Fleeing The Social Scene

WPdesigner.com is now for sale at sitepoint for $65,000 and already has a pending ‘buy it now’ offer. I recognize this site as the distributor of the Jello Wala Mello theme I mentioned in my last post.

The reason behind his success is no secret- he designs and distributes free wordpress themes, which helps to bring in traffic and increase his page rank. But this doesn’t mean that anyone who designs and releases wordpress themes will be able to sell their website for $65,000. No. I myself have released a few themes and have gotten absolutely nothing in return accept for the occasional visit or two, and backlinks from a PR0 blog. Yep, after you spend days tweaking a theme to try to make it perfect, you may end up with nothing but frustration.

It takes one hell of a talented designer to get a following that big. WPdesigner has a PR7, and unlike some other theme websites, has cleverly been monetized in a way that doesn’t compete with similar sites. Whereas premium wordpress themes fetch for around $100, WPdesigner.com offers multiple templates for $5 per year. Any new themes they make are made available for download by these subscribers. And judging from their 400 paying themes club members, this marketing tactic works. I didn’t find any themes there that I liked, but obviously other people do and don’t mind paying extra to have access to those themes.

Now, here’s the juicy bit. No one knew how much WPdesigner was earning before the sale, but of course it was disclosed to the public when it was listed at sitepoint. Ladies and gentlemen… WPdesigner, who is a cut above the rest of us trying to earn money online, earns $890/month!

Top executives who work offline earn $8900 per month, but the highest earning people online make $890. It dampens my spirit, it really does.

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The picture I am about to show you will either really motivate you, or make you feel like a failure. Hopefully it’ll be the first. Here is the CJ earnings of fellow blogger Jeremy SchoeMaker, better known as ShoeMoney.

Earning from affiliate programs takes a lot of time, a lot of money, and a lot of testing. You can advertise on one website for a year and not make anything, and you can advertise on another website and have dollars in your account within a week. I tend to stay away from affiliate programs because I don’t like taking big risks. I don’t want to spend $100 in advertising just to be left with no earnings in my CJ account. But it does intrigue me that some people are so successful at it, so I do have the occasional banner or two on my websites.

My earnings from CJ have been nilch, so far. While I was browsing a book about affiliate marketing in a bookshop, I read that the same goes for about 99% of affiliates. The only ones making money from such programs are the super affiliates, and they are the ones who don’t use the standard banners supplied by vendors. They are the ones who find unique ways to advertise, such as sticking leaflets under car’s wipers while a big event is going on. Say, there is a surfing competition happenings at the beach.. these super affiliates hire some guys to place these leaflets on the parked cars, and they mention the surfing competition itself on the leaflets. That’s how they make the big bucks. And that’s something not a lot of people would do.

Now take a look at this screenshot of someone’s Adsense earnings.

They can’t be serious! I spent ONE whole year to make 0.01% of their earnings! To get a cheque like that, you need a high paying niche like insurance and a LOT of traffic.. not to mention a high CTR theme for your website. That, for me, is problematic. One, I HATE boring topics like insurance; two, I have trouble getting traffic to my websites because I don’t like spending money on advertising; and three, I think high CTR templates don’t leave a good impression on your visitors and I wouldn’t want to use one myself. *sigh*

Check out more cheques like this at s.eriously.com Make sure it’s not before your bedtime, or else you won’t get any sleep.

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When and how do you make the jump. I’m not talking from no one blogger to big time blogger. I’m talking a bit more businessey than that. (yes i know it’s not really a word but run with me here…)

In a world of YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr, I’m willing to bet we’re better than halfway past web 2.0 and AJAX is going stale. Zuckerberg is probably hanging out with MySpace Tom, and they are both living comfortably off their “next biggest thing.” I’m not saying we’ve got a bunch of diamond in the rough entrepreneur-future-millionaires, i’m simply asking the questions that I think most people wonder:

What’s Next? What kid living out of his dorm room or in his parent’s basement is going to be the next Bill Gates? Is there a Web 3.0?

Or maybe I should calm this rant down a bit… What about let’s say realistically you’ve grabbed two maybe three decent domain names back in one of your purchase splurges, you haven’t developed it, and you’ve got a few ideas for a product. What now? For sake of argument the blogging for bucks trend has come and gone, and you need a product to make you money. How do ya do it?

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why do i want to earn money online? Maybe it never occurred to anyone that someone has a reason greater than “To make money.” as to why they are trying to make money in a certain way. Making money online has a particular appeal to me. While many people say that earning money online affords them more free time, I’ll agree. However being a full time university student my biggest reason to making money online is simply because working online, or being able to blog and work on sites from my apartment is more time efficient for me with my full school schedule as well. There’s no time wasted commuting from point A to B. I can simply make a blog post or two, or three if i’m lucky, timestamp them or post them, and head back to my homework or studying.

Now you’re just saying, “Well why the hell are you an different than anyone else who’s at university trying to make money online?” I’ll say it, because I’m better than most of those other guys. Well maybe not better, but yeah, better. Actually its just simply the fact that I’m trying to get through my senior year, all the 400-level course work and hassle. Also I’m a Microsoft Student Partner as well. The combination of time obligations really makes the online money earning bit a sweet deal.

So that’s why i do it!

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So more and more often I’m seeing the plugin for paypal donations. The one that says “If you liked this post, buy me (insert food item here)”. Now I’ve heard people loving the plugin, and others hating it. If you sit and think about this plugin, it could easily be a great tool for “low money earners,” but you need to use it correctly. The only way this plugin will work is if you are generating high quality content. Yes, the content needs to draw traffic but also it needs to engage the reader and make them feel compelled to do something. Comments are free. Anyone can read your blog and post a comment.

If you want your readers to buy you a beer, or lunch, or a coffee or whatever, you need to go the extra mile. It’s quite obvious because of two reasons:

• Your content has to be good enough that your reader is willing to leave your site, go to a PayPal page and pay you.
• You have to trust that your content was so good once your reader has left your site, they will pay you at that PayPal page, and come back to your site!

Now for low earners this helps because well every penny counts, lets be honest. Something that readers need to realize is that if they’ve gotten to that PayPal page more often than not (unless the blogger has set prices for his beer) the amount of money you give is left blank. That’s for the giver to fill in. Let’s not be stingy, if you’ve made it to someone’s PayPal page you’ve at least half committed to giving them something, now do you have any cash laying around in your PayPal account? It may not be much, but if more people see a great post, and the blogger offers that buy them something and you’ve got a space 79 cents in your PayPal account, or $1.38, why not give it away? After all with your payment of (you filled that one in) , you are helping to feed some blogger in the blogosphere.

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So today I got home from work and found an email from YPN. Here’s what it said:

“Did you know you can receive your Yahoo! Publisher Network payments more quickly? Our convenient PayPal payment option requires a minimum earning of only $50, instead of $100, so you don’t have to wait as long for your paydays.

There are other benefits of choosing PayPal, too:

• Same-day payment—no waiting 7-10 days as you would with a check.
• No-fee transfers to your PayPal account. So you don’t pay more for more convenience.”

I’m impressed. Now i’ve been trying to spread my sites out between Adsense and YPN, and i’m finally close to the $100 payout for YPN. Paypal with YPN is a definite option for the future. Way to go YPN!

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