Introduction
A lot of the articles and posts I’ve written so far have been covering the more advanced topics of how to use SEO, PPC and affiliate marketing to make money for your site. Apart from these skills, you obviously need to have some web design and programming skills, not to mention hosting, domains and everything that comes with being a webmaster.

However, there are a lot of ways to make money online without even having a website. Today I want to give a beginners’ guide to, Subvert & Profit. In a nutshell, you sign up and get paid to Digg and StumbleUpon specified sites. If you’re already a veteran Digger & Stumbler, you probably want to go straight ahead and sign up, and skip to the “S&P Tips section” at the end to get tips on how to get the most out of S&P and how not to get your accounts banned. I’ve already talked about using Subvert & Profit from the advertiser side to exploit Digg for links. Today I’m going to talk about using it from the social user side and earning yourself some easy cash.

Get a PayPal Account
I imagine just about everyone has one of these. I rarely meet a person that doesn’t. S&P pays via PayPal, so if you haven’t got a PayPal account, you’re going to need to go to www.paypal.com and sign up. C’mon… You got a PayPal Account, right?…

Sign up to Digg
Whether or not you already have a Digg account, it’s best to go and sign up for another one. Head over to digg.com and in the top right corner hit “Join Now”. Signing up to Digg is a pretty simple affair, so fill out the form and activate from the e-mail.

Sign up to StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon is a network of almost 3 million members using the “StumbleUpon Toolbar”, which is a neat little bar that allows you to give a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” to any web page you’re currently on. When you’re not voting for pages, you can click “Stumble!” and be taking to highly user-rated pages on topics that you specify in your profile. Nip over to stumbleupon.com and click their “Join StumbleUpon Today” link. You will have to sign up and download the StumbleUpon Toolbar. There is version for both Internet Explorer and Firefox and it’s not very intrusive and can be quite fun when you’re not just making money from it!

Sign up to Subvert & Profit.com
I know all of this signing up is a chore, but this is the last one - so almost there! Hoss over to subvertandprofit.com and enter your e-mail address that you use for PayPal. This will give you access to the sign up form.

Fill out all of the usual sign up gumph then check your inbox for the activation e-mail.

Set up Subvert & Profit
Once you first login to S&P you’ll need to have your Digg and Stumble usernames handy. These are entered into your profile and they will give you a verification task of a story to Digg & Stumble. They will then have to verify your actions, which can take a few hours. So go put the kettle on. Make the tea. Drink the tea. Then probably make and eat dinner as well.

Ready to rock!
We should be all ready to go out there and make some money now. Subvert is a dead easy system, they will send you an e-mail every time they have a new task for you (most days generally). Then you login and follow the request URLs and either Digg or Stumble them. (There’s two sections here, one for Digging and one for Stumbling - so get it right!). Every time you Stumble or Digg a story you get paid $0.50. Now, say you’ve got 6 stories to Digg/Stumble, you can open all 6 URLs at once and it will take around 30 seconds to complete the Digging and Stumbling. This essentially works out as earning $360 per hour for your time.

Digging Pages
Sometimes, S&P will pop you directly to the story on Digg.com, so it’s nice and easy - just login and hit the “Digg This” button. On other occasions, you will land directly on the page/article that is being Dugg. If this happens, there will be a “Digg This” button or link, somewhere on the article. So just have a quick scan and you should be able to see it. Another $0.50 in the bank.

Stumbling Pages
Stumbling is a dead simple affair. When you land on the page, no searching around - just hit the “I like it” thumbs up button on your browser toolbar. Sometimes you are the first person to Stumble a page, which means it will pop-up a form asking you to fill in the page title, description and tags. This is pulled from the page, so just hit Stumble! One bit of advice, if you have multiple tabs open to Stumble several sites, wait until the “thumbs up” icon goes green before you try and Stumble the next page. Sometimes Stumble gets a bit confused if you Stumble pages really quickly.

Some FAQS & Tips

Digg & Stumble of course, don’t really “approve” of this kind of usage and although it’s not “illegal” by a long stretch, it is against their Terms of Service, so there is a small possibility you can get banned. (I haven’t and I’ve been using this service since launch). So here’s some tips on avoiding getting banned and getting the most out of S&P.

• Make a new Digg account. They’re quick to make and if you get banned, S&P lets you quickly and easily change the Digg account you’re using from their interface
• Digg and Stumble other stories! Don’t just Digg and Stumble paid for stories! Use your Digg account normally and randomly Digg & Stumble a few things between subverting. This makes it very hard for Digg or Stumble to ban you. Afterall, any user could randomly Digg or Stumble a paid for story without knowing it - lots do in fact! So as long as you balance your profile out, you’re onto a winner
• Make sure you’ve got a system to alert you immediately when you get a new e-mail from S&P. Advertisers only pay for a specific number of Diggs & Stumbles, so if you don’t react for 24 hours, you’re going to have missed the cash boat. If you stop Digging & Stumbling pages for S&P, they seem to send you fewer notifications - so keep on the ball!

How much can I earn?
Once you’re signed up and get a couple of friends on, you can on average you can earn about $6 a day at the moment. It’s not loads, but add it up, $42 a week, $168 per month - just over $2,000 a year. Certainly not a figure to scoff at. Especially when you’re doing next to no work at all!

I’ve been using this service for a few months now and I’ve decided it is worth recommending and trying to increase the amount of users. It’s still fairly young, so sign up now and you can get your friends onto it as well. The more people that know about Subvert & Profit, the more people will buy Diggs & Stumbles, which means more money for me and you!

I’ve been pretty specific and this blog post is still pretty short! That’s really all you need to do, hardly any effort or time. It’s about as close to free money as you’re gonna get guys. Go get some! If you feel I’ve missed something out or want to know more, leave me a comment and I’ll try to answer your question

Edit: If you want a blog or forum added to this list - you can contribute it here. Also please read the latest update of this search engine.

The original nofollow list was sourced from third party sources, with the original list being created at http://courtneytuttle.com - I have taken this list and made over 200 additions and listed them by PR and category for SEO purposes.

I’ve had a pretty rough few days this week, so I dedicated quite a lot of time putting together a rather special resource for you. It may not look much, but it’s a list of over 160 categorised, PR ranked blogs which all don’t use the “nofollow” attribute in their links. Before you jump to the end of this article to download it, I’d like to say one thing: This list is not for blog spamming! Seriously, spamming it would be a waste of your time and a waste of the 10+ hours I spent putting this list together. Since I was feeling extra generous, I’ve also built the blog list into a Custom Blog Search Engine, so you can simply search for your niche and find relevant blog posts! Anyway, as I said…

Me no spammy list?
No, you no spammy list. For a start, it probably won’t work - plugins such as the awesome Akismet pretty much stop most automated spam, also if you piss the blog owners off, they’ll probably just nofollow the links anyway and then the fun’s over for everyone. There’s a much better use you can put this list to.

Ok, I’m listening. What’s there to do?
Okay, as I said, we’ve got a list here of over 160 blogs that will follow comments. All of them either have a lot of traffic, or high PR. (Some I believe have a high PR, but display PR0 because the Toolbar PR hasn’t updated yet). So for instance, lets take an example that you run a Travel Insurance website. The best thing you can do is look down list this and make your own mini-list of all of the blogs that cover travel and culture. These are going to be the blogs we want our links on, they have authority, traffic and more importantly, they are highly relevant.

It doesn’t take long to scan read a post, so have a look at the latest posts (who knows - you might learn something too!) then leave a comment on the blog, using your “name” as the keywords you want to rank for (try and keep it the least “spammy” as you can). In a standard comment you’ll want to compliment the post, make a relevant comment on the post content and a closing remark. Keep it short & sweet but try and add some value, this will get your comment approved.

If you factor this activity (say an hour a day) into your SEO/blogging schedule you’ll be picking up some nicely weighted, relevant links every single day - as well as the traffic you can generate from click-throughs. It is a safe method of building pretty good quality links that you can be sure will get indexed fast. The main leg work is in sourcing a list of blogs that don’t use the “nofollow” attribute, but I’ve already done the hard bit for you!

Isn’t there an ethics issue here?
Even for white hatters, I don’t think there’s an ethical issue here. So we’re putting our comment there for the sole purpose of getting a link, yes. However, if the blog author can read this comment and they think it adds value to the post, where’s the harm in that? If bloggers are so concerned about who they are giving their link juice to, they should be use the nofollow attribute in the first place.

That sounds like a lot of work!
Well, it really isn’t, but for your lazy types - you’re in luck. Jon Waraas has recently launched a service called Buy Blog Posts. His service essentially offers the above technique for 100, 500 or 1000 blog comments in your niche. Now, there has been a lot of criticism over Jon’s service saying it is “evil”, “vile” and it will “destroy the blogosphere”. These people, really need to get outside more, if not only so we can give them a kick in their blogospheres. As I stated earlier, if the author of a post can’t tell the comment is “pseudo-spam” then I don’t see what the problem is.

As usual - Give it a try and let me know how you get on! You are welcome to put a copy of the PDF list on your on website or blog.

Edit: If you want a blog or forum added to this list - you can contribute it here. Also please read the latest update of this search engine.

(This PDF is out of date now - use the search engine)

Yes, I haven’t blogged in a while - apologies. I got burnt out this first part of the year, with long work hours and personal projects so I took a couple of months break doing “non-computer” stuff. Writing a decent post takes a lot of effort, so I figured rather than drag Digerati down with low quality posts, I’d just save a bunch of stuff up for when I had the energy to get it all down. I’ve started catching up on some reading and I’m ready to start you off with a teaser article about using Digg to get yourself ranked better.

What’s the plan?
Okay, the plan is this. We are going to produce an article, get it to the front page of Digg, grab all the links that this gives you and turn them into something valuable for your website. A lot of people try similar methods and fail miserably, never getting off the “upcoming stories” page on Digg. So we’ll be looking at solutions to:

• How to make a powerful Digg account
• How to write a “Diggable” article
• How to guarantee front page coverage
• How to make your links relevant

With no further fanfare, lets get cracking.

A little about Digg and Digg accounts
The Digg community, much like Wikipedia does not really take kindly to “SEO types” or people trying to promote their own articles or websites. If you’re caught Digging your own stuff, or just spammy crap over and over, you’ll get your account suspended. Building up a “powerful” Digg account is a reliable (but long-term) method of making sure this strategy works well. If you create a new Digg account and Digg a story, your Digg (vote) carry less weight/authority, whatever you want to call it, than say a user who has been registered for 2 years and has Dugg thousands of stories. There is a kind of “trust” game going on with Digg and you need to get in on it. One way Digg looks at your behaviour and measures trust is by which stories you Digg. Do you only vote for the crap stuff? Or are you joining in voting on stories that are really popular? How long have you been around on Digg? When you post a story, how many Diggs does it get?

You essentially want to build a “upstanding citizen” profile on Digg. This will take time, but I mention it now because it will save you the (albeit small) expense that this tactic incurs in the future. So, as a beginning and side note to this strategy, make a point of logging into Digg everyday and doing these things:

• Look at the first dozen or so top stories and give them a Digg
• Search for stories posted by powerful Diggers and add these Diggers as your friends
• Whenever your friends post a story, make sure you Digg it immediately

The last point there is one of the most important. If you have 200 friends and you make sure you Digg their stories when they post, they will, generally without question return the favour to you. When I post a story on Digg I can get 30-40 Diggs within an hour or so just from my friends list which helps me reach the top of the “upcoming” stories list, which is your first milestone.

Bare that in mind and I’ll write the rest of this post for those who do not have powerful Digg accounts.

Choosing a subject and writing a successful article
If you’re not an experienced Digger, I suggest you take a quick trip over to Digg.com and have a look at some of the top voted stories over the last month or so. Try and get a ‘feel’ for what makes a successful story and think about the Digg audience (which is mostly techies, geeks etc…) and look at what kind of stuff interests them. To give you an idea, I’ve noted down some observations I’ve made:

• Top Tens! Very, very popular. A lot of articles are “Top 10 list of…” or lists of… stuff… To make a story hugely successful, it has to be accessible. A lot of people will be put off if you Digg a 3 page long text heavy story, no matter how funny.
• Sarcasm, humour, parody. “High brow” kind of jokes, poking fun at corporations, politicians, or simply well photoshopped images go down a storm. You know all those “Fw:Fw:Fw:BRILLIANT JOKEZ!!!11″ emails that land in your inbox from loved ones? Think the opposite of this type of humour and you’ll be well away.
• Retro stuff! Nostalgia is a powerful tool. Think thundercats, transformers, spectrums, amigas, all your base are belong to us.
• Weird geeky science stuff.. Black holes, UFOs, teleportation, time-travel. In list format where possible. Everybody loves off-the-wall useless facts.
• Once you’ve got a theme, tie as much is as possible. If you can squeeze some current buzz in like the release of a film and tie it all together with a “thundercats versus the new movie transformers” or such like, you’re onto a winner.
• Lastly, make sure it hasn’t been done before! (Or do it a hell of a lot better).

Okay, hopefully you’ve started thinking along the right lines now. You want to try and pick a topic that is related to the content of your website. This is probably the hardest part and you might need the help of a friend or two to brainstorm. A good example I saw recently was for a travel insurance company, a list of “the top 10 most dangerous travel destinations” was created, with brilliantly photoshopped images of each country, making it worth Digging just for the photos, let alone the article which was written dripping with sarcasm and good humour. Making a story controversial, may seem risky (don’t worry about that for now), but it is exactly the kind of buzz you’ll need.

Putting your article up
If it’s your first attempt, it might be worth getting a friend or two to cast an eye over it, to get their thoughts and make sure you’ve hit the nail on the head. Once you’re happy with your article, things get a bit more sneaky. Create an orphan page on the domain you want to boost and put your article here. An orphan page is once that is not linked from your site (or sitemap) or linked back to your site. This will reduce any negative impact if you’ve written a particularly controversial article and throw people off the scent of what you are trying to do. If you’ve written an excellent article that really sits well with the rest of your sites content, then by all means, put a link with anchor text of your choosing at the bottom of your story to your website. Lastly, you’ll want to add a “Digg this” and at a later stage perhaps a “Reddit” (or social network of your choosing) button to your page. This will encourage more people to Digg your story, who land on it from other sources. Now. login to Digg and post your story and give it an exciting title (this doesn’t mean CAPS!), and a taster intro. This bit isn’t too hard. If you’ve already got some friends they will hopefully Digg it for you.

Nobody is Digging my story!
Okay, if you want to make the front page of Digg, there are people that can help you. If you head over to www.subvertandprofit.com, you’ll find an entire network designed to giving your Digg stories than initial “boost” they need to go viral. In a nutshell (I’ll let you read through the site), you pay $1 per Digg you wish to buy and users on the site who have Digg accounts are paid to Digg your story for you. Now, if you’ve written an okayish article, you’ll only need to buy about 50 Diggs (so $50/£25) worth to get you front page. The rate at which you receive Diggs (and the previously mentioned “power” of a Digg have a lot more to do with your stories position than the total amount of Diggs. Once you’re story has reached this critical mass, it tends to snowball.

Wait! Wait! $50?! Does it work? Is it worth it?
I’ve used this tactic half a dozen times now, with what I would consider “okay” articles and I’ve hit the front page every time giving me thousands of visitors and more importantly, thousands of links. Yes it works, yes it damn well is worth your fifty bucks (sorry my fellow English readers, but $ is the currency of the net, deal with it). So, buy your initial Diggs, sit back and make sure you have well hell of a server! The first time I did this, I crashed my server due to the visitor load!

What’s the point of all of this? Explain!
Right, your getting thousands of visitors to an orphan page, what the hell use is that? Okay, cool your jets. What we’re really gaining here is links, lots of natural, beautiful website citations! If you’ve chosen your topic well (such as travel insurance: travel destinations) a lot of your incoming anchor text will also be relevant to your main site content. As mentioned in a previous article, you’ll be giving your website a massive shot in the arm when it comes to link velocity, which will help your rankings across the board. Having a #1 Digg story will give you the so called “long tail Digg effect”, which will see you get a whole bunch of links over the next couple of months, after the first massive influx.

What good are links to an orphan page?
A contested point, which I have experimented on (in the most controlled way possible - nothing’s perfect). Google has a “trust/authority” scoring for your domain as a whole, not just individual page strength. If you get a few thousand links to any page on your domain, Google knows the page is part of that domain and will raise your domain’s authority as a whole. Using this method, I have simultaneously jumped rankings over a dozen or more keyterms (usually going to 30-40 places in SERPs), using no other method. So it definitely works and let the nay-sayers do as they wish. Having more links to your domain, from a variety of good sources, with relative anchor text will give Google a clearer indication of your site’s content and authority, thus improving rankings.

A few tail notes
To put the last nail in the competitions’ coffin, a few months down the line when your article isn’t receiving many links anymore, remove the page and 301 it to an internal page of your choosing. This will give a specific page on your site a shot in the arm and increase rankings for that specific page. I generally just go for my main homepage, as the anchor text will be fairly mixed and you want to keep individual pages very targeted in terms of incoming anchor text.

A closing note, don’t bother putting Adsense/ads etc on your Digg article to try and squeeze some extra bucks out of it. Digg users are notoriously savvy and you’ll get the lowest click-through rates you’ve ever seen in your life and may well damage the popularity of your article.

There we go, a nice and easy way to gain a few thousand decent links! This was a taster article to get you guys (and me) back into the swing of things. I’m sitting on a massive 4 part guide to building a network of affiliate sites and automating the whole process. I’m not quite sure what to keep/remove from these next articles yet, but I’ll be posting on roughly a weekly basis for a while, so there’s a lot more to come. As always, good luck, let me know how you get on and drop me a line if you want to be my Digg friend!

Today, I want to have a chat about link velocity. In a nutshell, the term “link velocity” means, “the rate at which you gain new links to your website”. If you read SEO forums and blogs, it’s not a topic that you’ll regularly come across. People will harp on about PageRank, relevance of link and my personal favourite “just build better content than everyone else”. Now, I’m sure that last comment will annoy some people, but lets be honest here. People say “just build quality content” as if it’s as easy as knocking your tea on your keyboard. I’m not arguing that having quality content is an advantage, but quality content can take months, if not years to build and there’s nothing stopping other bigger websites just stealing your ideas!

This is what it boils down to: Google can’t tell the difference between average content and great content. It relys on people thinking your content is good and linking to you.

Link velocity is a great measure of popularity. It’s important. Very important.

Lets give an example:

Last year I set up a website for a for a niche with about 5-10 medium sized players in it and 1 super large player. These guys, quite rightfully had total domination of the SERPs, aside from SEO, they do PR releases, sponsorship, an affiliate scheme and they buy advertising on sites like MySpace.

Taking a closer look at their website:

“Super Large Player” Website Profile:
PageRank: 7
Indexed Pages: 15,771
Links to URL: 5,200
Links to domain: 610,000
Domain Age: 6 years

So by all accounts, pretty well established site with a large marketing budget. I set my own budget of £4.22 (for tea and some sherbet flying saucers) and decided it was time to take them down a peg or two.

Without getting caught up in the details of the web build, I uploaded a fairly basic, flat HTML website with about 50 pages of content, following all the basic SEO rules (page titles, h1s, anchor text usage..etc) that you can find on 1,000 other SEO blogs. The important thing is this; I noticed my super large player friend wasn’t gaining links very quickly - a chink in their armour we could exploit.

So how do we get 100 new links per day?
The niche I was in was providing web graphics. Now my competitor offered a download which installed the graphics onto your computer, for use in your blog, forum, e-mail or whatever. I opted for a “hosted” option, so you can hotlink my images off my server onto your site/blog/forum whatever.

To do this, when somebody clicked on an image, I was generated a little BBcode or HTML so they could paste it into anything they wanted. Fairly standard procedure. To get your head around the idea, my friend has built and launched a similar site - Free Icons. Have a look around the site, when you click on one of the icons, it will generate the code for you to display the icon. The code also generates an alt tag for the image, which can be the keyword/phrase you are trying to rank for.

No bombshells here, it’s a pretty standard technique. Sure enough though, after 7-8 months:

“Super Large Player” Website Profile:
PageRank: 7
Indexed Pages: 15,771
Links to URL: 5,200
Links to domain: 610,000
Domain Age: 6 years
Ranking for main terms: ~3rd

“My Home Made Website” Website Profile:
PageRank: 4
Indexed Pages: 27
Links to URL: 6,720
Links to domain: 11,500
Domain Age: 1 year
Ranking for main terms: 1st across the board

I was outranking them for every single one of their terms, result! The site’s success wasn’t on this one thing alone, but their site is stronger than mine in almost every way, the only thing I’ve got going for me is that I get a regular healthy dose of fresh incoming links every day. Google seems to deem this enough that my site should rank better.

All these extra links will boost your site’s authority. Since Google will have trouble identifying the content of the link, your on-page SEO will have to be spot on and the “regular” links you gain will have to have some well tuned anchor text. These bonus links can really give your rankings a shot in the arm.

Review your own position, you have have those dozen PR7 links pointing to your site and you’re ranking okay, but what mechanisms do you use to constantly garner new links? There’s a million and one ways you can use this technique. SEOmoz (who also briefly mentioned link velocity) offer “I love SEOmoz” badges that you can stick on your site, and guess what - they link back to SEOmoz.

For any site I do now, I always try and think of a mechanism to keep gaining links in the future, then integrate this into the design, whether it’s a tool, an image or document links. With these kinds of techniques, you can sit back and relax while other SEOs desperately scramble around the net looking for directory links and you are free to move onto your next project!

The first blog post is always the hardest with amblings on who you are and what you have set out to do. I’ve decided to keep the introduction short and jump right into some nice, worthwhile content. So, for those of you who don’t know me, my name is Mark and I’ve moved from zzmarketing.co.uk where I used to blog as “MarkZZ”, as zoomzoom’s Head of Online Marketing. If you’d like to know more, you can have a look here - or if you want to make some money, keep reading! [Update: Now working at Further as Online Marketing Manager]

An Introduction to Video Websites
There’s a lot of them about, a lot. Apart from the old-timers like ebaumsworld, Google’s acquisition of YouTube has really seen them starting to eat up this market. The great thing is, that doesn’t matter, videos are a disposal media - people look at them once, show their mates and then it’s old news. You’re only as good as your last video! What we’re going to look at doing here is setting up a video website with minimal cost & time and maximising our profit.

Now, I’m not claiming this will make you a millionaire, but you can earn around £500 ($1000 to our American friends) per month without too much trouble. So it’s well worth it for the day or two it will take to set up!

Step #1: Monetization Strategy

Okay, for this site we are going to make our bucks from a couple of different sources. Our main income will be made from Google Adsense. If you haven’t got yourself a Google Adsense Publisher account, click the big button below and sign up. Adsense will display contextual adverts which you can neatly blend in with the design of your website, to make them non-intrusive, yet a natural click away. For this website we are aiming at generating a 25% click-through rate while staying well inside the Adsense Terms Of Service.

An important note: I’m going to give you some tips on optimising your Adsense placement and layout later, if you want to take the optimisation further, you may be pushing the limit on what Google does and doesn’t allow. The Adsense team can be merciless at times if they think you are breaking their ToS, which can be quite “grey” at times. So, stick to the guidelines and you’ll be fine, cross the line at your own risk!

So, if you haven’t already,

Step #2: Setting up the website with Wordpress
Yay for Wordpress and its many uses! Wordpress gives you an off the shelf platform for out video blog (vlog). It allows comments, pings, trackbacks, easy archiving, it’s SEO friendly and has loads of plugins. For this kind of mission, it’s definitely the number one choice.

There are two ways you can go about getting Wordpress up and running:

1) You can go to wordpress.com and sign up for a wordpress account, they will provide you with a hosted blog such as myvideoblog.wordpress.com

or

2) You can go wordpress.org and download Wordpress and install it on your server. This is really the preferred option as it will give you the power to use some neat features in the future, which will smooth out the money making process! If you haven’t got web hosting, I use Site5 (aff link) and they’ve always been good to me and are fairly priced.

Once you’ve uploaded Wordpress to your server, follow the installation guide (it’s pretty simple) to get your Wordpress installation and database up and running.

Step #3: Choosing a domain name
Probably the hardest part of building any website is finding a domain name! Don’t worry too much about getting keywords in there, organic SEO isn’t how we’ll be doing the bulk of our promotion, try and focus on getting something short, snappy and memorable. (That means no hyphens!). If you can get something with a keyword or two (funny, video, comedy, humour - reach for your thesaurus) all the better, but as I say - don’t sacrifice the name for it. Once that’s sorted, point it at your server so it will have resolved by the time you’re ready to launch.

Step #4: Plugins Galore
There are some great plugins for Wordpress that will save you a hell of a lot of time and coding. I’ve experimented with quite a few and whittled the list down to some essentials.

Viper’s Video Quicktags - This plugin will save you having to rip out all the embed code from videos on major sites like YouTube, all you need to do is paste in the video ID and this plugin will do all the rest of the code & alignment for you. It’s essential to make adding videos as quick as possible.

WP-Email - This plugin adds an “E-mail This To A Friend” option at the bottom of every post (which will be your videos). I’ve been using these for a while and although you don’t get loads of people use them, personally recommendation is the best kind of marketing your website could hope for.

WP-PostRatings - This will add the “rate this video” 0-5 stars function at the bottom of each post. It’s a nice addon to get people to try and interact with your site if the can’t be bothered to post comments. Interaction is good - it’s the first step in relation building with your visitors and ultimately trying to get them to come back.

Sociable - Adds a mini-bar of just about every popular social bookmarking site worth mentioning at the bottom of each post. Digg, Reddit, Bloglines, they’re all there. Optimisation Tip: From experimenting, I found it is best not just to select all the social sites going, choose a maximum of 5 major ones, then rotate to see what is most successful. Having a line of 20 social bookmarking icons looks a bit confusing and seems to ultimately put people off using them.

StumbleUpon It! - StumbleUpon is a really great way to promote sites with entertainment and disposable content. This plugin gives you a “stumble it” button at the bottom of each post, which will play a part in our future marketing strategy.

Did You Pass Math? - Did you? This is just a basic anti-spam measure that puts one of those sums before you’re allowed to comment. Spam is a major problem, so I’d recommend this one, just to save you some time.

Akismet - This should be present in your default Wordpress installation, you require a Wordpress API key - but this little gem has stopped more spam than anything else I’ve ever tried.

Step #5: Get Feedburnt
Okay, with further promotion in mind it’s time to sign up to Feedburner. RSS is going to be one of the main ways we keep in touch with our readers, letting them know we’ve put more videos on our site and Feedburner offers a load of other ways to let people subscribe to your content.

Step #6: Theme Design
There are loads of great Wordpress themes at themes.wordpress.net. Have a good look through them until you find something you like. I would generally recommend going for something fairly simplistic and neat with an either 2 or 3 column design. Or, if you’re feeling adventurous, you could always design your own!

Once you’ve got your theme and uploaded it, I’d suggest tweaking some of the graphics to make it your own. Get your branding up there, design a logo and base your site around the domain name. This is why we wanted something easy to remember and relevant earlier, it’s no good calling your site “Video Hustler” then having www.my-funny-internet-videos.cc and hoping people will remember it.

Some Wordpress essentials
There are a couple of other tweaks you can do in Wordpress to make your job easier.

1) Add a few categories, I used “Funny Videos”, “Extreme Videos” and “Sexy Videos” just so I could tag my content as I add it.

2) Use custom permalinks! This will make your URLs easier to remember and will help various bots crawl your site. To do this go to the “Options” menu, then “Permalinks” and at the bottom check the “custom” radio button and put /%postname%/ in the field.

3) Change page titles.

What we want to do is to swap the position of “Post Title” with “Blog Name”. This is because:

* Search engines uses your Page Title as the linking text in its search engine results page (SERP).
* The search keywords are bolded for page titles in search engines
* It makes it easier for search engine users to know right away if what they are looking for is correct

Now, this will involve some editing to your template files, which is normally called “header.php”. Find this:

and replace with:

And you’re done!

I’m not going to tell you how to design your layout pixel by pixel, because one of the keys with maximising your profit is experimentation. Here are some guidelines:

Adsense Placement & Optimisation
This is how you’re going to make your money, so it’s pretty important! On your main index page you want to have an Adsense content unit at the very top, below your site header, but above the first video. This for me, is by far the highest click though, achieving around 30-40%, with the right keywords later on we can marry these adverts up with your content beautifully.

In your Adsense control console, under Adsense for content, go into your “Ad Units”. These will get you paid after 1 click, whereas link units require a click to bring you to a results page, then a click on the results to get paid. So select link unit and leave “text only” (default) selected. There is 468×60 pixel size which fits perfectly above your standard Google or YouTube Video.

You second biggest earner will be the ad unit which will create a gap between the first video and the rest of the videos on the site. Your first video will obviously be visible above the scroll, but being an average 10-30 second long funny clip, people will never be able to resist at least looking at the other videos on your front page. You must exploit this human curiosity! The 336×280px “large rectangle” unit fits the bill perfectly. Again it will fit in nicely below your video and will give a nice chunk of adverts. This ad unit must only be displayed below the first video as there are limits on the amount of ad units you are allowed on 1 page. You will however, want this ad unit again on the “single post” page. So, if somebody links directly to one of your videos, you still have max Adsense coverage.

I would recommend showing the first 5 videos on the first page. Having less, will reduce the chances of people looking at anything but the first video on your site and will effectively reduce the page size - minimising advert space. Having a lots of videos will distract people from using other parts of your site navigation (well, by this I mean will keep people too amused to click on your ads!). It’s a fine line between wetting their appetite but then keeping them hungry for more.

It’s also worth having a vertical unit (skyscraper) near your navigation. You want both of these units clearly visible without scrolling down, so you’ve got the top of the page and the central part covered in lovely adverts, which is where peopleâ??s mousey clicks tend to go!

It is important to blend your Adsense into your site and there are two schools of thought on this. The default “blue” hyperlinks on websites will get the most clicks, always. This colour has been drilled into our head since the dawn of the www and your brain just says “click”, so if any of your other links on your site use this colour, you will need to use this colour for your Adsense titles. I however, think this colour is ugly, so I refrained from using it anywhere on my site at all. If you follow this approach as well, then you simply want to make your Adsense units the same colour as your standard hyperlinks. If you’re using Firefox there is a great Colour Picker addon, which gives you the hex code for any colour, live on a web page. Since you’re allowed a link unit on the page as well, I tend to put one of these in the footer, just because it looks okay and it does earn a few pennies every now and again.

Beating Adsense Smart Pricing
“Smart Pricing” is Google’s way of trying to keep its advertisers happy by lowering the cost of junk traffic. Unfortunately, they do this at your expense. Having poor advertisers on your site, will lead to you users clicking the adverts, then leaving the horrible site they land on almost instantly. When people do this, Google will think you’re sending out junky traffic, when actually it’s the advertiser’s site that is at fault. This will lead to the money you get per click, going down.

Fortunately, Google offer a “competitive ad filter”, which allows you to block certain advertisers from showing ads on your site. Login to your Google Adsense account and go to “Adsense Setup” and you’ll see a “Competitive Ad Filter” tab. Click this and you’ll be given a box of URLs to block.

Copy & paste this list into your competitive ad filter and this should help you keep a strong amount per click.

Google Coop
Google Coop is a custom search engine (CSE) which basically allows you to click a few buttons and make a custom search engine. The great thing is, you can tie this in with your current Adsense account and it will pay out when somebody clicks on a sponsored result from your custom search engine. So, rather than leave in the standard Wordpress search, you might as well make some money from it!

Find the bit of code in your theme that shows the default Wordpress search box and comment it out. Create a Google Coop account and you will be presented with if you would like your search engine to search the entire web, with preference to selected sites, or simply search specific sites. Choose the option to select specific sites and just add your own URL. Don’t forget to enter your Adsense Publisher ID!. Google will then generate a chunk of code for you, which you can paste in place of your current Wordpress search. Voila! Monetized search! My search box generates around an extra 30% of my site revenue.

Get Feedburner on there
Login to your Feedburner account and get it to give you the code for an e-mail subscribe box. I’ve found I get more e-mail subscribers than RSS readers. I believe this is because RSS is really only embraced by the more “web savvy” user and they will be fully capable of finding videos on Digg, YouTube, Google and are more likely to be aware of the bigger sites. So for your regular Joe Blogs (heh), e-mail a nice, easy to understand way to get them to sign up to updates. If you can squeeze your Feedburner RSS subscribe button in above the scroll, all the better - but I have found people that want an RSS feed will find it.

Feedburner also offer “chicklets” which is a little button that shows the world how many subscribed readers you have. Generally, I’d advise not to install this until you have 100 or so readers, there’s no point showing people how unpopular your site is to begin with! Leave it for bragging rights later. It is quite possible to achieve 500-1000 readers within 6-12 months.

Here’s one I made earlier:

In Green: Our main above the scroll adsense
In Yellow: CPM advertising (we’ll talk about this later, but save some banner space!)
In Red: Our monetized Google Coop box
In Brown: The feedburner subscribe bits

That’s most of the design info covered.

Step #7: Sourcing and adding video content to your website

Okay, so how do we go about getting videos onto your site? Well there’s a quick and profitable way and a longer but more profitable away.

The quick and profitable way
I don’t recommend this method to begin with, even though it’s quicker, this is only something you should be doing after your site is established, or if you are very short on time.

Go to digg.com/videos and see what other people find funny. Follow the link through to the video site, grab the video ID and pop it in a post.

When you are post a video, make sure every 2-3 videos you have the words “funny” and/or “video” in the post title. Wordpress uses header tags for these titles and it will help make your Adsense adverts more relevant. Below the video, type a couple of lines explaining the video (without giving too much away!). Be as funny/sarcastic as you like, but keep it short and interesting - and write your own descriptions!

The longer but more profitable way
Okay, this takes a bit more work, but will really, really help you promote your site. One neat thing about Google Video is that they allow you to download the videos. So, go have a search around Google Video and download 20-30 videos that you think are funny. Download them in “PSP” format which will give you a .mp4 format file.

If you have some decent video editing software that can handle mp4 files you can skip this step:

If you’re stuck using Windows Movie Editor you’ll have to convert the file before you can edit it. Now, if you can find a free program, let me know. I’ve been using Riverpast Video Cleaner, which will convert the mp4 files to avi without any real quality loss. It’s $30 but it will be your only expense in this operation. Riverpast will be able to convert all your videos in batch, so go make yourself a cuppa.

Once you’ve got your video in .avi format, create yourself a bitmap image with your site logo and site URL on it. Use your video editing software to show your logo for 5 seconds at the beginning and end of your video, so it’s all branded to you now!

Get your branded videos out there!
Once you’ve got branded videos, you’re really onto a winner. I pull in around 500-800 visitors per day from YouTube alone. Google have a batch video uploader, so your first port of all is to re-upload your newly edited videos onto Google Video.

Once they are uploaded you can add the video information. Generally in the title I again try and get the words “funny video”, “extreme video” or similar in. These help pick up a bunch of generic searches. I’ve found the description doesn’t make a huge difference to whether the video is viewed, as long as the title is good. If you’re uploading to Google, using the batch uploader there is a separate field to link to your website, which becomes an active link, so you may as well type a description. Keep it short and snappy to try and get as many views as possible. For tags, I use a set of standard: funny, video, humour, humor, comedy, laugh, lol, cool, extreme, stupid, insane, accident - then add a couple of video specific keywords on the end.

Repeat this process with YouTube. The only difference with YouTube is that there is no separate field for your own site URL. If you just pop your URL into the description, this will automatically become a clickable link. YouTube is a bit more of a pain because you can only upload 1 video at a time, but you can always do other stuff at the same time! The sheer amount of traffic that YouTube gets makes it worthwhile doing this.

Once you have a “base” of around 30 videos, you don’t need to keep finding new ones. You just create a new YouTube account under a hotmail address every week or so, since you’re a new user and uploading new content, your videos will more often or not appear on the front page briefly which will get you spurts of traffic.

Using your imagination, there are loads of places that accept video uploads that you can use. MySpace anyone? MySpace Video is taking off big-time at the moment, so if you have access to some large MySpace accounts, this can be a great way to get traffic. One other technique is taking a screenshot of your video at 00:00 then posting this picture on a MySpace profile or bulletin, so it looks like an embedded video, but will take people through to your site with the video on. Hey, that’s pretty scrappy - but it works. Make sure you use the border=”0″ attribute on such images so you don’t get a blue border around them!

Step #8: Kick Starting Promotion
Following this recipe so far, you’ll probably make $5-$10 per day. If you want to get up to the $40 per day mark to make your $1,000 a month, you’ll need to give your site a kick up the backside. Here’s how:

Go to www.stumbleupon.com and register yourself with an account and install their browser toolbar.

Once you’re all ready to rock with StumbleUpon, make your way over to www.stumblexchange.com. Stumblexchange is a system where you sign up, stumble a whole list of other people’s sites, then in return they stumble you back. StumbleUpon is fairly simple - the more stumbles your site gets, the more traffic they send you. StumbleUpon has a ton of users and this step will get you 200 more uniques a day for months to come. So login, register your account details and stumble everyone’s site. (If your so inclined, you could script this). Well done, you just added another $200 a month onto your earnings! There’s also a diggxchange and deliciousxchange in this network, however I haven’t experimented with them to comment on this.

Get some links
Everybody loves links, especially Google. There’s a massive list at RSSTop55 of directories and blog aggregators. I would start with these:

• Yahoo
• Open Directory
• Globe of Blogs
• Blogarama
• Blog Universe
• Feed Shark

Next Steps
Now you’ve got some readers and some regular traffic, you can sign up for a CPA advertiser. Burst Media is quite easy to get into and has a large inventory. Having CPA ads will earn you money for page views, without clicks and makes for an excellent secondary income.

Above all, experiment, experiment, experiment! Let me know how you get on!