MyLot.com - Discuss and get paid

How many of you are actively involve in online forum or discussion groups? I'm sure some of us did occasionally posted some comments in the forum as to share our personal opinions.

Recently, while I'm doing some research and information searching on the latest web advertising methods, I stumbled upon this website - MyLot.com, a discussion site where the latest blog postings, discussion topics and news can be found. It has more than 100,000 members and vast amount of topics and categories for discussion.

Beside participating the forum, readers who contributes responses will be paid for their postings. If the member starts a new discussion topics, he/she will also be paid for it. I tried it out by posting some comments and my MyLot's earning account is already running.


How much can be earned? Well, you can't expect too much. You may get USD$ 0.01 or 0.02 for each posting. You may get more if you start a new discussion topic. Besides, your earning can also be increase if you manage to get refer more readers to MyLot where 25% of your referral income will be credited to your account too. MyLot provide low payout of USD$10.00 via PayPal. Because of it's low earning, it may take some time before you can see the money in your PayPal account.

What I like the most of the MyLot is the opportunity to get lots of responses from the readers, from all over the world. I have started a new discussion topic yesterday (less than 12 hours ago from the time this post is being written) and now a total of 22 responses has been posted.

My First Adsense Cheque

I just received my first Google Adsense cheque two weeks ago and only until now I’m blogging about it. The cheque accounted for the earning up to end of April 2007. It is a figure that has been accumulated for almost 17 months since I first putting up the Adsense ads.

Wow…so long, paiseh le, amateur mah and I'm still learning what is blogging. Yes, it has been a long long wait since then and the patience finally paid off. It’s also proved that this business model is actually working.

The first nine months earning was very low as it is a reflection of the traffic to my blogs. Slowly, it picked up until the balance reaches USD100. Google Adsense will only pays you when the balance reaches USD100 either by cheque or electronic fund transfer for selected countries (Malaysia is not in the list yet).

Hopefully the second cheque will be coming within a shorter time compared to the first one.

Google Adsense is one of the popular and established affiliate advertising in the market now. It matches ads (most of them are CPC [cost per click] as well as a bit of CPM [cost per thousand impressions] - refer to e-commerce revenue model) to your site's content, and whenever your visitors click on content the advertisers will credit the money into you account.

It is easy to become a Google Adsense publisher.
Step 1 - Sign up
Step 2 - Log into your account, customize your ads and copy and paste the HTML code into your website or blog.
Step 3 - Targeted ads will then appearing on your website or blog.

Enjoy blogging!

Related posts:
1. Google adds 2 new referral links - Google Apps & Google Checkout
2. Google Adsense rounded corner ads

Google adds 2 more new referral links

Google has added 2 more new products referrals for its publishers namely Google Apps (Communication and collaboration tools for businesses and organisations including Gmail and more) and Google Checkout (A faster, safer way to shop online).

Major applications for Google Apps includes Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar and Docs & Spreadsheets. If a customer signed up for Google Apps through your referral and use the account for more than 4 consecutive weeks, then you will be credited USD$5.00. Read the Google Apps explanation from the Google website. Tour and demos are also available here.

Google Checkout provide a fast, safe and convenient for online shopping. Basically using Google Search to find the merchants, with a single log-in, customers can buy from many stores that offer this services. (An article from Google Checkout blog - Find it with Google, Buy it with Google Checkout). The referral will receive USD $1.00 if the signed up customer completes a transaction of at least $10 within 90 days. (New buyers purchase). A short video tour of Google Checkout can be accessed here.

A sample of the Google Apps and Google Checkout banners can be seen at the sidebar.

Personal Notes:
Frankly, the design of the banners seem a bit plain and lack of colourful images. There only a few choices of banners being available for the time being.

These CPA (cost per acquisition/action) models may seem attractive but in my opinion, I'm more concern with the conversion rate. I'm afraid that it will be slow and tough time getting for the conversion to take place. How many of the customers are using Google Checkout to purchase things from the merchants? Just wait and see how its progress. Anyhow, its fun to know that there are new referral options provided by Google.

JohnChow dot com - Blogging Mogul

From an entrepreneur to a blogger and now being the blogging mogul - This is John Chow with his making money online tips and sharing.

From a novice blogger who came across this blog by accident (I can't really remember exactly how I get to his blog) to reading his blog is becoming a daily ritual - This is me.

His blog, beside tonnes of money making tips, also contained lots of latest IT and applications reviews, foods and a little bit of traveling. Just like attending some daily 10 minutes tutorial lessons where there is new knowledge being taught in his almost daily updates.

Not only that, you can also learn a few hands-on applications in your blogging endeavour. This is what I am experiencing now. I tried a few of the tips and it did work in some way especially on being focus on the niche topics, consistency in blogging and replying comments by other readers. Recently he created an e-book entitled Make Money Online With John Chow dot Com, sharing his personal experiences on his money making endeavour. You can download it to become your study guide.

John Chow dot com not just an ordinary blog that helps you make money, it also enriching your blogging experiences. For me, blogging is now a fun thing to do. Sharing backlinks with its readers is indeed a brilliant idea. When you review his blog, he’ll link to it and you can expect a lot of traffic coming to your blog.

More traffic means you can share your ideas and thoughts with more people. In this way, your blog can serve its purpose and value.

Advertlets.com - Asian Weblog Advertising Network

This is a weblog marketing network that should be participated by Malaysian bloggers as part of your online money making revenue model, besides being a new e-commerce business model. Advertlets.com is not just another Asian version ala Google Adsense. The simple yet catchy theme of advertisers + bloggers = money + happy indicates that there are more than just earning the money from this program. The community services provided is expanding from donation to charity. (Hopefully there will be more free trips, gifts, vouchers especially and gatherings in the future, hahaha).

There are 3 most important attraction of joining the advertlets namely local content, its hybrid polling and advertising feature, and getting paid in local currency. (Yes! in RM instead of USD).


Local content:
Most of the advertisments are designed with the local content. After all, majority of our readers are our friends. So obviously it would be more advantages for the local advertisers to grab this opportunity of the efficiency of targeted advertisment towards the local markets, particularly the local blog readers. Local contents enable the readers to conduct the transaction conveniently minus the worries of high shipping costs incurred besides faster delivery time.

Hybrid polling and advertising feature:
This innovative feature is definitely plus point with the ability for bloggers to make custom poll. The rotation feature is providing another new experience for readers. This enable the advertisers to come out with new e-commerce business model.


Paid in RM:
This is definitely something that I am looking forward to. As most of the advertisers would pay in USD, the payment in RM is very beneficial for local bloggers as no conversion rate is needed to be applied to the payment (with RM is getting stronger against the USD nowadays, we are getting less after the conversion). Another problem lurking on our local bloggers is the processing fees inposed by the banks in processing the foreign check. Different banks have different rates - some can be quite high where a big chunk of your payment will be disappeared. With local cheque, basically we are getting the nett of what we have earned.

That's sum up: Advertlets = More Money + Happy Blogging.

Making money online - E-Commerce Revenue Model

E-Commerce revenue models specifically describe different techniques used in generating income from the publisher's websites. As the e-commerce progress, the traditional revenue model of sales is expanded to more variety of revenue options and e-commerce business model.

Publishers is referred as the website content provider as well as individual bloggers' blogs.

The common techniques are:

Sales - Sales of goods, merchandise information and services provided in the publishers' websites. Example: Dell.com is generating sales revenue from its notebooks, Amazon.com is selling books, ABC Consultant may be generating income from their consultancy services online.

Transaction fees - Commission earned based on either the volume of the transactions (the higher the volume, the higher the transaction fees will be) or fee per transaction conducted at the website (a fixed fee per trade regardless of the volume). Example: E-Bay may earned transaction fees from each successful transaction made by the bidders or sellers.

Advertisement fees - Publishers can allocate some advertisements spaces in their website for other companies to place their banners or advertisement, in return for a fee named advertisement fees. A major percentage of Yahoo and Google's yearly income is generated from the advertisement fees. Small companies and bloggers can also provide advertisement space for interested parties.

Subscription fees - customers would have to pay a fixed amount of fees either monthly or yearly when they are subscribing to contents and services offered by the website. Example: Yearly subscription fees for accessing the online journal databases, privileged discounts for members.

Affiliate fees - Companies receive commissions for referring customers to others' websites. It can include CPM (cost per thousand impressions), CPC (cost per click) and CPA (cost per acquisition/action). These methods are becoming more and more popular nowsaday especially for bloggers. Example: Google Adsense, Amazon.com Associates affiliate programme, Advertlets.com (I wrote a review here), Nuffnang (Asia 1st Blog Advertising Community) and lots more. This section will be further elaborated in the near future.

Most of the professional bloggers use the combination of affiliate, transaction and advertisement strategies in generating income. Example: Liewcf, JohnChow and lots more.

There will be more discussion on these topics in this blog in the future as well as on new and innovative e-commerce business model.