Million Dollar PortfolioReal Strategies for Making Money Online

Making money online isn’t easy and I am always looking for new ways to make some extra cash which is why I was excited to learn that IZEA CEO Ted Murphy unveiled his newest money making venture, Sponsored Tweets.

Sponsored Tweets is a new Twitter advertising service that allows advertisers the opportunity to leverage Twitter users to hock their wares. The idea is simple. Twitter is one of the fastest growing social networking tools available and big name stars like Ashton Kutcher, Lance Armstrong and others are using it to reach massive audiences keeping them up to date with what they are doing.

Bloggers and everyday tweeters can make money by signing up with Sponsored Tweets and allowing advertisers to use their twitter stream to advertise products and services. You have the option of writing the ad copy yourself or letting the advertiser do it. You can also set your own price.

If you are looking for a new way to generate some ad revenue without clogging up your blog space and you have a decent amount of twitter followers, this may be just the thing you are looking for.

Already, a lot of top name bloggers and celebrities have signed up to use Sponsored Tweets. Names like Neil Patel, John Chow, Holly Madison, Sister Hazel should ring a bell.

You begin by putting in some basic information about your twitter account, setting some keywords, a price and how you want to be notified of new ads pending.

Then you just sit back and wait for the cash to roll in, right? Not exactly.

Your success with this tool is going to depend on several factors. Your twitter followers (the more the better), the content of your tweets (keep in mind this is about networking) and the frequency of your tweets are all going to contribute to your success. In essence, the more followers you have, the more conversations you carry on, the more people you reach, the more you can charge advertisers for leveraging your account.

Is Sponsored Tweets going to change the landscape of twitter advertising and making money using twitter? Maybe. Am I going to be testing it out, definitely. I’ll keep you posted and let you know what kind of success (or failure) I find with this tool.

» Post Ad Purchase:  Banner Ad

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In an ongoing effort to offer publishers the best tools for making money online through advertising sales, Text Link Ads (which is the biggest money maker for this blog) has made some significant changes to their user interface.

Now when you log in you get a breakdown of which sites you are selling ads on are active and what kind of links you are selling, notice the small blue or red icon next to each listing. You can also see how many ads are sold on each of your sites.

They have also made it much easier to find your projected earnings for the month. On the right side at the bottom of the main page is a box that shows your projected earnings.

Text Link Ads really is one of the best ways I have found to make money online. The bottom line is, if you can drive traffic to your site, you can sell advertising the easy way by having someone else do it. Less work means more time for blogging and getting other things done. Sign up Today!

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I want to show you a way to add hundreds or thousands of targeted Twitter followers to your account in just a few days, but before I do that, I thought I would explain why.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is one of the fastest growing social networks today because it is simple, straightforward and it works. Twitter allows you to communicate what you are doing in 140 characters or less. If you are already following me on Twitter then you already know this and I’m preaching to the choir. However, if this is new to you, it’s time to look at what Twitter can do for you and your online business.

I use Twitter to not only get news on topics i’m interested in, but stock trading ideas, marketing and information on making money online and other business related ventures I am involved in.

Just as you want to have multiple streams of income, you need to have multiple avenues of information gathering and dissemination. Although I don’t follow every single one of my own followers, I do follow those ones that I feel contribute to the topics I am interested in or need to keep track of.

Why Do I Need Followers?

Your efforts to make money online are only going to be as successful as the number of people you can reach. You may have discovered the greatest money making opportunity ever but if you can’t tell others about it, you could be losing hundreds or thousands of dollars in revenue.

What you want to do then is get as many people following you as possible. There’s one tool on the market that does this better than any other tool i’ve seen. It’s called Hummingbird and you need to buy it today if you are serious about making money online.

Hummingbird works the same way a human would if they were adding followers in Twitter. You search for followers by keyword or hashtag(#) and then using the tools in the Hummingbird interface, add all those followers.

That’s the first part, but there is more. What will happen is your account will get to a point where you can’t add any more users. You wait one day and then unfollow all those people that haven’t followed you back. Hummingbird knows who you have followed an unfollowed and will prevent you from following the same person you have unfollowed so you won’t seem spammy to the Twitter servers.

When you are able to add more users, usually a day or soe later, you just repeat the same process. It’s not uncommon for someone to be following thousands of others and have thousands of followers.

My goal is to have as many followers as possible so that my marketing efforts have the highest impact with the least amount of effort. Download Hummingbird today, it’s the best tool for the job.

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It’s been a while since I’ve found anything I thought had great potential for making money online. I’m working on one product that I think is going to be huge but it’s not quite ready for prime time. In the meantime, I’ve discovered something that just launched today! It’s called TweetBucks and could make you a lot of money if you use Twitter, Facebook or other social networks.

The basic idea behind TweetBucks is to pay users a commission on clicks through to links or products. You shorten your URL using bit.ly and an affiliate code is automatically inserted into the link if it matches one of the merchants in the TweetBucks database.

So if you post a link to Twitter or Facebook that goes to Amazon.com, Best Buy or any of the other 1000 or so merchants, your affiliate code is automatically added and you earn a commission on the sale. It’s that simple. You can sign up for a free account today.

There’s also a great article about TweetBucks here. ProTwit asked a great question in the article:

Protwit: So what if the link I want to shorten is not part of your list of supported Merchants?
TweetBucks: That’s the best part, you can still make money on every click using our customizable ad-frame!  This optional feature inserts a leaderboard (728×90) ad unit on top of the site you are sharing.  We pay you for every click.  People are earning anywhere from $0.5 to $1 eCPM.

So, if you aren’t on Twitter or Facebook you can still earn money using an ad-frame. The potential for making mone with this is unlimited! It’s much the same as everything online. Drive traffic, convert clicks and make sales and you’ll find success. If aren’t doing so already, follow me on Twitter and keep up with what I am doing.

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I took a walk around the Ad:Tech SF show floor yesterday and checked out some of the exhibitors. One that I was really impressed with was VideoClix. They have a great new product that allows you to embed links in your video regardless of the source of the video. You can track objects within the video like a shirt for example that can also have a link to the actual shirt for sale. Good stuff.

I wasn’t able to attend the second or third days due to a conflict with my work schedule so I missed the two keynot speeches I really wanted to see. I think next year I may just take the time off work so I can fully enjoy what Ad:Tech has to offer. The show floor this year was bigger and had to span two entire floors of Moscone West. If you plan on attending next year, let me know so we can meet up for Lunch or drinks during the show.

Here’s a wrap up video of the first day (This isn’t me, I just found it on YouTube). Enjoy.

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I just got a letter from Google Adsense letting me know their video units are retiring. I have some mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I think Google should be doing whatever they can to streamline their business and keep an eye out for what’s working and what isn’t. On the other hand, video units were my biggest moneymaker when they were clicked on. That being said, I don’t use much of Adsense anymore to begin with because the ads just don’t perform well on my blogs.

For reference, here’s the email:

Hi,

We’re writing to let you know that we’ll be retiring AdSense video units at the end of April. After reviewing this feature, we’ve found that it hasn’t been performing as well as we had hoped, so we’ve decided to focus our efforts on other opportunities to help publishers monetize their sites.

We recommend that you begin removing the video unit code from your pages as soon as possible, to ensure that you can take advantage of the available ad space on your pages. At the end of April, any remaining Leaderboard or Skyscraper video units will begin directing users to YouTube.com, while other video unit sizes will automatically be changed to standard embedded YouTube players. These standard video players will display top YouTube videos, but you won’t generate earnings from them once this change occurs.

If you’d still like to display free video content from YouTube, you can do so through YouTube.com directly: visit any specific video page for the embed code, or sign in to your YouTube account to create a playlist. For more information about embedding YouTube videos, please visit http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=57788. Alternatively, if you have less than three ad units on your page, you may prefer to replace your video unit with a regular ad unit.

Although video units are being retired, other video offerings within AdSense aren’t affected. Video ads may still appear on your pages and AdSense for video is still available for eligible publishers. If you’d like more information about the retiring of video units, please visit our Help Center at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=12182.

Thanks for your support of video units in the past, and we appreciate your patience and cooperation.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Email preferences: You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your AdSense product or account.

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

I think what really wasn’t working here is the format of the video units. The idea was that you could embed YouTube videos into your blogs and people using the player would generate revenue for you when the videos were played. The problem was, none of the sizes of the players are economical in terms of real estate on your blog. They were too big for most spaces and had a clunky interface. Perhaps they are going back to the drawing board to redesign them. We’ll have to wait and see.

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In March, Ad:Tech will once again return to San Francisco. This is the premier advertising and marketing event in Northern California.

Ad:Tech brings together the top advertising programs and producers in one location for you to meet and schmooze with. Last year was extremely successful and this year should be just as good.

Registration is open and the exhibit floor plus all the keynotes are free if you register before March. Ad:Tech SF runs from April 21-23 at the Moscone Convention Center. Register today!

I’ll be there checking out the floor. Let me know if you are going to attend and we can meet face to face.  See you there!

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I just became aware of a new service that will pay you cash for your timeshare. Those of you that own timeshares know who you are and maybe you are kicking yourself for buying it because now you realize you just can’t get out there to enjoy the vacations you thought you were going to be taking.

Maybe you just aren’t interested in keeping the place anymore but haven’t had any luck selling it. Maybe you don’t know what a timeshare really is and are interested in getting more information about them.

If this sounds like you then you should check out Timeshare Resale Marketplace.

Timeshare Resale Marketplace specializes in buying, renting and selling timeshares. A timeshare is basically a condominium that is owned by several people who all get a couple weeks a year to live in the place should they choose to do so.

It is common practice to rent out timeshares in which case the owning party for that time period would recieve compensation. In September of this year, we spent a week in New York (actually Brooklyn) and we rented out a 3 bedroom apartment which was so much nicer than staying in a hotel and so much easier. This is what a timeshare offers you if you are considering renting for a vacation instead of a costly hotel. Timeshares are deeply discounted compared to hotel rates.

Since it can be difficult to find buyers and renters, you might want to have someone handle this process for you and that is exactly what Timeshare Resale Marketplace does.

To find out more information, go to Timeshare Resale Marketplace and fill out a simple form.

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