SBI was founded by Dr. Ken Evoy and was launched back in November of 1997. It is touted as “the only all-in-one site-building, site-hosting, and site-marketing product that makes it easy for you to build a professional, popular, and profitable business.”

When I first started out on this mission to earn an online income, I heard about the SBI program. I ventured over to their site and read tons and tons of rave reviews, and viewed many many sample sites. Many of which they advertised as being in the Top 2% of the web. It looked promising and being the newbie that I was, I decided to sign up. Big Mistake!

First of all, they charge a whopping $300 per year to use their services. What do you get for $300? In a nutshell, basically a platform to build and host your website. They also provide some other “extras” all of which you can get for free. I also learned that the reason there were so many rave reviews of SBI, is because of the commission paid to affiliates. Affiliates are paid $75 every time somebody signs up to become a member of SBI.

After forking over $300, I discovered that SBI was seriously overpriced. Building and hosting a website only costs a fraction of the cost that SBI charges. GoDaddy.com offers domain names for about $10 per year. NVU is an excellent free WYSIWYG Website Creator. Several web hosting companies offer webhosting plans that cost less than $5 per year. Plus many of the extra services they provide such as brainstorming, pinging, directory submissions and stats are all services you can obtain for free from places such as Google (i.e. Google Adwords keyword tool, Google analytics).

There are more economical ways to get your first site up and running and hope you don’t make the same mistake I did.  A list of more reviews on SBI can be found at the end of the
following review: Site Build It – Don’t Buy It

Here is my story.

I have always had an entrepreneurial spirit and have always been interested in non-traditional ways of earning money.  Unfortunately, I never acted on any of my ideas.  I did what my parents expected of me and went to college and earned a B.A.  I also went on to law school and earned a J.D.

I started working for corporate America and while some may think that this is a good thing, I discovered that I utterly hated it.  I’m not the “yes sir”, “yes ma’am” type.  I absolutely hate being bossed around.   I hated the fact that someone who had half the education than I did was my so called “boss.”  I hated that I had to work 40+ hours a week.  I hated that the top few executives in the corporation make all the big bucks, while all of the real workers at the bottom, were nickeled and dimed. Plus, the work is absolutely BORING!!!

So about 9 years ago, I started exploring ways that I could earn some extra money on the side.  I really needed to build up my savings account.  I tried a few offline opportunities i.e. MLM, but decided that those opportunities were not for me.  That’s when I discovered how to make money with eBay. At first I was only seeking extra money, but I then started toying with the idea of maybe earning all my income online.  I decided that although eBay could amount for a small percentage of my online income, I needed to do something more that would be a little less physically demanding.

This desire became even stronger after I had my son 2 years ago.  Although I have the privilege of working from home a few days a week, on the days that I do have to go into the office, I have to leave the house before 7 a.m. and I don’t get back home until 8:00 p.m.  I have a crazy commute.  That means that on those days, I hardly get to see my son because he tends to fall asleep around 8:00.

Over the years I started learning more about different ways of earning online income.  I came across several forums such as the warrior forum, and digital point forums.  I read countless numbers of blogs; I also spent a ton of money on eBooks, etc…   I would say that I became so obsessed about learning how to make money online, that I didn’t actually put anything that I was learning into action.

That stopped last year.  Last year I finally started taking action.  I built websites, I published content, I submitted tons of articles to EzineArticles.com in an attempt to secure more inbound links, and finally started getting somewhere.  Makes me wonder why I didn’t start taking action earlier.  I guess I’m the type of person who has to analyze everything.

I’m still working  for corporate America, and am pretty far from my goal of earning all my income online, but feel like if I can make it this far, I will succeed.

Well, it just so happens that a few days ago, I was reading one of my favorite blogs on make money online blogs and lo and behold the blog owner Grizzly, mentioned that he used SEO Elite to track his stats. I had tried a few other free programs such as the SEO for Firefox plug-in, but was never really happy with how they worked. So I again added SEO Elite to my buy list. I had all intentions of buying the software through the link on Griz’s site, since the advice he gives is beneficial and helps me in my quest for more online income, but then a funny thing happened.

I stepped away from my computer for a little while to watch Lost and when I returned, I noticed an email in my inbox with the subject line: “SEO Elite New Version” from Brad Callen Bryxen Software. I thought, wow that’s weird. Here I was just thinking about buying the software, and miraculously out of nowhere, I get an email telling me about the software. I felt as if someone had read my mind, or had somehow hacked into my PC or something. Anyway, seeing this as a sign, I immediatelyclicked through and purchased the software.
(Sorry Griz! It was totally an impulse purchase)

For those of you that don’t know, SEO Elite is a search engine optimization software package. For me, one of the most important features of this software is the competitive analysis tool. This tool will provide you with information on your competitors, and will show you where they rank for certain keywords, and will show you exactly what anchor text they are using for inbound links and help you find their strongest links. This is valuable information which can help you to optimize your own site, move up in the search engines, and as a result, bring in more online income.

The SEO Elite Software package also includes a:

1. Link building tool to assist you with getting get high PR links from a variety of highly relevant pages.
2. Ranking monitor, which identifies where your sites rank in the search engines.
3. An article submitter that allows you to submit articles which contain a backlink to your site to a lot of popular article directories.

The software package also comes with training videos that will help you get started using the program. So far, I have gone through all of the videos and am just now starting to actively use the software. I will post my observations on how the program is working for me in future posts and will let you all know if it’s helped to bring in more online income.

Image Credit :  © Marco Rullkötter – Fotolia.com

What is Kontera?

Kontera is a company that provides web publishers with a method of earning online income from advertising. Kontera provides web publishers with special affiliate links that are tied to certain keywords found on your site. Kontera describes themselves this way on their website:

“Kontera’s ContentLink In-Text Website Advertising Solution lets you monetize your content in real-time, enabling an incremental increase in ad revenue by providing a new source of untapped ad inventory. ContentLinks also enhances user experience by serving relevant and informational ads that match the user’s interest and frame of mind.

ContentLinks are contextually relevant ads and information units dynamically linked to keywords on a publisher’s web page. The keyword is linked to the most relevant and highest paying text ad from among Kontera’s thousands of advertisers.

These ContextLinks appear as links on your page with small ‘pop-up’ bubbles that appear when you hover your mouse over them.”

This is what it looks like:

Visitors click on the pop-up and you earn on a CPC basis. So for example, let’s say your blog post is about Apple iMac computers. Kontera might highlight the words “Apple” and “computers” in your post. If visitors to your website wanted to know more about these topics, all they would have to do is bring the mouse over to the highlighted word and an advertisement bubble or pop-up would appear. If the reader found that ad to be interesting and decided to click through, you would earn online income in the form of a commission.

How Kontera Works

Kontera is very easy to use. Once you have been admitted into their program, Kontera will provide you with a snippet code for your sites. You’ll simply need to install this code on every page of your website and voila! A lot of the words on your website will be converted into contextual advertising links. Once a visitor clicks on one of these links, you will get paid, earning yourself more online income.

Why use Kontera?

If you’re looking for a good way to increase your online income, Kontera may be the solution. Kontera’s ContentLink can be a great source of additional online income and can be used along with Adsense and other advertising programs you may be using, without taking any extra space on your web page. Even though Kontera is a contextual advertising system you can use it on the same pages as Adsense. The Adsense TOS has recently been updated/clarified and states that you can use competing contextually-based advertising systems as long as they do not have the same “look and feel” as Adsense. Kontera is also really easy to set up, all you have to do is insert their code on all the pages of your site and you are all set.

My Thoughts on Using Kontera for More Online Income

I find that Kontera is a very easy program to run. Like I mentioned above, I totally forgot that I was even enrolled in this program, and only remembered after I received their check. I also found that it did not conflict with my Adsense earnings. I will definitely continue to use their program and will experiment with adding it on more of my smaller sites.

This is what I like about Kontera:

• ContentLink is very easy to install. Installing the code on your site will only take a few minutes.
• It’s a legitimate program that pays on time.
• Kontera ContentLinks don’t take up additional ad space.
• Kontera doesn’t conflict with Google Adsense, an advertising network that you are probably already running on your website. This means that you can use Kontera alongside Adsense, which gives you another way to monetize your website. Kontera is also a reliable option for webmasters who do not like  to use blocks of Adsense-style contextual ads on their website.

This is what I don’t like about Kontera:

• I find the pop up ad to be annoying. If I’m annoyed I’m sure that some of my readers are annoyed as well.
• To add more websites to Kontera’s contextual advertising network, you have to email them with a list of the domains you would like added to your account.
• Kontera script slows down loading time for web pages.
• Reporting is not that great.
• $100 minimum payout. While this doesn’t really bother me much, people who don’t receive a lot of traffic to their sites, may wind up waiting a long time before they get paid.

Like anything else, your earning potential largely depends on how much traffic you receive at your site. Higher traffic will inevitably lead to stronger CTR and earnings. Traffic will also compensate for the possibility of getting low paying keywords which can give you less than $0.07 per click. The more traffic you receive, the more online income you will earn.

So how do I get started?

To get started, simply fill out the publisher application form on the Kontera website. There are, however, some qualifications that need to be met in order to be accepted as a publisher

To qualify for ContentLink, your site must:

• Use English as the primary language
• Be content-rich with more than 50 words per page on the majority of the site
• Contain original content, not repurposed content that is owned and created by the sites themselves
• Not be used for domain parking
• Be a live site and not “under construction”

Once your site is approved, you will receive an email containing a JavaScript code snippet that must be embedded into the footer of your website.

If you want to read more about Kontera, or to sign up, go to www.kontera.com

First and foremost, allow me to explain what an inbound link is.  Inbound links are also referred to as backlinks. This is what the super popular web encyclopedia Wikipedia says about backlinks:

So basically, inbound links or backlinks are links from another website to your site.  For instance, the URL of this blog is http://www.onlineincomediary.com.  If I decide to leave a comment on somebody else’s blog, I’d also leave this blog’s URL when I comment so that other readers of that blog would be able to click through and visit my blog. That URL that I left would be considered to be an inbound link or back link.

Why are inbound links important?

They’re important because (1) they can increase your traffic; (2) they help your link to be crawled by the search engines; and (3) the search engines such as Yahoo and Google consider the number and quality of sites that link back to your sites as part of their algorithms.  Basically, Google, Yahoo and other search engines will see your website as important because other websites have linked back to yours. This is all very important if you want to earn more online income like I do.

But you also have to remember that the number of inbound links alone doesn’t justify higher rankings.  The search engines also look at the quality of the inbound links.  So it’s very important to try to get links from sites with similar relevant and high quality content.   A web page that has acquired more backlinks than another one that has similar content will always rank higher than the other web page, simply because it appears to be more popular with visitors and other sites.

Want to find out how many backlinks your site has in Google?  Simply do a search of your site or blog URL in Google as follows:  link: www.YourUrl.com

The Strategy

If you’re looking to score some more inbound links for your blog or web site, and at the same time earn more online income, this simple strategy can help.

What I have been doing lately is setting up Google alerts for the keywords that I am targeting.  Google Alerts then sends emails which contain search results which include the keyword that I am targeting.  I then simply click through to the blogs and sites listed in the search results and see if comments are enabled on that particular site or blog.  If it is, I leave a relevant comment along with a link back to my site.  I tend to focus more on leaving blog comments because blogs are indexed by search engines more frequently than regular websites and are updated more frequently which search engines like Google love.  Simple eh?

Although this is not the only strategy I use for getting inbound links, In my opinion, I think this is one of the easiest strategies you can implement to build quality inbound links.   Make sure that the comments you post are relevant and helpful.   Do not comment just for the sake of building your inbound links. A comment that adds nothing to the conversation and is only self serving will tend to be seen as spam and will most likely hurt you more than it will help.

To set up an alert, go to www.google.com/alerts.  You will then be presented with the following:

Fill in the keyword you’re targeting in the search box and sleet how often you want to be notified, along with your email address.

I set it up for daily alerts, because in order for me to get anything done, I need to set up daily to do lists.  Having it set to daily helps me to meet my daily goal of trying to acquire a certain number of inbound links every day.

Do you use this strategy or a similar strategy for building inbound links?  If so, do you have any additional tips that you can share?  How is your strategy affecting your online income goals.

Fast forward to 2009, and I can happily say that I still sell stuff on eBay.  I introduced my husband to eBay after we got married in 2004, and he wound up leaving his job in 2007 to pursue selling on eBay full time.  We are now eBay Powersellers, and our online income has risen dramatically with sales of over $1000 every month.

There is definitely money to be made on eBay, but it is definitely not a get rich quick scheme.  There is a lot of work involved in selling on eBay.  First, you have to identify and purchase products that are in demand that can be purchased at a deep discount and resold for a profit.  Next you have to take photographs of each item you intend to sell.  Then you have to create an ad listing for it on eBay.  Finally, when the item sells, you have to pack it up and mail it out to the buyer. You also have to be detailed oriented as you will have to keep track of: your inventory, payments, and shipping log.

It’s not for the faint of heart, but I would definitely recommend eBay as a great way to make money online.  I always advise people to start slow, just like I did, by finding stuff around the house that you no longer need and take it from there.  Once you learn the ropes, it’s all up to you to take it to the next level, so if you haven’t already, sign up for eBay today!

I plan on providing lots of tips and tricks on selling on eBay to improve your online income cashflow, so please stay tuned!  And let me know if you have any specific questions on selling on eBay.