Back to life

We will try to bring this blog back to life (it's been a while since the last post ;)

Link exchange

Exchanging links with other sites, especially sites similar to your own is a great way to generate traffic. Not only will the links themselves provide traffic, but having a high number of sites linking to you should help your site get better rankings in search engine results. And that means more traffic as well.

More information on the topic of "link exchange" can be found on Wikipedia.

Traffic exchanges

Traffic exchanges have you visit websites, and in exchange other members of the exchange will visit your website. They typically work like this: When you visit sites through the exchange you earn credits. You exchange those credits for visits to your site.

They are a cheap alternative to advertise and attract traffic to a website, requiring a low to no advertising budget.

For more information try Wikipedia.

Traffic

Attracting visitors and/or users is probably the hardest part of making a successful website. It's absolutely essential in order to make money on a website. More users translates to more income.

There are several methods you can use to attack visitors to your site. I'll discuss some of them in future posts.

Wikipedia article on web traffic.

Bookstore

I've set up an astore (powered by Amazon) with books that are relevant. If you're serious about making money online, you may check it out.

myLot

Here's something different: myLot.com is a community that claims to pay it's users for their activity. I've signed up to check it out.

Initial thoughts
I think the effort to payout ratio is a bit too steep for this to be considered a serious online money making opportunity. It might take something like 800 posts to earn $10 (yet to be confirmed). They do offer to pay via PayPal, which is nice.

Disposable email address

I recommend you get a "disposable email address" through one of the many free email providers out there (hotmail, gmail, etc.). Use it when you sign up for programs and services that you don't fully trust (forexample the ones mentioned in "under testing" and "not recommended").

If you start getting a lot of spam or other unwanted messages in your disposable account, simply close it. Make sure you make a new disposable account first, and update your contact information for any services and programs you'd like to keep.

If you want better control over which services the unwanted mails originated from you can make a unique email address for each service you sign up to. You can do this by using the service name and a random number as the username part of the email address (for example servicename131@hotmail.com).

Also, be selective when it comes to what other personal information you decide to share. Try to foresee how the information can be used, or abused.