Once you start making some money online you realize your real potential to make money online which then influences you to raise your daily target and explore more monetization methods. If you feel happy with the current money you are making then you are probably losing a lot of opportunities and maybe you wont ever realize the full potential of your blog as money maker.

My latest experiment on making money online was with AdBrite an advertising marketplace that offers you different type of advertisement, CPC (Cost Per Click) or CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions). With AdBrite you can chose 3 different methods to monetize your site

• Place banner advertisements on your site
• Place textual links on your site
• Place In-Content Ads

Here at another night shift you will notice I am using only in-content ads as I want to check out how much I can actually monetize my content. The in-content ads are those double lined dark green keywords you will notice, that when you hover the mouse a an ad window will display.

So far I have tested AdBrite on another not so competitive niche and I have to admit that the PayPerClick is way much better then with Kontera, hence I am giving them a try even here on this blog to see how much it can really pull.

You can expect the results at the end of this month. You can subscribe to my RSS feed if you want to find out how well AdBrite performs in this site.

Reviews do work and will work for a long period of time, it is possible that it will change shape in internet but it will exist in one or another way. Lets take a banal example, you are about to get your first web hosting account and host your website at since you got tired of the free hostings that limit your website functionality and you want to get more flexible on that regard. The first thing you do is look after a web hosting that has good testimonials. These testimonials are that same shape of review, where existing customers review the hosting company they are with and share their experience with them.

Okey, the web hosting testimonials and the website reviews that we see now on daily basis is not quiet the same thing. For example the testimonials are much shorters and hit the nail on the personal experience (like, the hosting company has great support staff which helped me within a short time, or the technical staff is polite and fast, their prices are cheap and the up time rocks).

While the testimonials are short and go right to core and expressing customers experience with that hosting company, with the reviews we do see lately on blogs we don’t read anymore those “first person experience” but rather they do write a review for the website owner in first place and then this review serves as a great marketing tool as well. When a blogger reviews a website he is exposing that website to his/her readers, readers which might turn out to become customers of the website if non the less visitors of the website.

Some smart folks did see these reviews as great money making opportunity and they created a online marketplace where advertisers could find blogs on which they could get reviewed and exposed as well as for bloggers to find websites to review and get paid for this, and here is where that middle man is making profits for introducing YOU as blogger to the ADVERTISER, simple and clean, but sometimes things flip out of hands when there is the middle man, even tho in many cases it helps you start growing.

The middle man has the power to determine the price for which you can charge their advertisers for a review, of course you can negotiate this or rather, you can try and prove them that a review on your blog is worth more then what they are actually paying you. But how does the marketplace holder determine the price of which you can charge? They take in account some small (and I would say useless) factors such as the PageRank of your site (and this kinda comes in first place), your websites alexa ranking (easily tricked) and then your technorati ranking (much better, but this works only for blogs and is being determined from links coming to your site from other blogs while the static sites are being ignored).

Based on these informations is determined the value of a review in your blog. Even tho this can sound pretty fair, some times it can become frustrating when the company is paying you small cash for a review based on the informations they have to determine this. What slips out is your “time” from their calculation, or rather they don’t put that in account when determining the price of a review.

To write a real review for a website you need to surf the advertisers website, take notes on things that work and things that don’t work, you have to take a close lookup on their history (you would not want to advertise with positive review a company that has a shady background), and then finally you have to sum up all that and write a detailed review for the website owner and as well for your readers. It takes close to an hour to come up with “decent” informations for a company which you are reviewing and writing the review. Now imagine the schenario, the middle man says that a review on your website costs $7 no matter how much time you will need to come up with the informations and write the review. Whats for sure is that you MUST write a review which is not going to be short and spammy (at least if you want to continue with them) and you have to link out from you site to the advertisers website.

When these scenarios show up to me the answer is simple and clear NO.

But, how do you handle this? Do you prefer to write a scam like review of few words without looking at who you are reviewing and take the money? Would you really waste all that time to earn $7 ? Or you’d actually ask the middle man to raise the price or you will try an alternative. I’d be happy to know.

Passive Online Income

As passive income we can categorize websites that are being set with a landing page from where we do sell products, for example Make Money Online eBook or any other type of product that does not involve us actively in setting up, shipping the product or even configuring something. It does not even include services we provide as that actually does require that we are active since we need to work in order to provide services. As passive online income alternative rather than selling products can be considered making money through affiliates, where you create a landing page, setup a PPC advertising campaign with Google AdWords or any other PPC campaign and get the traffic that is being sent to your PPC advertising campaign convert through your affiliate link and make money, easy enough (kinda).

Active Online Income

Active online income is same as having a daily job and you are being active in your work, apart that you have the commodity to stay home and make money from home rather than working for another person. As active online income I would call blogging, where you have to actually post daily, gather readership, be creative to sell through affiliate links and constantly work to improve your blogs traffic (organic or via referrals). Another online active income I would consider web design and web development, where you actually have to work and provide your clients with web design services.

Do you prefer active or passive online income?

Before you get even the chance to answer (like you do have the guts to comment) let me tell you what do I prefer. Active online income, and the reasons are simple. To achieve active online income you actually have to work, to do something, to read, to learn to test, optimize and get known with other folks. All this gives you that regular rhythem of living that you are most likely missing while sitting in front of the computer, but in a certain way you re compensate that time by learning something and actually doing something rather than just sitting and being annoyed.

To achieve your goal and actually make money from blogging you need to learn many techniques, as optimization of your site to bring maximum revenue, you need to also learn seo and drive organic targeted traffic to your website, you also need to learn some internet marketing strategies to promote your blog as well as to promote the advertisers or affiliates.

So what do you prefer, passive over active online income or vice versa?