Make Money Online at Natespost.com

   How do you accept credit cards online? If you want to build a website that sells products or information, or even simply ask for donations, you need a method of payment. There are many different options to choose from, so you need to make the most educated decision possible because when it comes to accepting credit cards it comes down to 1) lower fees paid by you and 2) customer service. Let’s start with lower fees.

   To accept credit cards, it will cost you money in the form of application fees, discount rates, and fees per transaction. Understand that a credit card processor is a middleman that makes money by providing you a service. Its the same when you go to Wal-Mart to buy that new pair of neon camoflauged pants you’ve been looking at. When you swipe your card through the machine, Walmart gets the bulk of the sale amount, but they also pay a percentage to their credit card processor. Now folks like you and me that want to accept credit cards online won’t be able to get the sweet deal that Wal-Mart gets with their credit card processor, but we can make an informed decision that will maximize profits for us. The first thing you need to stay away from is a flat discount rate. Without getting too technical, there is something called an interchange rate (the small percentage that the issuing bank gets paid), and it varies by the type of card used, say debit vs credit, or corporate vs individual. You will get the better discount rate by going with a company that charges “interchange +” as opposed to a flat rate.  Think about it…a credit card processor that gives the merchant a flat rate has to make damn sure that they don’t get shorted. They do this by charging a rate that is above the mean, which covers their butt and equals a higher fee paid by you. There is also a “per transaction” fee that you will be charged when accepting credit cards. This can range anywhere from .30 to .50 per transaction.

   The other thing to look for when deciding on a credit card processor is customer service. How long does it take to setup the account? Do they provide people to help you set it up and answer questions/solve problems? Can they help you with a shopping cart for your site?

   While researching this topic so I could accept credit cards online, I decided on Cardaccept. First of all, there is $0 setup fee, same day setup, 24/7 customer support, and free shopping cart software. Their biggest competitor to accept credit cards online is paypal, so you need to look at the differences. Let’s say you will be making $3000 or less a month by accepting credit cards on your site. With paypal, you will be paying a discount rate of 2.9% of every transaction for their processing service. With Cardaccept, you will pay the lower discount rate + .25%. That’s a quarter of one percent. With paypal you will also pay an additional 30 cents per transaction as opposed to 25 cents per transaction with Cardaccept. Plus, Cardaccept is also compatible with Ebay and you can even accept payments by phone or fax.

   I hope all the technical stuff didn’t bore you or make you think it’s too big of a deal to accept credit cards. Cardaccept is simple with $0 cost to set up, excellent customer service and will save you money in the long run. Just fill out their short form and you’re up and running.

   Yes, you can make money affiliate marketing, you just have to look at the bigger picture. You have to “look behind the curtain” and see what that little man claiming to be the Great Oz is really trying to get you to do. If you don’t peek behind that curtain and see the levers he is pulling, you will simply be a shill for these mega make money onlineblogs like John Chow and Shoemoney. Ok, enough with the Wizard Of Oz references, what I am trying to drill in your head is that when reading what these make money online experts are telling you…..you must differentiate between what they are telling you to do and how it can make you money, and more importantly, if you follow their instructions, how it makes them money.

   I’ll get back to their sales pitches in a minute, but first I want to ask you a question. If you developed a method to make serious money in affiliate marketing, ppc marketing, ppv marketing, etc, would you share it with thousands of people online? If you answered yes, you my friend are either a liar or an idiot. If you had this method - if this method existed, by sharing it with thousands of others you would increase the competition, drive up the cost of doing business and render the method useless. I now invite all the liars to leave, so I can deal with the idiots. OK, lets say for reasons related to blunt force head trauma or oxygen deprivation, you want to totally disregard the laws of capitalism. Imagine for a moment that you have these can’t fail methods to make money in affiliate marketing whether it be ppc, ppv, etc. Also imagine that being the philanthropist you are, you share these methods with thousands of readers on a daily basis, because somehow your philanthropic soul has caused a bend in the space/time continuum and the invisible hand of the free market no longer exists. Would you have time to write 8 blog posts a day? NO, you would be so involved in raking in this money from your affiliate schemes to the point your dog would die of starvation and they would find your bloated, stinky body fused to your computer chair after your neighbors complained about the smell.

   Ok, that got ugly for a minute but remember, this is a lot like cult de-programming. Anyway, I started this post by saying that yes, you CAN make money affiliate marketing. How? Like your former mentors are. Like I touched on in this post, they make no money with affiliate marketing on the lower level because it is virtually impossible to make more than the hourly wage of a Minnesota banana picker. They make money by having a massive readership of blind sheep that do anything they tell them to do.

   OK, so I was actually employed for roughly a year, but now I’m back at trying to make money online. To start with, I have spent the last two days tinkering with pay per view, or ppv marketing. It was something I had developed an interest in before my recent job, so you can get up to date on what ppv marketing is by reading this post. It actually gained a LOT of traffic for natespost because my research and honesty on the subject rewarded me with a #1 google search engine result for several inquiries related to ppv marketing. Seems like people were starved for an honest description of a subject that had been cloaked in such secrecy before I wrote about it. Anyway, I started an account with one of the ppv firms listed in my previous post, and here is what I have learned.

   With ppv marketing, you have the option of bidding on (a) keywords the user types into a search engine, or (b) urls visited by the user. Never, ever bid on keywords. What ppv does is display a pop-up over the user’s current window when they perform action (a) or (b).  Let’s imagine you sign up for an affiliate account with randomdatingsite.com. They will pay you 75% of revenue for all new sign-ups you send them. You then bid on dating related search keywords with your ppv company, having your affiliate url show in a pop-up browser any time a user searches your selected keywords. What will happen, even if you do the sensible thing of bidding on hundreds of targeted keywords like “find Chicago singles”, is the user will simply close your pop-up affiliate ad. Why? Because having a pop-up window arise is not a normal occurrence for any user when performing a google, bing, yahoo, etc. search. They will recognize your pop-up as a nuisance and simply close it 99 times out of a hundred even though you get charged for the full 100.

   So what to do? Bid on urls. By bidding on a url, you are ensuring that the user has already show an interest in what you want to sell. One option would be to do a search for “dating online” and select all the urls under the sponsored search listings. Then when the user clicks on the link, your ad shows up over the one he selected. The 2 benefits here: the user has actually performed an action showing interest in what you are selling, and users are accustomed to a new browser window popping up when they click a link. So you’re in the money, right? Not so fast. You seem to have forgotten the whole reason for viable alternatives from ppc ads such as adwords anyway…..click fraud. It is rampant, and you will be paying for your pop-ups to display over the search engine ads which are more than likely clicked for fraudulent purposes. Consider the very small percentage of computers infected with running your ppv marketing source’s software. Then factor in the small percentage of people that actually click on sponsored results in search engine returns. Sounding bad? Now factor in click fraud and you will see that this method won’t show you results.

   So, as I’m prone to do, I got to thinking. How can I narrow this down even more to produce quality views of a ppv pop-up? Then it hit me. Find high traffic pages where the surfer has 1) already performed an action (thereby showing interest) to get there, and 2) shown a click-able link to sign up for randomdatingsite.com. I then click that link…copy and paste that URL into my targets list with my ppv company and now a sign-up page with my affiliate code inserted will be displayed over the intended sign up page.  Sounds good, huh? Well, when I do this, I get an automated response of “this url is not allowed”. F$%^! More research and more quality urls inserted….the same results. What does this tell me?

   It goes back to the question of why would people be willing to help you make really good money with no benefit to them. For a good “for instance”, see my post about Jeremy Schoemaker here. There is always a bigger picture that few people seem to see. In the realm of ppv marketing, ask yourself this. If a person has been able to successfully install pop-up advertising software on a decent percentage of users’ computers, why would he allow you to sign up and use it, rather than have the run of the system himself? Well, he maximizes his profits by reaching a middle ground. He reserves the quality, high paying urls for himself, while allowing you and me, the little guys, to pay him for the privilege of fighting over the scraps.

   So the FTC recently made some pretty hard-line rules about what a blogger can pitch to the reader without disclosing that they are getting paid for it. It basically says that you must disclose to the reader any financial interest you have in any product you push on the reader. Made me think of a post I read a couple of months ago on Jeremy Schoemaker’s blog. It was a post that went into great detail to show how you can make good money advertising on facebook. It turns out that it was really a post that would allow HIM to make good money by YOU advertising on facebook. The trick? He recommends his readers to become an advertising affiliate for Fling.com. He goes into great detail about conversion rates, keyword bidding, etc. And with the readership he has, I wouldn’t even be able to guess how many people went out and signed up for an affiliate account with fling and flooded facebook and other advertising platforms with ads….many of them making some money in the process, because fling is actually a very good converter. What did this do for him? Well, for every new affiliate sign-up he sent to Fling, he got $200. Yes, I’m sure he made a killing…you see… he is not the brick mason, he is the foreman. His readers work for him. If you notice when your mouse hovers over a Fling link on this post, an affiliate link shows up on the bottom of your browser. Sign up, make some money, and I get paid. It IS actually a great converter. And remember, be inherently distrustful of anyone that is willing to help you make money with no benefit to him.

  Ppv marketing? I spent a couple of hours on this the other day. Normally I can answer a question like this in a much shorter amount of time, but this ppv endeavor is cloaked in such secrecy that it took some serious digging. My quest started when I was reading up on affiliate marketing strategies and happened across a pretty well known guy in the field talking about how he was giving up on adsense ppc and going solely with what he called pay per view, or ppv. He made an excellent argument about the pitfalls and shortcomings of affiliate marketing through google’s ppc (pay per click) and talked about the wonderful benefits of this new method described as pay per view. Well, my research brought me back full circle to this individuals argument, which as it turns out, was a sales pitch.. and one hell of a good one.

   Here is what ppv marketing is. Adware. I know you have heard the term, but may not be familiar with what it is. Have you ever had a virus like issue where, whenever you type a url in the address box or tried to perform a google search, and a new, seemingly random browser window opens up over your intended result? That is adware. I have never experienced it personally, but had it happen on a work computer several years ago after a co-worker downloaded the file sharing application kazaa. The two ways it can plant itself on a users computer is by the user downloading an application like kazaa, where in the fine print… let me correct myself… in the minuscule print, you agree to allow them to show you advertisements in exchange for their free application. The other way that a user can have this happen is, for no better term, a virus. A virus known as adware.

   The way ppv marketing works: An affiliate advertiser signs up with an adware company and from there it works in much the same way as google adwords. They can bid on the same keywords as they would on google, and when the user of an infected computer performs a search on that term, the user will get their normal google search results, but, the adware causes their computer to open a browser on top of their google search results with their ad. In addition, the affiliate marketer can also bid on URLs. This causes the adware to open their ad or page in a browser window when the user of an infected computer types a certain url into the address bar. Let’s say you are selling pet medications. You open an account with an adware company and bid on the url www.petmeds.com. Now when a user of an infected computer types www.petmeds.com into their address bar, your page will open up on top of the page they intended to view.

   The benefits of this form of advertising that will be thrown at you is that that keywords or urls are much cheaper to bid on compared to adwords. Even with the “ad blindness” and click fraud involved in adwords, you have to factor in one huge factor on the ppv, or pay per view, side. Most people, once their computer is infected with adware, get rid of it without interacting with a single ad. This explains the cheaper bidding prices. Your ad would be shown to many, many people who simply ignore it and eventually reformat their hard drive, (most adware is impossible for the average computer owner to remove) or sadly, pay someone to remove it. In addition to this equalization of the bidding prices, advertising through adware could very likely get your affiliate account banned. Most affiliate marketing companies specifically ban the use of adware advertising in their terms of service.

   OK, now that I have downed this so called “new” advertising method of ppv marketing, I am also somewhat intrigued. While I say that most people will clean their computer of the infected adware without interacting with a single pitch, I also know that this is a big world we live in. I also know that their are a lot of… well, less than intelligent people out there (explains camo stretchy pants) that know very little about computers or how internet browsers work. I also know that a good percentage of those people have credit cards. So while I can explain away the majority of the keyword cost difference between ppc and ppv marketing, it does seem that there may be a little wiggle room. This wiggle room could be provided by that fact that as I already mentioned, there is next to no information available as to what ppv marketing is, and therefore, less competition. This morning, I actually signed up for a ppv account. As further example of the secrecy involved here, you are not immediately approved, but must conduct a phone interview. Three of the major ppv marketing outfits that you can sign up for are: trafficvance.com, mediatraffic.com, and zango.com.

   Anyway, back to the full circle. As I mentioned, nobody will give you information on what ppv is like I have. Do a google search on ppv marketing as of today’s post, and you will find the same as I did. A few people touting this “new” form of marketing, but rather than tell you what it is, want you to buy the info. The guy I mentioned at the beginning is well known in the affiliate marketing field and makes excellent money with ppc. His sales pitch was that ppv (of which he explains nothing) is so wonderful that he has now completely cancelled his ppc ventures (laughable). Remember, he is an affiliate marketer! He is a good friend of a guy (whom he mentions several times) selling a ppv guide for several hundred dollars.

   In closing, I am happy to share this info with you for free and would like to ask each of you one thing. I’ll beg if you want me to. Please link to this post, foreword it, digg it, etc, so that in the future when someone wants info on this subject, they can get it for free. Hell, I’m not even making anything off adsense right now because I apparently threw away the letter with my pin in it and now I’m showing public service ads.