Cash Money for Students Blog

As a follow up to my previous post, and in response to a few questions about builing landing pages, I present to you:

The Landing Page Design Toolbox: 100 Tools, Tips and Resources
Holy crap! That list is huge, and packed with excellent info on everything from building your landing page to SEO and writing techniques. Check it out.

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If you want to maximise your sales doing affiliate marketing, having a landing page is absolutely essential. A landing page is a web page that offers a review, a testimonal or a sales page for the product or service you are promoting.

A landing page is essential not only because it increases your chances of sales by convincing your customer further after reading your ad or article and clicking your link, and also because as those who are doing article marketing will know well, many article directories forbid linking directly to your merchant page.

This can present a problem to students starting out with Affiliate Marketing, as building a landing page often involves buying web hosting and a domain, and then building a landing page using HTML and CSS.

Luckily for you, some marketer friendly services exist where you can not only build a landing page for free, but you don’t need to know a lick of code to build great looking landing pages that will increase your sales and make you more cash.

The first and aguably most popular of these is Squidoo. With Squidoo you build your page by using the super user-friendly module interface where you can type in your review or sales information, and paste in your affiliate link. You then link to that page from your ad or article.

Another similar service is HubPages, which also offers an extremely easy-to-use interface that allows users with no knowledge of HTML code to create great looking landing pages.

So if you are hestitant about splashing out for hosting and domains, or just don’t have the HTML and CSS knowledge to build your own landing pages from scratch, Squidoo and HubPages might be the solution your are looking for. Try them out and start building landing pages that will increase your sales and earn you more cash.

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So here’s an incredibly important update for anyone considering signing up with Wealthy Affiliate. As of May the 6^th (8 days from today), the monthly membership cost for Wealthy Affiliate Membership is going to increase. There has been much buzz on the WA forums about this, and the consensus is the service has been vastly undervalued and the owners are correcting their pricepoint.

This makes a lot of sense, as there are other IM membership based services (that don’t offer nearly as much value as WA), and they charge up to $97 a month. The extra cash coming in will enable the WA guys to develop new tools and services, and is projected to add even more value to the already excellent service.

So is this bad news for current members? Thankfully, the answer is no, the news is all good. All current members are locked in at the $29.99 per month price for the life of their membership. This is an awesome and gracious move by the WA owners, and is just another testament to their commitment to their members.

The reason this is incredibly important to anyone still making up their mind whether or not to join, is that any member who signs up before the price rise (May 6^th 2008) will be locked in at the original price. Now is the time to sign up if you want to get the new improved service at the old pricepoint. Once you are signed up you will never be subject to any price increase.

No one knows yet what the new cost is going to be, but based on what other sites are charging there is much speculation that it will be significantly more. I know I’m repeating myself like an old broken record at this point, but seriously, now is the time to sign up to Wealthy Affiliate! You have one week left before the price goes up, so stop putting it off and sign up now! You certainly won’t regret it.

If any of you have no idea what I’m blathering about, you can check out Wealthy Affiliate by clicking here,

Or…

Go read my personal testimonial, with my tale of how Wealthy Affiliate helped me earn real money online, by clicking here.

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Sorry for the lack of updates lately, I’ve been in examinations/assignments hell for the past few weeks. Since I’m currently procrastinating my hardest assignment, I thought I’d do a quick update so you know I haven’t died.

As a quick aside, I’d just like to comment on the beauty of Affiliate Marketing. I’ve had my nose in the books for the past two weeks and have barely touched any of my online work, and due to the fact that I’ve got several decent article campaigns running, I’ve still made a bunch of sales and have got two checks coming in the mail.

Ahhhh… passive income. The best kind of income!

But, that aside, in my procrastination I’ve stumbled across another interesting opportunity for students to make a buck online, and this is tailored especially to the more studious of you out there.

Student of Fortune is a site that allows students to ask questions on their area of study, and put up the price they are willing to pay for the answer. Users who know the answer can then provide a solution and get paid the bounty.

The user asking the question chooses the answer that they find the most helpful. Solutions are displayed in an excerpt format, so the buyer won’t get the whole solution until they have coughed up the cash.

The site has a user rating system, so the better your answers, the more likely your solutions are likely to be bought. Solutions are kept on the site, so particularly good ones can be bought again and again by those seeking answers to that topic.

I haven’t tried this out yet, but I certainly will once I’m through with exams. The guys on a forum I frequent swear by this site for making a few easy bucks, so check it out and see if it’s for you.

Definitely sounds more interesting than filling out surveys, and you might just have a few bucks worth of answers sitting in your My Documents folder right now if you’ve done any papers lately.

Click here to check out Student of Fortune

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Filling out surveys is a fairly popular way for people from all walks of life to make a bit of scratch on the side. Survey sites have caught a bit of flak over the past few years, with some sites charging for membership without even providing enough surveys to make back the membership fees, some not paying their members or cheating members out of their commissions, and some dodgy dealers were charging exorbitant amounts for ’survey lists’ that were either outdated or just a list of links to all the free sites the user could have found with a quick google search.

But, luckily for us, these days survey sites are generally pretty good, and if you know what to look for in a site, and how to avoid the few scammers that remain, you can easily make a little cash on the side with survey sites.

What to look for:

• It should be free. Don’t pay someone for the privilege of doing their market research for them, they should be paying you. If a site charges for membership, this is a good sign you should look elsewhere, there’s plenty of legitimate sites that don’t.
• It should have a referral program. Lets face it, filling out surveys is pretty boring. After the first 50, the magic just seems to disappear. Good survey sites will have a referral program where you can get your friends and family to sign up, and you’ll make a small commission on what they make, and if they do the same, you’ll make some money off what those people make. Confused? It just means if you get lots of other people to sign up, you’ll make money off any surveys they do, so you won’t have to spend hours and hours filling the suckers out in order to make anything more than bus fare.
• It should have a range of offers and actions to perform. As I mentioned above, surveys can get really boring really fast. Most modern sites will have a range of things you can do to earn your commission, such as trying out software, reviewing free samples, playing games, and of course, lots of surveys.
• Incentive programs. Good survey sites will reward you beyond the monetary incentive for doing all that work. Some sites will offer you credit towards consumer goods for each survey filled out, others will have prizes for most surveys done in a week, most referrals, and also for random users, just to keep things fun and interesting. Just a warning, this is a tactic used by some of the scammers too, so keep your wits about you.
• Community. A forum where you can keep in touch with other surve-jockeys, compare notes and provide feedback. This is epecially important, and keeps the site owners honest and accountable and the members informed.

The beauty of filling out surveys online are along the same lines as any sort of online work: You can do it any time, day or night, so they are great for anyone on a schedule, for instance, uhh… College Students!

You also get paid per survey, so it’s not something you have to sit down and devote hours upon hours to (although some people do!), you can fill out a few every now and then when you get a spare hour to kill. If you can manage a few a day, with payments of on average 2-6 bucks a pop, you can earn yourself a decent amount of beer money at the end of the week.

Survey sites are never going to make you huge gobs of money. Many limit the amount of surveys you can do per day or per week, so signing up with a few different reputable surveys sites will be necessary if you want to make more than just a bit of pocket change.

Here’s a couple of sites you can check out if you are interested in making some money doing surveys online:

Treasure Trooper

CashCrate

If you’ve had success doing surveys, have a site to recommend, or even if you’ve got some scammer horror stories about survey sites, drop me a comment below.

Cheers,

Seth

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Article Marketing, whichever way you want to look at it, is a numbers game.

Whether you’ve found a pure, untouched niche and you want fill out those top search engine rankings before other marketers catch on, or you are in a higher competition niche and want to compete with all the other article marketers, you are going to want to have as many of your articles driving readers to your affiliate links as humanly possible.

As many of you know, even if you can squeeze out one article a day, you are still gonna have 30 articles (hopefully) making you cash at the end of the month, a figure not to be dismissed. But if you can write two a day, then that doubles your exposure! What about 3? Or 5? Or 10…

Not all of us, especially those studying with a heavy workload, can afford to take out that much time a day to write article after article. Personally, I try to at least do a few every weekday, and put aside 2 hours, aiming for five a day, but honesty usually getting only 3 or 4 done.

Many marketers swear by article spinners. Article Spinning software takes an article you’ve written, and after specifying your keywords you want to remain intact, runs it through a thesaurus powered sieve, changing your article by replacing words with synonyms of the same to make a new article. The various programs available claim anywhere from 5 to 100 unique articles can be spun from a single article, therefore cutting your article writing time exponentially.

As for me, I’m very suspicious of this technique. The articles that come out in the end are usually (if they are lucky) barely readable, and very reminiscent of spam emails.

The phrase:

This peice of software is beneficial to anyone writing articles for profit.

Comes out looking like

This portion of data is advantageous to individuals enscribing journals for finance.

They really aren’t gonna fool any human reader, the only real benefit I can see is getting more backlinks to your landing pages. However, with google getting smarter, Page Rank meaning less and less every day, and not to mention consumers getting smarter, I feel this will only hurt you in the end more than benefit. I know for certain if I was researching a product and came across a one of these robotic sounding spun articles, I’d be clicking off immediately, looking for a real opinion written by a real person. But, of course, your mileage may vary.

My personal technique for ’spinning articles’ (ahem) goes thusly:

After researching and writing say, 5 to 10 articles on a new niche, I’ll sit down with two Word documents open, side by side, one with my original article, one with a new document. I then go through para by para, re-writing each into my new article. Once this is done with all of my articles, I’ll either repeat the process, or go write some more original content. This method won’t save you the time spinning software does, but it will make things a bit quicker. I can probably at least double my amount of articles this way, and tripling them is sometimes possible, and sometimes a bit of a push.

I guess the moral to the story here is: Nothing beats good, well written original content. At least in my opinion. It takes longer, but I think in the long run it is much more beneficial. So Nay says I to the Article Spinners.

If you’ve had success with article spinning, or want to share your methods of pumping out those articles at a rate of knots, please drop me a comment!

Cheers,

Seth

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One of the reasons article marketing is such a great choice for students wanting to make some money online is that it’s something most students are very familiar with; researching and writing articles. I know, I know, I hear your collective snort of electronic disgust (the sound of many, many browser windows closing), “Don’t I do enough of that at school?”

Well, the good news is, article marketing, while being similar in many ways to writing your papers and reports for school, is also a lot easier, a lot more fun, and each article you write can earn you money. How many more papers would get done at college if the students were getting paid to write them do you think?

For those of you unfamiliar with article marketing as a whole, here’s a brief summary (This will be the topic of an entire post, or more likely, a series of posts):

The basis of article marketing is writing brief articles reviewing a product that is being sold by a particular merchant. The author (that’s you) then submits the article(s) to a variety of article directories with their affiliate link attached. This affiliate link, when clicked by your enthralled reader, then sends the reader to a page where they can purchase the product, and if and when they do, the author (you again) gets a juicy commission of the selling price.

That’s a bit of a simplification of the process, but fairly accurate. Writing articles to attract affiliate sales is a lot easier than writing essays for school because:

• Brevity is important. The most effective articles are between 300-400 words.
• You choose the product, so you choose the topic. Would you rather research and write about The Societal Effects of Italian Neo-Realism, or the new wave of Apple iPod products?
• You choose the angle. No Marxist readings or Post Modern interpretations here. You can write a review, an anecdotal blog style post, a story, an experience, a list of features or benefits, a comparison to a competing product, or just your thoughts on the product. As long as it’s comprehensible and gets your reader thinking about buying, it’s all good.

With your ingrained essay writing skills, writing articles for Internet Marketing is an absolute snap. If you can put aside an hour or two every other day, it’s easy to write ten articles a week, which can bring you in the starts of a healthy income.

Travis Sago, Wealthy Affiliate’s resident Article Marketing guru (he calls it Bum Marketing, because it’s totally free and he reckons even a bum off the street can do it) estimates that properly written and Search Engine friendly articles (SEO, or Search Engine Optimization will be explained in an upcoming post too if you’ve lost me at this point) will earn on average $20 a month once they are submitted to the article directories.

Of course, some will earn you nothing, and some (Travis Calls these ‘Home Runs’) Will earn you upwards of two or three hundred dollars. Travis also points out that once articles are submitted to the directories, they can and will continue to earn sales for you for many months, or in some cases, years.

If that has whetted your appetite, stay tuned for a more in-depth look at article marketing from a student perspective. If you can’t wait to get started, check out Wealthy Affilate for the best repository of Article Marketing info on the interwebs, and if you decide to join, you can hit up Travis in the forums. He’s a nice dude who loves to help out newbs (surprisingly since the amount I annoyed him when I was starting out would be enough to drive a perfectly sane person bonkers) so thanks, Travis.

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With internet marketing gaining in popularity, more and more people are realizing that once you look past the plethora of scams and get-rich-quick schemes that glut the industry, anyone armed with the right information can use Internet Marketing to create a stable side income, work from home full time, or make a few extra bucks by working a couple of hours a week. One segment of the workforce that can really benefit from Internet Marketing is students wanting to make some money to help them get through college without relying on loans or their family’s money.

With Internet Marketing maturing and legitimate information becoming more widely available, the purveyors of the scams and shams are being pushed aside by those offering real opportunities to make money online. Students who are savvy enough to avoid the scams are finding that internet marketing is both easy and fun, and a great way to make money without having to resort to flipping burgers or tending bar.

Students are embracing Internet Marketing as a source of income because:

• The hours are flexible, the work can be done at any time of day or night
• The earning potential is virtually unlimited
• The aspects some in the industry see as difficult, such as researching and article writing, are second nature to most students, and this aspect of the work is exponentially easier than writing a paper for school, something students do on a weekly basis.
• The huge range of services available to promote through marketing techniques means students can promote products or services in line with their interests, and can reach the customer with more legitimacy than traditional marketers due to their geninune interest in the topics.
• The most effective techniques in Internet Marketing, such as writing articles, blogging and building web pages are free to implement, so students can start earning with no initial investment.
• Students are often more familiar with the new wave of marketing tools than the marketing gurus themselves. This is especially true of tools such as social networks (Myspace, Facebook) Blogging (Blogger, Wordpress) and social bookmarking (Digg, StumbleUpon)

Students looking to create a real income working online should investigate Internet Marketing as a viable option for doing so. Avoid the scams and over-hyped products and seek out the real deal information, and you can create a real online job that will fit around your study schedule.

Click here for more info on how students can make money using a variety of techniques including internet marketing, webstores and survey affiliates.

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This is a blog discussing Internet Marketing and other “work from home” solutions from a student perspective.

IM is an excellent income generation choice for students working to support themselves whilst in college. Flexibile hours, no commute or boss, and in most cases the work involves a lot of areas in which most students are already comfortable, such as researching and writing articles.

We will also look at other techniques such as surveys, pay-to-blog, webstores, and any other techniques or ideas that we can dig up.

There’s not much here at the moment, but that will change very soon. In the meantime you can check out our parent site http://www.cashmoneyforstudents.com for some more info on IM and other cash generation ideas for students.

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