The question on a lot of peoples minds lately is whether or not it is possible for them to make money on the internet automatically by not doing a thing themselves.

The answer is yes.

My automated blog

Recently I decided to look more into how a lot of people are making a living with automatically working blogs. I decided to make my own auto-blog to see if it is really a viable way to make money online.

Choosing the Domain Name

A little less than a month ago I did some topic and keyword research and decided to make an automatically working blog about Back Support Braces. I registered a keyword rich domain name www.backsupportposturebrace.net that cost me $9.69 – this was the only investment I made to get started.

I chose the domain because it has 4 words that are all significant in terms of search engine optimization. The words in the domain make up at least 3 terms that are commonly searched in Google. It is widely known that if you have a keyword or phrase in the domain that people search for – it will mean that you will rank high on Google.

How the blog works

The blog automatically takes most of its content from Yahoo Answers and posts it in a way where the original question is the blog’s post and the answers on Yahoo Answers are the blog comments. I also have the blog set up to seldomly post a video from Youtube or a product from Amazon.

The blog itself works on the WordPress platform and is hosted in a server where I also have some other websites – so I don’t have to pay anything extra for hosting.

Currently I have set the blog to post 6 new posts each day. The posts might be of bad quality but having constant stream of new posts is a good way to get more traffic from search engines.

The traffic

I am not doing any marketing or promotion for the blog.

The only traffic I am focused on getting is long keyword traffic from Google.  Currently I am getting about 20-30 visitors a day which is great compared to 0 visits just less than 1 month ago. I expect the traffic to rise significantly after 3 months of having the blog work automatically. 3 months is usually the time what it takes for a new blog to get the credit it deserves from search engines.

How much money does my automated blog make?

My automated test blog is currently not even half way finished but 1 thing I did was I installed as much Google Adsense ads on the site as allowed by Google – this means 3 ad units and 3 text link units.

The people coming to the site and reading the little content it has usually want a way out and often click on 1 of the ads. Since the website is a micro niche the content of the ads is highly targeted – that means that on average the % of people who click on the ads is very high – about 6 times higher as the ads here on Financial Jesus.

I know it is not much and that it is tens of times less I make with my other sites but it is essentially money for doing nothing. I know people who have 500 auto blogs that each make them 1 dollar per day. That’s an income of 182 500 dollars a year for doing nothing.

By getting my auto-blogs traffic up from 20 visitors to 100 a day would mean an extra income of 2 dollars per day. Furthermore I am positive that I can add adverts from other networks and improve the click through rates – helping the auto blog to make even more money.

In Conclusion

It is certainly possible to make a living by creating auto blogs but it would mean creating a very large number of sites to make a decent living. You could essentially install all the automatic blogs to the same domain meaning that you can even have a thousand blogs for the cost of registering 1 domain for 10 dollars.

Over 10 years has passed since I did any of this but I figured it would still make an interesting read.

1. Advertising

About 10 years ago I made a website on Geocities – the address was something like www.geocities.com/mywebpage.
I used a special program and a list of more than 20 000 proxy servers to fake the visitors number of the website. I probably had no users at all but the counter said about 100 000 visits daily

A lot of people contacted me and wanted to know how I got such a huge number of visitors and asked to do link exchange. I didn’t do it!
Instead I signed up for a program and offered ads on my website. These were tricky ads – they required clicking and filling out forms on the subsequent pages.

I had a special program intended to do just that. The program was called CaCa and it was made by a Russian hacker who also offered support.
Do date this was the most advanced cheating program I have ever seen (but I haven’t seen many) – it offered features to fake the click through rate of the ads and even allowed you to make it look like more people are on the website during the day and less in the evening.

The advertising company sent me my first check but then closed my account because I was not generating any sales. I could have used the same technique on other pages but I didn’t.
More than money I just wanted to see if I can do it.

Why you couldn’t do it anymore:
I did it before there was Google or any modern advertising companies. Today Google Adsense and other similar programs have large blacklisted proxy lists that they keep a close eye on.
When someone uses an anonymous proxy server to change their IP address and to click on ads they will know it immediately and most probably cancel your account due to fraud.

2. Get paid to Surf programs

My first encounter with making money on the internet was a website called Spedia. They offered a bar that would sit at the bottom of your screen while you browse the web and show you ads – you would make money just buy browsing and occasionally clicking on ads.
I followed all their rules but for some reason they thought that I had somehow cheated them and closed my account just before I got my money. I was very disappointed.

I then started to look around for similar programs and found GetPaid4 – a company that has since gone extinct.  Me and couple of my friends would kind of break in to the schools computer class and play games throughout the night on some computers and on others log in with the GetPaid4 bar and have a program move the mouse cursor and simulate surfing on the web.
Each of us had programs making money for 4-5 people at the same time. This meant that we would get multiple checks with the names of different people. These people were our friends who had nothing against making some money for only cashing a check in their bank.

Why you couldn’t do it anymore:
This one has actually multiple reasons. We had 20 to 25 computers making money at the same time from the same network. This means that all these computers had the same IP address. It would immediately raise all kinds of red flags today.
We also used programs that automatically moved the mouse cursor – it is very easy for another program that has been loaded in your memory to detect mouse moving applications. This would also indicate an immediate red flag.

3. Get Paid to Read Email

I opened an account for 1 of the first web services that used to pay people for reading  emails. The way it worked was that they had 2 banners – on the header and on the footer of the email. Their advertisers paid them some money for advertising and they paid 60% of it to the people having email accounts and seeing the ads.
I have since forgotten what was the name of the company but it went bankrupt pretty fast. They didn’t require you to click on the ads – this meant that they were probably showing CPM ads. Nobody knew 10 years ago but today it is common knowledge that these are the worst kind of ads to make money.
The people who got paid didn’t get enough money to stick around and the companies advertising probably didn’t get anyone clicking the ads.

I signed up for all sorts of spam emails and made sure that I got thousands of mails per day. Then I used a program to click “next” and read all the emails during the night while I was sleeping.

Why you couldn’t do it anymore:
These kinds of basic web services are all bankrupt. The business model wasn’t simply viable. The websites still working usually want you to fill out some forms and click on things. This is a lot more difficult to cheat. Automatically beating CAPTCHAs is almost impossible.

Would I Do It Again?

No. And if someone asks I am willing to give all the money back even if more than 10 years has passed.
In total I didn’t make more than a few thousand dollars all combined. It was a great learning experience but nothing beats making money the honest way.

If I think back I am pretty sure that I wouldn’t know half as much about computers and the internet as I know today if I hadn’t done what I did. So I am happy I did it but I wouldn’t do it again!

Markus Frind is the owner of a website called Plenty of Fish – the largest dating site in the world.

His website is free for everybody – he uses Google Adsense ads to pay for hosting and makes enough to keep the site running. In fact – Plenty of Fish makes about 1 million dollars a month just from Adsense advertising. In addition to that, the good news is that he doesn’t have to share the money with anyone – he is the only person working for his website (his girlfriend also helps out).

3 years ago – in 2006 – he was already making over 10 000 dollars per day just with Adsense. Here is his Google Adsense check for 901 733 Canadian dollars  (735 567 US dollars)
The check is for only 1 month and is the largest known Google Adsense check ever seen.

Click for a bit larger image

The Website Itself

To tell you the truth – Plenty of Fish itself is a rather basic website that doesn’t look too good. Since I don’t know a lot about online dating I went to ZoomOnDating.com and checked out some other dating sites – I have to tell you that Plenty of Fish was probably the worst looking! But it’s also the largest in the world and free – so you really can’t argue with that. They must be doing the important stuff right!

For more information about people who make a lot of money with Google Adsense – sign for our  full feed RSS or subscribe via email.

One of my intents when launching Financial Jesus in May 2008 was to make some money!

I wanted to have a blog that looks good, has quality content, is well known and makes enough money to live on!

While I haven’t fully reached any of these goals – they seem more attainable than ever.

After reading thousands of blogs on the internet I dare to say that the quality of blog posts here at Financial Jesus is top notch (is this my ego talking?).

When it comes to my blogs design and the ability to make money – there is a lot to be done! I feel that the website should be a lot simpler and also incorporate some ads to pay for itself.

My Google Adsense Check

Despite many challenges – today is an important day for Financial Jesus. We just received our first Google Adsense Check!

Click for larger image

The Check is for 112 dollars and 31 cents and it took a total of 6 months to make this money.

I know – it isn’t millions but everyone has to start from somewhere! After all – I can promise that the next $100 comes a lot faster! After my post about how much money a website can make it feels that there are no limits!

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I am a big fan of Firefox and use it almost exclusively for all my web surfing.

Firefox was also the only browser that I used when redesigning the theme that this blog comes with.

Here is what I thought FinancialJesus.com looked like to our visitors:

And indeed it looked like this for 75% of all my readers – because they use Firefox.

Here is what FinancialJesus.com looked for the 24% of visitors who used Internet Explorer or Safari:

Notice the magically appeared Google Adsense ad on the right! It was not inserted there by me and until yesterday I had no idea that it was there at all!

Whose ad was it?

The ad was included by the author of my blogs theme. When redesigning the theme I tried to comment out the code for the ad but I did a sloppy job! The ad did not show up in Firefox but it displayed just fine in Internet Explorer.
This was totally against my policy of keeping the site clean and ad free. I have recently added some experimental ads but none of them were above the fold (the part of the website that is visible without scrolling down).

This ad had probably the best CTR on FinancialJesus.com. Unfortunately I have no way of knowing how it did, since it made money to someone else and I don’t have a way to getting my hands on its statistics!

If you want to be sure what your website looks like and you don’t like making money for someone else you should check your website with different browsers.

You never know when something strange (and somewhat stupid) like this happens!

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Don’t be too happy if you want to be rich

Good news everybody!

FinancialJesus.com has been up and running for 15 days straight and it looks that things are getting better by the day.
Sunday(that’s yesterday, baby! ) was our record breaking day with 579 unique visitors.

Here’s what happened during the first 15 days

FinancialJesus.com has a total of 34 posts and exactly 70 comments.

The comments part is what I am particularly satisfied with! It shows that there is already starting to form a small community around this website and that is exactly what I have been trying to do!

During the first 15 days I have had 1596 unique visitors! This is an average of 100 visitors a day! I am very satisfied with this, but to tell you the truth this number is very far from what it will be. All my next efforts will be made in order to get more visitors to FinancialJesus.com and eventually get the average to 1000 unique visitors per day.

My number 1 traffic source?

StumbleUpon.com – I can’t recommend it enough! I spend a lot of time on StumbleUpon to find new interesting stuff, and to tell you the truth I have submitted a few of my more interesting posts to StumbleUpon as well… If you are a user, add me as a friend

Most viewed post

My most viewed post is Top 10 richest countries of the world. I wrote it only 3 days ago, but it has already got 1134 unique visitors and 1253 page views. Nothing compared to big sites, but pretty OK for FinancialJesus.com.
The traffic to Top 10 richest countries of the world has mostly come from StumbleUpon. Guess who adds his own content to StubleUpon? That’s right – ME I only do it for posts I feel are StumbleUpon material, so, to tell you the truth, I don’t feel bad at all.

What have I learned?

Basic things actually.

1. If possible make lists – they are easier to read.
2. Use a lot of titles and highlighting – This make it easier for visitors to read your content as well
3. Use spell check – you always make mistakes!

Ads?

As you have maybe noticed financialjesus.com is ad free. But it is not my intention to keep it ad free forever. In fact just about 2 hours ago I added some Google Adsense ads to my top post – Top 10 richest countries of the world. Since I have almost no experience with ads I have yet no idea on how it will turn out. The reason I decided to post some ads is to make a small case study for myself – that way I’ll get a little experience on whether the ad formats and positioning that I used work or not!

For information on how my next 15 days will go and how the “ad placement project” went, sign up to my full feed RSS or subscribe via email.