In my post about about how to monetize unused domains, I mentioned that I was experimenting with redirecting a typo domain. The domain is blinkco.com which is a typo for the ringtone company blinko.

I have seen a drastic improvement by redirecting the traffic to the blinko affiliate program on azoogle. The previous owner was using Sedo to monetize the domain. This earned him approximately $0.13 per visitor. The affiliate program redirect has earned my over $0.40 per visitor over the first month and a half. This equates to $430 CPM. The traffic volume is not huge, but it is a nice additional revenue stream. I will keep my eyes open to apply this technique to more domain names.

Here are some great monetization related posts that have bubbled up in my feedreader lately:

Vizu just launched a new service where they pay you to post polls on your site. You provide some basic demographic information for your site, and they will pay on a CPM basis for placing the poll on your site. This could be a great strategy for some of the quiz sites or even my friends who run a popular teen site, Kiwibox.com.

Here are two good posts related to website monetization.

Making Money In the Mashup Economy – An interesting post over at GigaOm about how some companies are monetizing all of the mashups that you see springing up all over the place. One key take away is that many of the people selling tools and services related to mashups are the ones making money. However, there is a great example of hypemachine which allows users to sample music. They monetize the site via links to the apple itunes affiliate program and advertising sales. I could also see them selling feature spots on the homepage to push certain artists. This might be a bit shady, but it could be a nice way to make some money and the payment could be disclosed.

As someone who has been building websites since 1996, I have a small collection of domain names that I am not making use of. Over the years, I have tried a variety of methods to monetize these domains.

1.) Domain Parking Services. These services allow you to point your domain to their name servers and they show semi-targeted pay-per-click ads on the domain. The level of input you can have related to targeting varies for each service, but most let you provide some keyword suggestions.

Advantages

The first week of 2007 is coming to a close, so I thought it was a good time to provide some links to help you get motivated for earning more in the new year.

One of the blog posts which helped me to get into the right frame of mind was Quadzilla’s You are the CEO. In the post he emphasizes the importance of viewing yourself as the strategic leader of your company, even if your company is just you and your computer. This means you should:

• Focus your limited time on the high value tasks in which you specialize.

In the forums, I came across a leaked link to the new Adbrite Video Beta page. The system looks very impressive.

Key Features:

• An embedded player where Ads are shown in a text bar on the top, and float down in a pop up bubble that is 60 pixels high.
• The player has built in sharing capabilities similar to youtube, except when a video is shared the visitor is referred back to your site.
• Others can embed your video in their site, and the player will show your ads.

The holidays are a great time to sit back and relax with family and of course catch up on the latest monetization ideas floating around the web.

I’ll be spending some time in the air as I head from Charlotte, NC to see my family in Connecticut, and I have downloaded a few shows from WebmasterRadio.fm that look interesting. WebmasterRadio has weekly shows hosted by some of the big players in the affiliate marketing/SEO/web business game. I have only listened to the SEORockstars and Net Income shows so far, and I always feel like I learn at least one thing from each show. You can download mp3s, so it will be perfect to fill up my ipod for the trip.

I was going through a few posts over at the wickedfire forums today, and I learned about the AutoBlog plugin for wordpress.  This plugin allows you to specify multiple rss feeds and it will automatically parse the feeds into posts on your wordpress template. The plugin can even put the posts into wordpress categories if the rss feed is set up correctly.

A while ago, I covered BlueHatSEO’s blog post about an idea to earn $100 per day from promoting screen savers bundled with adware.  Earnersblog just put up a great post about how the author earned $200 per day promoting Casino affiliate programs with an ebook. He basically wrote an ebook about a roulette strategy and encouraged readers to try out the strategy by signing up for an online casino via affiliate links embedded in the book. He distributed the ebook via p2p sharing and ebay promotion.
I think the idea is worth consideration. I really like that:

I have come up with a new method which I hope will help me to become much more efficient at making money online. A few weeks ago, I signed up with a company called GetFriday to provide me with a personal assistant in India. To get things started, I signed up fro the 10 hours per month package For $95. The hourly price can go as low as $6.25/hour based on the number of hours in the package.
Shobana, my new assistant works from 9AM to 6 PM Pacific Time, and I can contact her via email or an 800 number. She has a college degree, and her English is very good. So far, I have had her work on a few task such as entering data from various websites into a spreadsheet for me. I used this information to populate the mysql databases for one of my sites. This is work that I would have done myself in the past. It is a huge help for me to be about outsource these manual tasks so that I can spend my time working on more important tasks.