If you are like many bloggers, you may have trouble choosing from the various options to monetize your blog. Many of you are trying to use Adsense to make a few bucks but I think we might have found a better alternative.
RevResponse is a new player on the market that claims that you can profit by offering your visitors access to free business and technical resources. The great thing about this is that people love the word free and this simple word will typically lead to higher conversion rates.
Is this a viable option to monetize your site? The following is a paid review of RevResponse to see if they truly can act as another revenue stream for your blog or website.
Make Money Online with RevResponse
Most ad servers send traffic away from your site, however RevResponse pitches to the visitors that are already on your site. They have many offers including free magazine subscriptions, white papers, software trials, and even podcasts. If one of your visitors completes a registration form for any of these resources then you just earned a referral commission. Sounds easy so far.
A side benefit of this is that it adds to the depth of the information available to your visitors. In many cases RevResponse will have free offers that align with the theme of your site, giving you even more credibility to those seeking information.
As I mentioned earlier, free offers are often well received and typically produce a much higher conversion rate than offers that have a cost attached to them. It has been my experience that the exact same ad copy with the word “Free” in it will convert better than ones that do not contain that one word.
The three steps to making money sound pretty straightforward, right? It is, but I know the real question is how much can you make and how much work is it.
Payout Amounts
Unlike Adsense, where every click is a mystery, RevResponse guarantees $1.50 minimum for every qualified lead that your site produces. If you read their FAQ though you find that “you should expect to earn substantially more.” I have even been told that some leads can produce as much as $20 apiece. I must admit that makes me skeptical as I have heard the same thing about Adsense but have yet to see one.
They offer standard payment via check but Paypal is an alternative if you prefer an instant payment. I know I personally prefer a Paypal payment option as it is easier for me to track and keep my records straight.
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Running an online business is just as much of a real and legitimate business as owning a brick and mortar store. Whether you are blogging to make money, running an e-commerce website, providing a membership or subscription-based site, or doing affiliate marketing, you are running a business. Part of running and managing a business is incurring necessary expenses.
For those of us who do business online it’s easy to forget about this, and we often ignore products and services that could improve our business in some way because they’re not free. The amount of freebies that are available online has really caused a lot of bloggers and online entrepreneurs to blow off outstanding opportunities to make their business more profitable because of an expectation for free alternatives.
We’re obviously better off to spend some money (and spend it wisely) where it will drastically improve productivity. But it seems that this is forgotten a lot of times. In many cases there are free options online that we could choose, but spending a little bit of money may make a big difference for our business. For example, I wrote a post on my blog a month or two ago about online data backup services, mostly because I was looking into some options myself and the post helped me to do the research and find the best option. If you’re running an online business, chances are you have a lot of valuable information on your hard drive, and if that hard drive crashes you’ll lose it all. As a result, there are tons of online services for automatically backing up a hard drive. Some of these services are free and some are not. The service that I wound up choosing was Mozy, which costs only $5 per month, which is a ridiculously low amount to improve the security of your business. Still, with other free (and inferior) options available, many people will overlook a great service because it is not free.
When Should You Justify an Expense?
When you are producing revenue
If your online business is making money, you should be willing to re-invest some of that back into the business. In order to improve your business and increase the amount that you make you may need to spend money on certain things. How much you re-invest is up to you, but be willing to consider an expense that is justified.
When it saves you time
Depending on what type of business you are running there are probably plenty of products and services that can save you time in one way or another. Having more time available to dedicate to the business is a huge plus. An example of this is a WordPress plugin that Adnan uses here at Blogtrepreneur, OIO Publisher. As a premium plugin OIO publisher costs $37, but it handles and manages all facets of your blog’s advertising. By spending $37 on the plugin you can automate some of the manual work that you do and free up more of your time to work on other aspects of your blog.
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Strong search engine rankings are high on the list of any serious online entrepreneur yet many don’t have the first idea how to achieve these. They may have a great site with a lot to offer but no idea how to promote it properly.
Before I start the review, I just wanted to quickly apologize for posting private reviews twice in 2 days, however, the advertisers wanted these reviews out as quickly as possible, and this is the only way we could have fitted things in.
The review we are doing today is of a company called iBusinessPromoter and what they specialize in is helping those site owners who may not know much about SEO, but who like to handle things themselves.
iBusiness Promoter
iBusiness Promoter claims that they can get you a Top 10 ranking for your site if you follow their plan. I am typically kind of leery of sites that make these type of claims as they often don’t offer much for substance.
iBusiness has enough confidence in their plan that they are willing to offer you a money back guarantee if they fail to deliver. That’s pretty strong and encouraged me to look a little deeper.
What they offer is a step by step guide that gives you tasks to complete and tools to help you complete those tasks. Each task is a key ingredient in obtaining strong rankings, and in order to succeed you need to follow the complete plan as each piece works together.
I like what I see so far but let’s break it down a little more.
The iBusiness Plan
The plan that they lay out for you is quite thorough and detailed but not so much that an average person couldn’t follow it quite easily. It encompasses all of the basic SEO cornerstones and explains the process every step of the way.
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Many of you Make Money Onliners use affiliate marketing in order to generate income and I am sure that you have heard that one of the secrets to successful affiliate marketing is having a great “list.”
If you are a budding internet marketer or have been considering building a mailing “list” for any reason then you want to give this review a serious look and see if it could be for you.
Omnistar Mailer
The company we are reviewing is OmnistarMailer and what they have to offer is a web based email marketing software that is capable of meeting all of your mailing list needs. They accomplish this by offering a web based PHP mailing list software package that they claim to be very easy to install.
They got my attention early when I noticed that they are so confident of that claim, that if you cannot get it done with their instructions, then they will install it for you. Free.
We’re off to a good start so far.
They also claim that once it is set up, it requires no technical knowledge from there to use. This is a huge plus for someone like me who doesn’t have the time or inclination to spend hours fiddling with code.
I want a simple and easy to use interface and after using their Demo feature, it appears that Omnistar offers that. Another bonus for someone like me.
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Launching and growing a successful blog takes commitment to several different areas, including promotion. Even blogs with large, established audiences need to be doing some type of promotion in order to keep growing. What’s been interesting to me in my experience with blog promotion is the curve that takes place as your blog develops and your base of readers grows.
Defining the promotional curve
When a new blog is launched, off-blog promotion (anything you do to market your blog that takes place away from your blog itself) is critical. Naturally, a new blog will start with zero readers, and in order for people to subscribe they will first have to find the blog somehow. As a result, new bloggers need to dedicate the majority of their promotion efforts to things like commenting on other blogs, writing guest posts, building social media profiles, building inbound links, etc. These efforts will lead people to the blog, which provides the initial exposure that’s necessary to start the growth process.
As the blog’s audience and subscriber count begins to grow, more time will need to be spent on the blog itself, or those who are arriving as a result of the promotional efforts will not stick around because there is nothing worth seeing. Eventually the blog will reach a stage where the blogger’s time is too valuable to be spending on excessive off-blog promotion, and the priority will curve towards promoting the blog by different means. At this time, activities like content creation, community building on the blog, sometimes contests and other activities will be more productive than the tactics that were used to gain the initial exposure.
How the curve impacts you as a blogger
As a blogger, it’s important to understand the stage of development that you are in. My blog started to really grow last summer when I became very active in writing guest posts for other blogs and gaining exposure in that way. That wasn’t my only method, I also did a good bit of social media marketing, but creating content and managing my blog only took a portion of my time, not all of it. One day I hit the Digg front page and gained over 200 new subscribers. Then it hit me. All of a sudden I felt much more pressure to create the best content that I was capable of, because now I had something to lose if I didn’t.
When you are first launching a blog the biggest challenge is simply being noticed. I think most of us believe that our content is good enough to be appreciated by our target audience, the problem is that they can’t appreciate the blog without ever seeing it. Simply put, your first challenge is to get people’s eyes on your work.
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