Happy New Year! And Better Way To Make Money

It’s being great, after taking sometime off, working hard to capture the Christmas Crazy Sales and couple of projects, now it’s time to evaluate our method to make money online.

Of course, to make money online is simple if you know how but first step is always the hardest since you are lacking of resources and the know-how.

What people do online? Base on study, people mainly check their email, search for information and hangout directly in their familiar community website.

Viral Marketing Or Word Of Mouth Marketing.

Still main activities for most user is checking email. This is why word of mouth marketing will become center of most online marketing in this few years to come. Facebook is a great example of word of mouth marketing, that use email to capture a lot of traffic and continue viral after that.

Search Marketing

Most of our effort being focus on search marketing because we think it’s the most valuable traffic if we are making money online. And we are lazy too, we like to get continue quality traffic but this traffic is a bit expensive to get now with all the commercialization and competition.

Direct Traffic

Blog, community site and forum do get higher direct traffic because there are more update and have a lot of things going on. Well, hoobin.com as our testing platform for this direct traffic. Well, so far it’s the most expensive direct traffic or worst ROI we even get. Unless you have really become a brand like Oprah, people start listening and trust you, if not, you have little change to monetize just base on adsense. Affiliate is still have the higher profit margin. So direct traffic is the most expensive traffic we create in the beginning and really we will have better ROI if we do spend money on advertising so that we get higher eCPM for the writing. Anyway, I think the real value of blog, forum or community site is sometime not the money you make, but the asset you build. For example, if you really post blog post a day, you will have 365 posts or articles in a year. That is some “intellectual property” you build there. Well, to build some property, you need some “long term” strategy to monetize. Anyway, that’s another long topic to discuss there.

Reference Traffic

Reference traffic come from the links you exchange with other website, or post your submit to Web 2.0 site like digg, delicious and etc. Reference traffic is great but have little value in term of monetization. Reference traffic will give value if it’s come from recommendation. There nature of this traffic and make money online is like direct traffic, it’s require long term strategy to monetize.

Last Year Summary

We think for new website, your focus should always focus on getting traffic and links. 80/20 rules apply here, spend 80% to promote your site and 20% to create great content.

We have better success with create site that have 5-10 articles, but strongly optimize for keywords and links. Those site continue to help us to make money with little maintenance.

For blog, I think you must know how to spend 10 minute to create a blog post in order to justify your time and investment. And really, you need to think about long term strategy if you are going for blog, forum and community website.

Well, this blog continue to bring good money from adsense but the things, whether I update or not, it’s still making the same money unless I spend sometime to promote it. Anyway, “make money” industry is just too competitive for me. In order to make real money, I guess next time, I have to include affiliate link in my new post:)

So far, I’m just too lazy to do that:P And I enjoy to write about this topic plus I guess hoobin.com is not really a great way to make money online, for me, I think I can do much better with my time spending in creating my other topic site. But again, the objective of this site is not to make money, but to document and share how to make money online. Sometime, people just thought if you talk about make money here, your site should be able to make a lot of money. I guess this kind of assumption will continue pushing us to monetize our blog that talk about make money online. But seriously, what really make money is the site that don’t talk about making money like facebook, wikipedia and etc.

Well, anyway, happy new year!

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