TheAnand

My cousin and I were trying to figure out ways to escape/reduce the problem of recession. Every person I have been talking to have worries over recession and especially those in IT related services.

They are a worried lot, with huge housing loans over their heads, with their net worth in the marriage market falling. These computer professionals are seeing an uncertain future.

But I think there are 5 ways you can actually benefit from a recession! Presenting TheAnand’s 5 ways to benefit from a recession.

I was too busy looking at the footer of CNBC TV18 for the past week and finally have decided that buying websites is a way better investment than trying to make money in the stock market! This is a screenshot of my current holdings

Though I was able to make some money over the last year same time with a way lesser investment than this, this year was something else! Currently at a red color of more than Rs. 90,000, I am beginning to think that buying websites are a way better investment option than putting it into shares!

I had been talking about getting into affiliate marketing for sometime now and one of the main hurdles I faced about 6 months back was that TheAnand was my biggest site and the blog brought in bulk of the traffic. I tried applying for a few affiliate programs and most of them rejected me since the site was in a sub-domain. Here is a tip, next time you plan to build a big long term site, do it on the main domain, not on a sub-domain!! I learnt this the hard way.

My personal life has always been outside this blog since I started this blog. I wanted this blog to be one good read than to be adding to the noise on the blogosphere. These days I am battling the demons within with a whole lot of drama all over making me miss all my deadlines and limits. As I prepare to slay the demons, here are some posts you might have missed on TheAnand

1. How much do you love your GirlFriend? Ironically in a time when I am going through a break up mess.

You never get rich working for someone else. A typical day jobbers’ life goes something like this

1. Wake Up
2. Go to Work
3. Pay Bills
4. GOTO Step 1

A very few do save a lot of money only to spend it in an emergency. So a lot of people, particularly youngsters want to make money online and be their own boss. Here are a few tips I think will help in molding a perfect you.

1. Know your target audience

The title should not really be what blogging bought me, its more like what my online activity bought me. But then, blogging got me introduced to making money online, then to macro sites, niche sites and all that. I never really invested anything I made online back into the business expect for buying new domains and starting over with some other niche site. Thank you blogging and my readers who indirectly helped me buy it.

I am some sort of a pioneer in making money online my friends circle. Initially I used to persuade my friends to make money online, but these days I am persuading them to start blogging. So far I have succeeded in converting one to blogging religion but he is not actually blogging for the right reasons. Ahh Well! The other managed to get a site, hopefully soon he will be a convert.

Since in the past year that I have started blogging, it has become some sort of a addiction, a private place in the public domain to shout about anything and everything. Blogging is such a great experience that….eh? My Firefox Spell check says blogging is not even a word!

I have not been very successful with affliate programs in the web world, so I recently took up a affliate agency program with a bank here who pay per sale. I know it sounds pretty cheapass, but every penny of money counts and the way I am planning to make money is a mixture of online and offline marketing for the product. I am not really willing to let you know what the thing is, but its a banking product, but not insurance.

Millionaire? Not Exactly Last week I got my first Adsense Check from Google. Nothing else for a better New Year Gift! Hope I keep getting these every month!

How much was it?

The check was a huge princely amount of 127$! Yep, I have not left out any zeros on either side intentionally or otherwise!

First?

Yep, right again. This is my first check from Google ever ever ever! I have been online for more than 7 years now, blogging for about 16 months now and this is my first check? YES! Thats the best part, I just learned the hard way that pennies and cents do addup to a nice amount.

King Nomar, my good Internet friend and my first Internet money making friend went low profile after he sold his blog. I am sure he must have got some nice change since it was bought by iEntry. The very same iEntry who bought CashQuests for $15,000 (I think) recently and are in the perfect process of killing it. They have not even approved my comments on that blog yet. I sometimes feel sorry for these blogs which are rarely updated by the new owners and end up in a slow death.

So, its official today, AGLOCO is a dead horse project. All that hype claiming to make you money for surfing the Internet and all that hard work you guys put in for getting referrals and accumulating are hereby declared worthless!

My first reaction was a smile when I got this email. I was expecting this anytime since its been a while since they updated their blog, sent a newsletter or did even try to get back members to use their viewbar thing after they declared payout in 10 years! That was outright right there nonsense from them when they said that. I know it takes time to start profiting out of any business online or offline, but 10 years is a tad tooo long! But I am glad they informed their members about the death with dignity and did not shy away from it.

Last weekend saw one of my humour posts hit it big with StumbleUpon users. It was well received and hence a few ‘thumbs up’ brought in a lot of visits in a short time of 20 minutes. Now thats fast!

But the other day I was checking the stats from all sources and MyBlogLog and Adsense stats confused me a lot. The variation is simply too mind blowing. Check out the MyBlogLog stats for the blog:

Refferal Stats of MyBlogLog:

MyBlogLog Adsense Stats:

I am never a movie buff, but I do go to about 5-7 movies a year or so. But firstI just came home after watching Saawariya, the much anticipated Diwali release. I am too stupified to even guess what I did the last 3 hours of my life. Not a single scene stays in my mind and I have no guess on why this movie was even made in the first place either.

If you are anything like me, you usually spend a great deal of time online, chatting, hanging out at the forums, researching new niches and ways to make money online. The amount of information that you intake each day is simply enormous. Have you ever taken any action on the information you know yet?

How NOT to SEO

I recently noticed that I rank pretty high for the keyword “Web Designer Cochin” on the first as the 4th result. I got all happy and then I decided to have a goal to reach the top to topple the currently numero uno. I with my knowledge of search engine optimization, I optimized my pages with keywords in the title(I did not have it before), keywords in the body and stuff like that. But to my astonishment, I found Google kicked me to the second page for all my good ranking terms. Now I have been going up this week again to reach the 6th position. So the moral of the story is – “Do not optimize your sites too much for keywords, anchor text is important and don’t live by Google!”.

I found that a lot of people are using minisites about different topics to make money with adsense and other programs. Lot of webmasters feel that they should have a lot of sites in different niches to get a decent income without much trouble.

What are minisites? They are small sites with information about a topic and the subjects around it written with SEO in mind to obtain high results for a set of keywords to bring in traffic.

I have been terribly busy the past month looking at ways to increase my revenue and presence online. Also I am a bit pissed off by the pending page rank. As a webmaster or as a money seeker online, you must know the importance of page rank. It is what determines your ceiling to make money on the web. I am angry with this update since it is not being fair to me. I build a lot of sites build links to them and wait for the Pagerank update, but where is it?

I am announcing the end of my $27.93 cash giveaway today. The response was pretty good and some more entries are in. I wanted to give everyone a fair chance before I closed this contest.

Also my server troubles meant that I could not give the needed attention to this contest. Nevertheless, the contest closes on 31st of August. The winner will be chosen randomly from the entries to win the $27.93. Here are the recent entries that I got:

ThePinkc.net entered the contest and has some nice information on reading skills which I enjoyed reading. I used to read a lot, but not much these days.

If you remember, I had made a post about adsense earnings a few days back in which I said your site must well, suc to make money with Adsense. This month, I am happy to report that my site now sucs more than 100% than last month!

Well, the best part is I am happy about it! My Adsense account is really old and when I say old here is what I mean

I am all exited about getting my first check soon. I am also pretty confident about it, since I am adding sites to my portfolio that will help my adsense. And no, they are not bandwidth eating proxies!

Today I went around digging my own archives again to find some of my well received posts. Those who are new to my blog might find it interesting. Tell me what deserves a kudos or a kick!

• Made for Paid Posts is the next big thing!
• My Cash Giveaway, are you in yet?
• Who is the best of PHP, ASP and JSP?
• Make money with your blog.

These are some of the posts I found to get some good traffic from searches too. Tomorrow on, I will be tell you some really helpful ways to get your blog some fast and easy linkbacks for some PR and Google love! Maybe I am turning into a SEO blogger now.

Going further deep into the paid posts and making money with them, I had told you about money in paid posts being the next best thing to do. Taking off from where I left that post:

Buying a domain: This, as everyone will tell is the most important step. But when you are making money with paid posts, I can tell you that this is not at all the most important step. You can always buy any domain for this purpose. but one thing you can do to make best money with this is to buy a domain with PR. Either you register a dropped domain with PR or else buy such domains from popular forums like Digitalpoint or Sitepoint.

The promotion is going strong and as I promised, here are the first set of participants for the contest. If you are unaware, TheAnand is giving away $27.93 in a linkback contest. Besides the chance to win, you get a free from my blog too. Though the PR is not very decent, but the other rankings are good So people, keep them coming! and others, drop by these blogs and who knows what you will find?

• Jaxim has a blog which notes all the contest from blogosphere. It is a good resource for all those people who are looking for cool contests to enter! The latest one to include is a $2500 prize money!

I think the best way to learn PHP, or any other programming language for that matter, is through practical application of the language. I was looking around for a way to learn PHP easily and having fun on the way when I was thinking of designing a new theme for wordpress blogs. This is definitely a good way to learn some PHP, loads of CSS and get a basic foundation on how these work together and stuff.

Recently I won a contest from a fellow blogger Andreas Bard in a contest hosted by him. I promised to give away the prize money to another blogger in a contest. I won $30 cash from him, but due to credit card payment, paypal took a commision off it. So I am giving away 27.93, what I got from Andreas.

The rules are simple since the prize is not something to write home about. To enter the contest make a post about this blog linking to a inner post tell everyone about the contest and where the money came from. Here is a sample.

With Google cracking down on Made For Adsense and Adsense Arbitrages, its no longer okie-dockie to make money with sites made only for Adsense revenues. I was thinking on new ways to make money online, when I remembered reading about Made for Text Links being the next big thing. But honestly, I don’t think it is a viable alternative to Made For Adsense as this method of making money is largely dependent on a lot of factors like PageRank, traffic, niche and a whole lot more, which means time is needed to make money with them.

I am feeling a bit uneasy for letting my posting frequency dwindle these days. But I have been awfully busy with some new projects and my learnings with PHP.

Last month I spent about $75 buying 2 new sites and 3 new domains and advertising my site a bit for some search engine love. Here are some sites I bought recently.

Capital-Surf – This is a blog where I use to make some sponsored posts and other paid posts. The site also has a page rank which I can use to benefit my other sites also.

Going from $70.94 in April through $194 in May to the end of yet another month – June. Its really a learning experience, trying to make money, spending some and making some more. I was debating on whether to publish my earnings this month since I am supposed to take the focus of making money online from this blog, but for now, I will continue publishing my earnings till I think up of something else.

So what is the current standing of this blog monetarily? The June Earnings, ladies and gentlemen *Drumroll Please*

Adsense: $5.01

Sponsored/Paid Post: $268.85

Last week I was talking about the preferred web programming language for building Web Applications and the best to learn amongst PHP, ASP and JSP. Most of the readers commented that PHP is perfect for me. I did a few searches and found that it is true.

Here is what I conclude:

ASP is the preferred language of most VB developers, as is very related to the desktop programming language. Also it will be very easy to sell your skills if you are good with ASP. A simple search with Monster Job Search will tell you this. At the time of searching for jobs, I found 2228 openings for ASP and just 668 for PHP.

As you might know, I am trying to leverage my skills online, trying to make money off the internet. The internet is continously evolving, from a simple way to communicate between two computers, it has gone a long way. Heck, some are even trying to scrap it off!

I started off my web life with HTML, a basic and easy programming language if it can be called so. I started of making sites off it just for the fun sake of it, with some photoshop tricks to make it look nice. But I got busy with studies for some years and when I got back, the net had moved forward and become more than just Internet as I knew it pre 2000’s.

This a pretty interesting thing I came across all the normal blogs, which claim to make you money online is not making a great deal of money online. Only the big ones like John Chow and others of the kind are actually making big bucks enough to quit a day job. Also the content for making money blogs attract people who already know about advertisements and adsense and others, so it will not make much in terms of PPC revenue either. I had these thoughts running through my mind when I saw this at Courtney Tuttle:

Usually most parents want their kids to go to college, get good grades, join some multinational gaint and earn money. My parents are no different, they want me to get great grades and work to make money. But I say different, I want to make money, not earn it!

Looking for some inspiration got me to a recent post in Mashable about Web Entrepreneurs who either dropped out of college and missed it all together! This gave some more inspiration not to study, but to learn things. I am learning web coding soon and try my hand on making some cool money, if I do fail on that, I can always sell my skills to earn money like everyone else does!

Hem Acharya was asking me on how to make money with paid posts and the effective way to make money with them. I decided to make a post answering him since there have been many approaches to making money with paid posts.

Paid posts are of two types, one where there is a open marketplace of advertisers, as in PayPerPost where bloggers choose what they want and blog about it for the money. The other type is like that of SponsoredReviews, where the advertiser approves your blog once you inform them that you want to blog about them. The second approach is better for those bloggers who have a blog which is popular and has a good reader base.

Most people make money online through many methods as I mention earlier in my Money Online: How To Guide, many people use their blog to make money online like selling links on the blog, adsense and affliate programs and more. John Chow and Mike are examples of this kind of money online. There are a few others who use their blog as a launchpad to sell something they have on offer. Blogger of this kind include KingNomar and me. Both of us have other sources of income than the blog, but enjoy blogging and use it as a launch desk to promote our new ventures and existing services.

Since my last post about my May earnings, I have been getting a lot of mails to help people to make money online. I am more than willing to help everyone out, since I believe internet is a great place for everyone to become independent and live free. So I simply point them to my blog, give them links to my main helpful posts:

• Make Money With Your Blog in 10 steps
• The Psychology Of Making Money

Last week I got my paypal money deposited to my bank account. Time to celebrate

It was a fairly simple procedure since I used my Xoom account to transfer the funds to my bank. Xoom is a online fund transfer service much like PayPal or Western Union Money Transfer and others. They specialize in India and do direct deposit to your bank account. I first sent myself the money to my bank account and paid with my Paypal account. The money was deposited to my account in 2 days flat. I was really impressed with the level of service and would really recommend them to anyone! The withdrawal fee structure is a bit on the higher side compared to paypal, but is justified with the speed of the transaction.

Third month of making money online, and now I am officially a 3-figure blogger After adding some good money making methods, I am getting close to my monthly target of 500$ a month. My last months earnings was $70.94 from all the sources. This month here are the stats.

Adsense: $6.75

Content Writing: $125.50

PayPerPost: $62.50

AuctionAds: $0.00

Total:  194.75

I added AuctionAds in the end of May, just to try it out. It is getting the clicks better than Adsense but conversions are not. I think these type of ads will work out only in gadgets or technology related blogs of the kind. I might run them for a few more days and see if any of the clicks convert.

The AGloCo Scam-Viewbar is currently slated for release on Monday, that’s Tuesday in Asia. Hope they keep up their word this time, else they are in for a beating from most members! Their official blog has announced that the viewbar will be avaliable for download and use with most Windows machines with support for IE and Firefox.

I am bringing in some of my previous posts to the front page. The traffic to this blog have reached places in the last few months, so it will be nice to have some of my interesting posts from the archive to the front page. Here we go!

• First will be the JohChow Pen, which will be the star post till it finds another home in another part of the world. Who’s claiming it next?
• The All new Yahoo! Web based chat. Looks nice and super.Have you logged in recently?

Ready to change yourselves? Ready to bring in that money is abundant attitude? Here is the first part of this series of “The Psychology Of Making Money”.

Here are 3 tips from TheAnand that will help you make money than earn them

Money is Energy: That’s right. In Hinduism, we worship the Goddess of Wealth and Prosperity. We pray that the goddess should visit us, be with us bringing in money and prosperity. We are creating an ambiance for the money to flow in. We become the masters of money by allowing it to come to us freely, not restricting it with any mis-aligned thoughts. I earn only xxx$ is a limiting thought indeed.

Do you have it in you to make money? Make them in hard cold cash? Live with it? Do you earn or make them?

Almost everyone employed earns them, even I did till the end of last month. I was working at a telecom company here, Airtel, Cochin as a Retention Officer. I earned about 121$ a month. Yea, people still work for that kind of money, even less. My job was to retain customers leaving our Telephone and Broadband service. I left it last month to concentrate harder on my college and to take care of some inherited business. But I was totally new to this whole “make money online” concept. But I learned quickly, thanks to a million blog out there. When I read about people making 3+ figures of income online, I was interested. My first full time job paid me only 75$ !

Recently I have been thinking on these lines.

Adsense is undoubtedly the best in making money online for most webmasters and many have been making more than 5 figures out of it. Adsense provides webmasters an opportunity to make money out of what they do. Providing contextual ads to the content and stuff. But is the money from it worth it?

This is my take. I am basically a netizen, love being on the internet and learning more and sharing more. And the last thing I want to do when I am on a site I am enjoying is to click on some ad that will take me away from the site. Don’t you agree? This brings me to one possible conclusion, that is

In my make money online from scratch series, I wrote about getting noticed, letting others know that you exist. Getting them to link to you, making your blog go up in rankings and get some traffic on the way. There have been many innovative thoughts in getting linkbacks.

Taking off from my first part on making money from a blog in 10 steps, this part deals with the various monetization options available for your blog.

Step 5. Getting Recognized: This can be tricky and difficult, I am facing some difficulty in this as well. The point is to get maximum people know you, who you are as a blogger and as a person. If you have a look at my first post, I never really knew what to do with a blog, what to post and on what niche to concentrate. But these days I know the purpose, to make myself some money? yes, in a way, to post content related to the Internet, technology and gadgets and my views about them. I am not claiming that everyone reading this blog will make money like John Chow, but I will share tips that helped me make some money on the net. It may help you too.

This is my series about making money with your blog in 10 steps from scratch. This post is divided into two parts, first regarding setting up your blog and second about making money off it.

Step 1: Setting up your blog. This is a fairly easy job, get a domain, install wordpress and you are done! Speaking about this, I prefer that you setup your blog in a separate .com domain, since it gives you some physiological credibility factor. Not to downgrade the blogs in blogspot and other free blog sites. The blogspot has some really fine bloggers like Kumiko, Mikes Money Making Missions and others who are making money off free blogs. But having a .com is as cheap as it can get. So, why not get one?

I am enjoying blogging so much that at times I forget that my aim is to make money online! But I find blogging to be a very fun thing to do and a nice way to socialize with the world. Here is my current update on my money making missions.

1. Content Writing: This is by far the most profitable for this blog. I write a few articles for some clients who do not wish to be named. The usual payment ranges anything between $2.00 per 100 words to $8 for 300 words. I do plan to continue this mode of earning for some time to come. The opportunities come from a wide range of sites, like the DigitalPoint forums, freelance writing sites and a few personal friends online. Now you know where I make money writing!

This month was pretty nice compared to March. I started publishing my earnings last month, when it was only about 8.15$ from all the sources. This month was very good since I added new sources of revenue, PayPerPost and Kontera, Forum Posting and the like.

Payperpost is a good way to earn with a blog online, I take up opportunities which are related to this blog, and they pay good too, ranging about 5-15$ for a blog of my statistics. But Kontera has been a disappointment for this blog, as you will see from the earnings, even adsense will pay me more per click. Here are the split-ups:

This 27th April saw the birth of a new partnership between KingNomar and me. We are bringing out a Web Directory – DirectoryShift, which will organize the internet into relavent categories so that you can find what you want in a few clicks. The advantage of this directory is that you can submit your site for FREE and hence get a linkback to your site just like that. It will help you promote your site, get some search engine exposure and other advantages.

After looking at many contests running in the blogosphere, I decided to host a review contest on my own. Since I am not in a position of give away money for the reviews, I decided to make the contest mutually beneficial to both of us. Here is what I propose to do.

You review my blog in about 150 words, link to this post and to my blog homepage using any keyword you can think of. I will return the favour and link to you using the keyword you want me to link to. And if your blog is worth more than a simple linkback, I might as well add you to my currently empty Blogroll.

This is my post about Kontera In-text Advertisers with whom I have signed up as a publisher since 05th Apr 2007. The stats so far are not very commendable for me as a money making blogger. Here they are:

Impressions: 485+

Clicks: 9

Earnings:$0.18

Thats around $0.02 a click! Adsense gives me better averages than this! But I have decided to let them run for sometime more, since they have requested for about 14 days for their ads to get optimized and running for maximum revenue. But being the impatient about money, I decided to send them a mail about this and see what happens. Their service is commendable though, they replied in 24 hrs and here is what they had to say:

Having your own blog can let you get into some really cool games too. This one is called the Technorati Link Train. This will be very useful for those initial bloggers who are looking for ways to give their really good blogs some exposure. Another advantage being higher technorati rankings and a linkback. Read the following rules and get into the train with your blog!
This was introduced to me by His Highness King Nomar dotcom!

***Start Copying Here:***

Here are the rules:

1) Write a short introduction paragraph about what how you found the list and include a link to the blog that referred you to the list.

After a fortnight of troubles, I am almost online. My motherboard is still having a few “Unknown Devices” and stuff. But hopefully things may return to normal soon!

I decided to start my second phase of blogging with updates about my money making missions. I had a fairly better month in March. Here are my earnings for the month of March.

Adsense: 2.15$

Content Writing: 6.00$

8.15$ is not much of a money. But still putting this on a post lets me know where I stand. I decided to take the advice of John Chow who has tons of tips to make money on the internet. He is becoming more evil by each passing day. Now he has a Microsoft Zune for a winner!

This is one those posts where one gets a chance to laugh at the fate of a country called India where the country advances to higher and better standards in spite of the those in power. . .

Haven’t you heard? India is bringing equality to the common man. Now anybody can become “The President”. Read on to know how to apply for the post

1. The Application Form

The application form above has been issued by the Samajwadi Party for them to evaluate the candidate whom they would be backing. Take a print out of the form, fill it up and send it to them at i-be-the-one@samajwadi.com

Its been almost 2 months since I signed up for the various money making jobs on the internet. So how successful have I been?

Initially I wanted to post a report, but if I did it, it will a funny post altogether! So I thought of taking each program and reviewing them from my view.

We can say that soon!

As per the Agloco Blog, the viewbar launch is currently slated for launch in March. The Agloco, if you do not know yet, is a internet economic network that wants to share its revenue with its users. The concept is pretty simple, as explained below

“You might already know that almost everything you do on the Internet makes money for someone else. And that’s not just when you spend money. Just about every time you view an ad, click an ad, search, buy something, download something, join a community, or post a story, picture, or video, some person or some company is making a fee, commission, and/or sale from your activity.”

YouTube is now following the trends of a internet economic network like the Agloco, Revver and others. Its founder Chad Hurley, announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Friday that it is considering sharing its revenue with its users. This could mean a lot for the users of the most popular video sharing site on the internet.

Believe it or not. There are companies out there who are willing to pay you, to know what you think about their products/services which range from video games to painkillers.

Answering surveys can be a fun way to earn some extra cash. Most surveys are short and last about 20-25 minutes for which the payout range from 5$ to 20$ or more.

There are many ways to make cash from the internet. Here are some really fun and easy ways to make money on the net which require little or rather no effort from your side.

1. Make money through online paid surveys:

This the easiest and fun part of making money online. The concept is pretty straight forward. There are a number of companies who want to know the feedback of consumers like you and me. They approach market researchers like Ciao, SurveySavvy, ACOP etc. who in turn forward those surveys to us and take our opinion and pay us for our feedback. Sounds like hard work doesn’t it ? ? Read my reviews of the various market researchers here.

This is a update to my previous post titled – “Here’s your chance to Own The Internet” where I first wrote about this new trend of economic networks. They have updated on their official blog that the Viewbar will be available for download in 7 to 10 weeks time. That gives us sometime to build our refferal network.

Here is something you would like to know about the Agloco Community:

I am a member of AGLOCO. It has a goal of reaching 10,000,000 Members by July 1st.

Here is why I would like you to consider joining:

Ever since I expressed about my desire to earn money on the net, I got a lot of responses and questions from my friends and mates about this. I thought of putting them up here and answering them like a FAQ so as to let others to know more about this whole idea of making money on the net.

1. Can one really make money on the internet?

My ideology is simple; you should be rewarded for your efforts, how much ever big or small.

Look around the World Wide Web, one either has to own and MAINTAIN a community with a large number of users or have plenty to original content to attract internet users to earn and generate a decent income as pocket money or as a means of livelihood.

Who is making all the money now? Look around again, you will see that the big players like Google, MySpace, eBay, Orkut, Hi5 etc. They have something you and I lack, content and community.