2008.01.20

Highest Paying Affiliate Programs

Posted in General at 8:00 am by Sam

The highest paying affiliate programs online, in terms of dollar amount earned per conversion, are primarily related to the finance or travel industries. Finance affiliate programs include credit card offers, ranging from $20 to $120 per approval, student loan offers, and home loan offers. Travel affiliate programs include both flight sales and vacation packages.

Making money from a site or blog in these industries only requires a small readership. Even with an approval rate of .5%, one hundred readers a day can garner more than $1500 a month from credit card applications.

Our advice is to focus your blog or site on a niche within the finance or travel industry. For example, low interest college student credit cards or summer vacation packages. Here are some examples of affiliate programs within each high paying industry.

Finance Affiliate Programs

  • NCS Reporting - NCS Reporting provides access to affiliate programs for major credit cards and other finance products. Reporting is pay-per-click based and pays several dollars per click for targeted traffic.
  • Performics - Performics, which is part of Doubleclick, provides affiliate programs for all major credit cards with payouts ranging from $20 to $100 per credit card approval.
  • Driver Loans - Driver Loans is a lead generation site for auto financing loans. Average payout is $9.60 per lead.
  • Next Student Affiliates - Provides student debt consolidation and loan referrals. Pay outs start at $100 per validated application.

Travel Affiliate Programs

  • Orbitz - The Orbitz affiliate program is managed through LinkShare. Commissions from $5 to $30 can be earned on various travel products.
  • Travelocity - The Travelocity affiliate program is managed through Commission Junction.

The highest paying affiliate programs, in terms of percentage, on the other hand, are mostly digital goods. These include ringtones, wallpaper, music, ebook and software affiliate programs.

Highest Percentage Affiliate Programs

  • Thumbplay - Thumbplay pays out $8 per lead, or 200% of their monthly subscription rate of $3.99.
  • Amazon - The Amazon mp3 program will pay you 10% for digital mp3 sales. When it was first started, the percentage was 20%!

We have created a static page that we will continually update with the highest paying affiliate programs. Our goal is to eventually create a list that ranks affiliate programs by both performance and payouts. If you know of any other well paying affiliate programs please let us know. We welcome your comments and feedback.

2007.10.29

Yahoo! Publisher (alternative to Google Adsense)

Posted in General, Other Money Makers at 8:00 am by a writer

Yahoo! has been trying to catch up to Google for sometime now, specifically in the area of advertising revenue. CWire recently gave the Yahoo! publisher contextual link platform a try on our site. This platform has some interesting features that may give Google a run for their money and is an excellent alternative to Adsense for monetizing your website or blog.

The Yahoo! Publisher platform gets a 10 for ease of use. That along with the ability to use other publisher interfaces is a major plus for blogs like CWire. For example, you can easily submit your website for inclusion into Yahoo!’s search engine and you can also easily submit your feed for inclusion in their RSS feed directories. These tools are all under the heading “Drive Traffic” - you cant beat that!

Yahoo Publisher vs. Google Adsense Summary

For Publishers: The only downside to Yahoo! publisher is that there are simply not as many advertisers as there are on the Google Adwords platform (which means that ads may not be as relevant to your pages). However, several anecdotal studies by blogs have show that the payouts are competitive to Adsense.
For Advertisers: The flip side to the above, is it may create a buying opportunity if you are looking to advertise your site or service via purchasing keywords. In fact, Yahoo is currently offering advertisers a $25 credit just for signing up. If you have ever thought about buying keywords before, this may be the time to do it - or at least give it a shot!

Note: Do not use BOTH Adsense and Yahoo Publisher on the same pages of your site/blog. Their terms of use strictly forbid this!

2007.10.23

Internet Monetization Calculator and Dictionary - New Tools

Posted in General, Investing, Other Money Makers at 12:02 am by a writer

In our never ending quest to make cwire a great resource for internet entrepreneurs, we are proud to announce two new tools to the cwire website.

Internet Monetization Calculator - Although the math is not too complicated, we created a simple tool that allows you to compare the different ways to monetize your website (CPM, CPA & CPC) and allows for you to calculate potential earnings.

Internet Marketing Dictionary / Resource to Making Money - We hope that this one day turns into a tool that will allow for the individual looking to learn how to make money on the internet not only learn the vocab, Read the rest of this entry »

2007.10.15

Welcome New York Times Readers

Posted in General at 1:05 am by Sam

Thank you for visiting CWire.org, a resource for web developers and entrepreneurs. We encourage you to add our page to your RSS Feed and subscribe by sending your email address to info at cwire dot org.

If you read the recent article in the New York Times, you are most likely interested in the following:

Feel free to send us your questions or feedback.

2007.10.05

Make Money with Domain Parking

Posted in General at 8:00 am by Sam

Domain parking is a way to make money through the natural type-in traffic of your domain names. You essentially are using a service to put up ads on your unused domain name. You only need to make about $.60 a month per domain name for this to be a profitable enterprise (assuming you paid $7.00 for registration).

The most common type of domain name that gets type-in traffic is a typo domain name.

Typo Domain Names
A typo domain name is a domain that is based off a typo of another more popular site. For example, ituns.com is a typo of the popular itunes.com service from Apple. A site parked at ituns.com could probably expect to get a couple thousand visitors a month just from mistaken type-ins.

To find typos to register, you can use a Typo Generator Tool. People have been using this trick for years so it can be hard to find domain names, but if you keep up with fresh topics (e.g. search for typos on the name of an up and coming pop star) you might score big.

Mistaken Domain Names
Another popular domain name type for parking, are domain names people type-in when they are “guessing” at a web site URL for a product, company, or celebrity. For example, I might type-in orvitz.com after mishearing a commercial for orbitz.com. Similarly, I might type in downloaditunes.com, or zuneplayer.com, etc. These are harder to score with since you are guessing at the potential type-ins you will receive.

Domain Parking Services
Here are a few services that offer domain parking. Note that there are several services that only deal with business that require large quantities of domains before they will accept you into their program, this post sticks to the programs that do not have such limitations:

Sedo
Summary: Sedo is the 500lb gorilla that may have invented the process of domain parking (or at least created a simple interface for doing parking domains)
Pros: Easy, all you do is point your nameservers in the direction of Sedo and fill out a few fields in their sign up process and you are good to go; minimal technology skills required. Sedo will also allow you to list your domains in their domains for sale section which includes a simple traffic stat counter.
Cons: Sedo uses Google’s adsense platform (their website says that they use “partners such as Google”) to supply advertisements to parked domains, which adds another layer of intermediary (one more partner to take a slice of a pie that remains the same size). For example, Google and Sedo split revenue generated from advertisements and then Sedo splits revenue with you.

Domain Hop
Summary
: Domain Hop is run by the people who bring you Kanoodle. Kanoodle is a search engine that sells pay per click advertisements in a similar fashion to Google.
Pros: There is no “middle man” as in the case of Sedo. Domain Hop claims on their homepage that their ads generate over five times the return of competitor products.
Cons: General assumption that Google has better optimization than smaller search engines like Kanoodle; therefore they may not be as good in targeting the correct ads to viewers which could result in a lower CPM.

NameDrive
Summary: NameDrive has a simple interface and an affiliate program you can use to sign up other users.
Pros: Monthly payouts, affiliate program to earn extra revenue over just domain parking, and domain stat tracking. You can also list your site for sale in the marketplace.
Cons: The web site does not divulge the exact revenue split you get for parking your domain name, which makes you wonder how much you’re really earning.

CashParking
Summary: CashParking is from GoDaddy. They are the ONLY domain parking services that CHARGES to use it. We wouldn’t recommend it.
Pros: Supposedly, this service can earn you higher CPMs as GoDaddy is out selling some direct ads for you and other sites in your genre.
Cons: This costs $3.99 a month. That ruins the whole “$0.60 a month will make your domain profitable” thing we talked about earlier. If you have a good reason to pay for domain parking through GoDaddy email us.

I currently have about 50 domains registered waiting to be developed. In the meantime, I have them listed on Sedo.com and they earn their keep! Good luck with your domain parking and let us know about your successes.

2007.10.01

Welcome Web Entrepreneurs!

Posted in General at 8:00 am by Sam

Welcome to CWire.org. My name is Sam, and with a few internet gurus, we recently took over writing for this site and wanted to tell the readers what to expect from the new CWire! We are going to expand this site’s scope to beyond just making money through blogging. We will be discussing both ways to make money via blogging and simple web site ideas where individuals can make money on the internet on a wide variety of web sites. These methods include ideas like selling virtual goods, creating websites based around affiliate programs, direct sales, internet advertising, and more. Some posts to look forward to include:

  • Top Paying Industries
  • Basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  • Domain Parking
  • Free Web Development Tools
  • Affiliate Programs for Bloggers
  • And much more!

In addition to new posts, we will be building on the classic posts from cwire.org including:

We are excited to helping you make money on the Internet and we would love to hear your feedback and questions!

Keep an eye out for a post within the next few days, with the subject matter of How to Sell a Website.

Lets go make some money on the web!

2007.09.22

Website Value Calculator is Fixed

Posted in General at 4:29 pm by admin

Hi all,

Sorry for the inconvenience of not having the website value calculator operational over the past few days. I was Dugg on September 20, and the calculator tool received over 46,000 valuation requests in a number of hours. This caused a number of timeout issues on that day, which I tried to fix on the spot in the code. Unfortunately I have been quite busy with my work for the past two days, and did not notice that I had made a few spelling mistakes in my PHP — as reporting errors was disabled to avoid users seeing nasty PHP timeout errors, I didn’t spot the issue until now.

Have a great weekend,
Matt

2007.07.17

I Didn’t Even Write my Most Popular Pages

Posted in General, Blogging for Profit at 10:52 pm by admin

I was just looking over my server logs for the past few months, and I noticed something very interesting. I didn’t even write my most popular pages! From CyberWyre logs, below are the most popular pages on this entire site:

1. Website Value Calculator
2. Google Search Tools (download MP3s)
3. Current Top 15 Internet Searches
4. Highest Paying AdSense Keywords

CyberWyre: Top-four pages by traffic stats

What this shows to me is that you may not necessarily need to be the most grammatically correct, or write the most controversial, or witty articles to get a good amount of traffic — just give the people something useful, something they want. These types of pages are very easy to link to, and tend to get a lot of attention from sites like Digg or Netscape.

If you have some good web application development skills, try putting together a few PHP scripts to integrate with your WordPress blog. Think of some nifty little widget that others might find interesting or cool and drop it in your site. The best part is that once you develop it, it requires absolutely no further work to maintain. I wrote an article on inserting PHP script inline with your WordPress articles, titled Gotta Love Automatic Money.

Have fun and don’t be afraid to experiment a bit!

2007.06.29

Happy Long Weekend!

Posted in General at 10:56 am by admin

I’ve been holding off on updating CyberWyre until after the long weekend. With Canada Day, and Independence Day, I’m sure my traffic will fall to next to nothing. Take it easy, and I’ll be back to regular posting after Monday.

I’m off to Kingston for the weekend now!  Gonna try to beat the long weekend traffic…

« Previous entries ·