Get paid for recommending things to your friends and readers.  Amazon has an associate program that you should sign up for.

Amazon Associates

If you are using WordPress, then you should download two plugins:

Now-Reading – This Plugin will maintain a list of all the books that you plan to read, are reading, and have read.  You can post reviews and give ratings.  The books show up in your sidebar.  Also, it creates links to Amazon using your associate id so that you get a commission if anyone buys the book.

WP-Amazon – This adds a “Insert from Amazon” link below the article edit window.  It allows for you to search for products on Amazon and to insert links to those products in your articles with your associate id.

 

 

I broke the default WordPress layout when I tried hacking it to put the Google ads and Google search into it.  I have found several layouts that either support Google AdSense directly, or have spots open for it.  Here are some links to them:

ProBlogger Clean theme for WordPress

 Burnin’ R

 AdSenes Ready Theme

 Here is the one I am currently using:

MW

 

 

 

Look at this Google Analytics report!  What this shows is how easy it is to generate significant traffic to your site in a short time.  My biggest question is why so many of them are coming from ActiveWin.com?

 

With the little bit of promotion that I have done, the number of page impressions is up to 293 today.  That is up from about a dozen two days ago.  Also, the ad revenue for yesterday was $0.20 and today it was $1.90!!!

If you don’t have Google AdSense on your site, you need to sign up today and start raking in the dough!  Also, consider taking some of your major posts and submit them to digg.com, reddit.com, slashdot.org, shoutwire.com, and similar sites.  They can drive a lot of traffic your way.

Just so that you can see that I am starting from nothing, I thought I would post today’s adsense report screen shot.

How many times have you read a comment like “This web site is an example of such a system. At the time of this writing, it generates about $9000 a month in income for me” (Steve Pavlina) and thought, wow! several thousand dollars a month from writing content on a site and getting money from advertisement. How hard can it be?

Well, I’m about to find out. So, here is the plan:

Step 1 : Setup the infrastructure for the site.

Done! I have had www.gadgetnate.com for a very long time and have just piddled around with it. It is crawled by most of the search engines. In fact, the last time I looked, the search engine crawlers provided most of the traffic. So, good news, the site is listed and monitored. Bad news, there is nobody coming here. That is because there is almost no content on the site. That is about to change.

Also, I need a web publishing software. I have decided to go with WordPress mainly because my friend Dude uses it and likes it. Plus, I was able to get it installed with very little problems, and I did not have time to evaluate alternate tools like phpNuke. So, this is up and running.

I have also gotten my Google Adsense and Google Analytics up and running. That way, I can see if I am getting traffic, and have the potential of making money right off. I still want to get the library hooked up with the Amazon affiliate program, but that is a little ways off.

Step 2 : Pick a topic and publish content

I actually have two areas of content I’m working on. The first is this information about how to create a money making site. This will also include all my other writings and poderings. However, the real site that I am going to try to pull together is about Hindi. I have been trying to learn Hindi for a long time, and I figure that putting together a site and describing my progress with links to all the other Hindi sites would be something of use to fellow Hindi learners.

Step 3: Promote the site and increase traffic

There are several ways I plan to do this including:

1. Get site included in search engines
2. Get listed in general directories like dmoz.org and Yahoo
3. Get listed by sites that are about the subject, i.e. Hindi
4. Join hindi mailing lists, discussion groups, and bulletin boards and promote the site where possible.
5. Join a webring about Hindi
6. Create a “Hindi word a day” mailing list and send out daily emails with a word of the day and links back to the site.
7. Create a “updates to site” mailing list and send out weekly update emails about the site.

If you have some other suggestions, please leave them as comments. Check back here to see how it goes.

BTW, if you haven’t done so already, I recommend you install the Google Pack which includes a lot of useful programs. The link is on the right hand side at the bottom.