looks for numerous types of activity that may inflate advertiser costs, then takes the necessary actions to protect our advertisers.

That said, we still find that many publishers are clicking on their own ads, possibly because they feel that Google is disregarding those clicks. Keep in mind that even though we filter the revenue from an invalid click, we don’t ignore it completely. If we detect significant invalid activity on your AdSense ads, we may take action on your account to protect our advertisers from inflated costs. Here are some examples of situations in which clicking your own ads is prohibited:

Clicking out of interest in the ad content

Clicking to see an ad’s destination URL, such as for filtering purposes (we recommend trying the AdSense Preview Tool, available at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=10005)

Clicking to ensure that Google is properly registering clicks on your ads (we log all ad clicks, but it can sometimes take up to 24 hours before your reports are finalized)

Clicking to test your website

For general invalid click questions, you can find more information at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=8426

For questions about AdSense accounts disabled for invalid clicks, you can find more information at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=57153

source: jensense

So I’ve decided to change all the high traffic blog posts to have the 336×280 large rectangle on top of each blog post and also at the bottom of each blog post. And I have also taken Google’s advice, having these ad units appearing at the top center and the bottom center of the blog posts. Which should be more or less in the positions suggested by the Adsense heat map. Look at the top center of the primary content, where it is red.

I was approached as well with my gadget blog which was making pretty good income last year from AdSense. And of course, the first few questions to ask is that whether Ads such as Chitika Premium and Kontera will conflict with AdSense’s TOS. And the answers are of course they’re not, and according to AdSense’s TOS, they are NOT either, so you’re safe to run those ads together with AdSense to increase the very little income. And those Ads players will suggest you to run those ads with your existing AdSense to increase your income.

Such as Chitika Premium, they’ve even run a few contests before for who have a website or a blog that blends the best for AdSense and Chitika Premium together.

My point is here if you’ve been running AdSense for quite some times, and AdSense has been making pretty much for you, it’s best NOT to run those ads such as Chitika Premium and Kontera, although they’re quite tempting. As after running them for a couple of months, you’ll have noticed those ads will bring in pretty low income for your blog.

I ran Chitika Premium for my gadget blog that was targeted for US search engine traffic. But the Ads could bring in about only more or less than 10% of my daily AdSense income.

I got about an average of 30-40 clicks from Chitika Premium daily, I had it placed under my AdSense ads, as I still favored AdSense as it was the most making for me. I couldn’t afford to sacrifice AdSense. But I’ve found after a couple of months that my AdSense ads dropped even though my traffic has increased for almost 70% compared to last year’s traffic, but my CTR of AdSense has dropped almost 50%.

It’s obvious that Chitika Premium and my Kontera have stolen some clicks away from my AdSense. Actually this is fine for clicks on ads on your website or blog. But the main problem is Chitika Premium and Kontera have very much lower CPC (Cost Per Click) compared to AdSense.

If Chitika Premium has taken away an average of 40 clicks+ average a day from my AdSense, and they could only produce about 10% and very low CPC, which quite a number of them less than $0.10 per click, why NOT take a away these low-performing ads and let those 40+ clicks to go to AdSense, as AdSense could actually bring in much higher CPC with those 40+ clicks a day. And this is similar to Kontera. So, I’ve done that for my gadget blog, and the AdSense shows improved CTR and my monthly income is getting more and more.

So the best is NOT to run other ads together with your AdSense on your blog, although they sound tempting or may bring in extra little income, but they’re definitely NOT worth to run as they will affect your AdSense’s CTR!!! Drop those ads to favor only AdSense from today! Google has always been the best!

1. Shall I start with a self-hosted blog or (publically) hosted blog? – Okay if this is the first question in mind, you may have little knowledge about what self-hosted and publically-hosted blog are all about. Self-hosted blog means you sign-up or buy a hosting space for your blog, and you register your own domain for it. For example, you will have your blog URL as www.myfirstblog.com. A publically hosted blog is provided by blogging services, such as Google Blogspot (Blogger) or Wordpress.com, which you can sign up for a free account and start blogging there. The benefits of each will be detailed in the next two questions.

2. What is the benefit of a self-hosted blog? – Of course, if the little money that may cost about a few hundred in RM a year is not an issue for you, then you shall consider the self-hosted blog. Self-hosted blog gives you the flexibility of having your own domain, hosting space and the most important is you can easily access to any webpages, which allows you to highly customize your own web templates for future expansion. For example, if you intend to bring your blog to a stage which it’s able to start making money online, you shall consider to start with a self-hosted blog if the initial startup little investment and your own technical know-how is not an issue. As self-hosted blog gives you freedom of customizing your own blog template, which you can easily add in advertisements for making money online.

3. What is the benefit of a hosted blog? – Of course, it’s free, and you can start anytime without dealing with too much technical hassle. But of course, you’ll start with a sub-domain for a free account e.g ketyung.blogspot.com, myfirstblog.wordpress.com etc instead of on your own domain. But these days, services like Blogger and Wordpress.com also offer your own domain by charging you a fee. As mentioned a hosted blog, may give you some inflexibility for customizing your blog templates for adding advertisement or some other necessary expansions.

4. What blogging platform or software shall I use for my own self-hosted blog ? – Of course , the answer will be Wordpress, which can be downloaded from Wordpress.org. Why Wordpress? As it’s free and open source! Of course, if you have little budget then you could some others like MovableType etc. For Wordpress, the little downside is since it’s opensource, you’ll need to have some technical knowledge of handling PHP and MySQL database, and you’ll have to keep yourself following it for an update version, since it’s one of the most hackable software due to its openness and freely to use.

5. Where to find a good hosting for my blog? – Okay, if you decided to have a self-hosted blog, then you’ll surely need to find a hosting space for your blog. Nowadays, you can find shared hosting as low as USD $8 per month or about USD $100 a year, which is equivalent to RM350 per year. So, it’s just about RM30 a month which is very much cheaper than renting a shop locally to start selling goods.

So, the question is where to find a good hosting? Okay, I’ll definitely tell you to maintain the cost as low as possible, if your main point is to probably make some money online a couple of months later. For a start, I recommend to go for a shared hosting. Please do NOT be misled by others that you’d need a dedicated hosting which would cost you more than USD $150 a month. If you expect a pretty low traffic of less than 3,000 unique visitors a day for the initial few years, then a shared hosting shall do well. And I strongly recommend BlueHost.com. I’ve used Bluehost.com for a couple of years, they offer only shared hosting that costs only about USD$107 per year (if you sign up only for a year and pay yearly) and costs less about USD $90+ a year if you sign up for more than a year.

With only about $100 a year, you’ll get 300GB space, with MySQL databases, unlimited bandwidth and transfer, which is definitely suitable for a Wordpress-powered self-hosted blog. My Gadget Blog is being hosted on Bluehost.com for years, and I’m getting a unique daily visitor of 3,000+ and total pageview of 120,000 per month, has NO problem at all hosted on Bluehost.com. But of course, occasionally there are some little down times with the MySQL db with a site that has more than 3,000 daily unique visitors, but Bluehost provides live chat support, and once reported, it shall then be solved within minutes.

6. How do I get my blog on Google ? – After all the setup and you’ve got your blog up and running, then of course, you shall start writing your interesting blog post. And you want more traffic, visitors and visibility of your blog. Surely, you’ve heard of others saying that building organic traffic for your blog, or at least when people search on Google, it shall come out. In order to get on Google, you’ll have a couple of things that you need to do.

Google judges a website or blog visibility on the Google search engine by the pagerank of the website or the blog. But I won’t go into very detailed what the pagerank is, since you’re just a newbie, maybe the subsequent posts on SmartBorneo will cover more details about this. In short, Google values a website or a blog by looking at how many incoming links from other websites or blogs to your website or blog. If a website or blog has more incoming links, it shall be given a higher value or higher pagerank, which shall reflect a higher chance to appear on Google when others search for some particular keywords. But these days, building incoming links is not an easy task, which definitely deserves a dedicated blog post on SmartBorneo here to explain more about it later.

For a quick start to get incoming links, if you’re a good writer, you shall consider submitting various articles which have the hyperlink of your blog URL embedded in them, to those article directories. Or you shall link to other blogs, make friends with them, getting them to link back to you, if you continuously produce quality articles/blog posts. Yes, the basic of increasing visibility of your blog is you continuously write good and interesting blog posts for your blog, which shall attract more people to link to you. And of course, there will be some other elements, that you need to fine tune your Blogging software platform e.g Wordpress, mentioned above, to increase the advantages over some keyword searches on major search engines. But this topic shall be considered to be covered in more detailed in some other blog posts dedicated for Wordpress at SmartBorneo here.

Hope you enjoy this post, and get some useful tips to start blogging!

Bloggers shall be considered in making long-term income, or maybe one day you can drive your blog into some semi-passive incomes. Bloggers continuously write great contents for their blogs. Some write a couple of blog posts a day. But it really takes time for a blog to be successful, making lucrative or sufficient income to let a blogger to quit his or her job and become a full-time blogger.

It all depends how much you need that you can survive to be a full-time blogger. If you’re single, and you don’t have a family which you need to sustain and bear all the costs, then it shall be around USD$1.5K to USD$2K a month is enough to stay as a fulltime blogger. And it also depends where you stay. If you stayed at those expensive areas that you need more than that.

One thing you need to know it’s not easy to become a full-time blogger these days. Some blogs may take a few years to start making an okay income but it might not be sufficient to quit your day job or be a full-time blogger. And you need lots of traffic these days to make a good income from blog. I’ve blogged for two years on my tech and gadgets blog, only now I see about USD$2K per month from total ads income (I was only making a mere few hundred dollars from my gadget blog about a year ago) . But I haven’t quit my day time job yet. In fact, I don’t have to, as I’m also one of the bosses of my day-time job. It’s a company that I partner with a few for developing software applications. It’s quite a good business although some times you have to face with great pressure of facing fuzzy people for unreasonable requirements for the software they want.

So in short, bloggers shall be continuously writing good content, hoping to gain more organic traffic, and through out many years that you’ve blogged, you blog shall come to a stage that is able to generate a more or less consistent income for every month. And your continuous effort is to bring your blog to a further stage, hoping to make it to bring more incomes as more contents that you’re adding into it, shall mean more traffic.

How about an Internet marketer? Internet marketers don’t really blog. They use various tools such as email marketing, writing landing pages, driving sales lead, and they also make use of blogs to promote certain products. But they will NOT continuously update or write new contents for their blogs. As after they’ve achieved what they want, lets say having managed to create sales lead using their blogs, they may just leave the blogs aside without further updating anymore.

In short, Internet marketer doesn’t have to depend on huge traffic, maybe just a few hundred of them as long as they managed to create sales lead, such as they blast out emails, using pop-up ads, text link ads etc, which will usually be considered as spammers by bloggers.

But if you wanna be a fulltime blogger in short period of time, you may wanna combine Internet marketing skills into your blogging, i.e. promoting your blogs as you promote products to generate sales lead over the Internet. Use other possible means to drive traffic to your blogs. Or you can even write blog posts about products, become the affiliates of certain online stores, write blog posts for them, and drive traffic to these blog posts, direct the readers to what you want, lets say convert a blog post read by readers into sales. Doing so, you don’t only make money from ads, you also make money from affiliate sales as well as gaining more readers sooner than only writing contents for it. Eventually, you’ll become full-time blogger making 6 figure income a year. Post By SmartBorneo, inspired by Problogger

The MFA sites are those sites or blogs that are fully loaded with AdSense Ads instead of contents. The owners of these MFA sites will advertise on Google Adwords to look for sites to place their lower-cost ads and in exchange they hope to gain much higher return ads on their sites.

For example, they get on AdWords and place an ad on your site with very low CPC, lets say less than $0.10. And when a user clicks on these ads on your site, the user will then be directed to the MFA sites which carry much higher CPC ads. And the MFA sites make much more money than you do.

And some more some of these MFA sites are having low CTR (Click Thru Rate) as they do not show ads that are so relevant to your site’s contents. Therefore users tend to click less on those ads on your site.

In order to gain much higher CTR and also CPC to maximize your AdSense income, you can make use of the AdSense competitive ad filter in your AdSense account. Login into your AdSense account, and on AdSense Setup menu, you’ll then find the Competitive Ad Filter. And there is a text box which allows you to enter up to 200 sites that you wanna filter out.

Of course, it’ll be hard for you to manually trace those low CPC or CTR or MFA ads. But, thanks to AdsBlackList.com, which it scans your site and generates a list of 200 sites to let you add into your competitive ad filter.

To generate the list, you must first sign up for an account with AdsBlackList.com. After that, sign into your account. But you may find it’s hard to get started as the menu of the AdsBlackList.com seems to be not-so understandable to most users. But I give you an easy steps here where to get your 200 sites.

Just click on the side menu, “My Account”, you’ll find “Add New Domain” on top, which is not so obviously shown. Click on “Add New Domain”, and key in your website or blog that you wanna have AdsBlackList.com to generate the 200 sites for you. You must provide the site’s URL, title and description. After submitting the site, you;ll then be redirected back to the account main page.

You can then proceed to “Generate Filter List” to generate the 200 sites. Drag and drop the available domains to the box “Keywords from selected domain”. Be sure to click the boxes MFA and low CPC, then click on “submit” to generate a list of 200 sites that provide low CPC/CTR ads on your website. And then copy the 200 sites into your AdSense’s competitive ad filter. It takes a couple of hours for AdSense to take effect. Then wait and see, you shall see some improvements of your CTR or CPC in the next couple of days, and shall be making more money then! By SmartBorneo.com

Please note Chitika Premium is different from Chitika miniMall Ad. It appears only when someone searches on a search engine (Google, Yahoo etc), and from the searched result that leads the searcher to your blog, then only the ad unit appears. If the visitor doesn’t come from search engine, the ad unit will NOT appear. And also Chitika Premium works great if your blog attracts lots of traffic from the United States.

One of my gadget blogs is able to make an average of USD $200 per month from Chitika Premium. The ad unit is placed at the bottom of each blog post, as the top is loaded with AdSense ad unit. As an additional income, although it manages to grab about only 15-16% of the income brought by Adsense on my tech blog, but it should be considered quite good in bringing in some money to a blog.

Remember that I place Chitika Premium Ad unit at the bottom of each blog post, leaving the top for adsense ad unit. If Chitika Premium Ad was placed at the top of each blog, it should be able to make more than $200 per month.

Comparing the CPC, Chitika Premium managed to clock at $0.10-$0.15 per click, which is far behind what Adsense offers. But I’ve heard that you will be able to negotiate with Chitika, if you managed to make USD $200 per month consistently for three months. Since my tech blog takes AdSense as tehe main revenue stream, and Chitika as the secondary stream, I’m quite happy with the current performance.

If for some unknown reasons, you can’t get an AdSense publisher account, you can consider Chitika Premium as the alternative if your blog has good search engine traffic. Use Google Analytics to trace the traffic source of your blog, if you could grab 1,000-2,000 from search engine a day, it shall let you make pretty lucrative income from Chitika Premium. If you haven’t had an account yet, click here to sign up now. By SmartBorneo.com