For Readers of My E-Book Chapter

Note: This is the only place online that you can find Chapter 21 of my e-book You Can Make Money Writing for free. Although it covers some of the ways you can make money with e-books, it covers other ways to make money, and specifically focuses on ways that do not require a website. Below this chapter you'll find links to other resources and to the sites where I sell my e-books.

Lesson Twenty-One

Making Money Without A Website

Can you make money online without a website? Absolutely. And without any investment other than your time? Yes. You'll find some great ways right here.

Now, the nit-pickers out there will say that you have to at least have a computer and you have to pay for internet service. Not true. You can do most of the things here working from a computer in a public library for free. In any case, most of us - at least in the United States - already have internet access and a computer, so there is no additional cost for these things. You just have to be willing to do the work.

Article Based Affiliate Sales

This little money making scheme is one I read about somewhere on the internet. It involves writing articles, so I had to try it out. I will warn you though, that this one does require an investment of $9, but that's a pretty low-risk business, don't you think?

Note to the argumentative among you: You could probably talk a friend into putting up the $9 for a 10% share of the revenue. That would make it free for you to try.

Okay, the model works like this: You register a domain name, forward it to a good affiliate offer, and write articles to promote the domain. I once read a post by a man who claimed he made $1700 with his first article using this plan. I suspect he exaggerated, but about two years ago I rewrote five of my articles and gave it a try. I'll tell you how it worked out, but first I have to cover a little background information, and get into more detail about how you can set this up.

You might know how easy it is now to sign up as an affiliate for various products. With services like ClickBank it has become even easier. There is no additional approval process for each product or company. Once you have your ClickBank "nickname" you can promote the products from any one of their thousands of vendors and get a commission on any sales, some as high as 75% of the sale's price.

For example, on UnusualWaysToMakeMoney.com, I have an page on buying and selling cars for profit. Browsing ClickBank products one day, I found an e-book for sale on how to make money selling cars. The publisher offers a 50% commission on each $47 sale, or about $22 after the fees.

A few minutes later, I had a link up on my page, going to his site. Every now and then someone clicks through to his sales page and buys the book, which earns me about $22. ClickBank tracks everything for you, by the way, and sends out checks every two weeks. It costs nothing to open a ClickBank account.

This is basic affiliate marketing, and it is simple now, but some people want it to be even simpler. Building a website to promote those affiliate products is a bit of work, after all. What if you just wrote an article and in the resource box linked directly to the affiliate sales page, so you could earn commissions without the need of a website? This has worked for some, but most article directories won't allow affiliate links in an article, and they do check. A better way follows.

How To Do It: Step-By-Step

1. Find a product you would like to promote as an affiliate.

It should be related to a topic you can easily write about. It should pay a commission of at least $20 (my opinion, but you can try lower-paying products). Sign up and get your affiliate URL. This is the address you send people to in order to get credit - and your commission - for the sale.

2. Register a domain.

This will be your only expense, and should cost less than $10 per year. Register a name that has something to do with your topic or product. Most good names are taken, but you can use numbers in a name in order to find an available one with the keyword(s) you want - this is why I have a site called 999articles.com. Certainly "articles.com" and related names were long gone, or being sold for thousands of dollars.

3. Set the domain to redirect or forward to your affiliate URL.

All good registries have free forwarding for your domain. If the one you're considering doesn't find another - you need this. We use MyDomain.com for our domain registration, and forwarding is free and easy.

Once you set the forwarding up, any time someone clicks through to your domain from an article (or enters it in their browser) they will be forwarded to the affiliate URL, with a delay of a second or two at most. They will hopefully buy something then, generating a commission for you.

4. Write relevant articles, linking to your domain in the resource box.

When your article is read, and the reader wants to learn more, he will click through to your domain and be redirected to your affiliate URL. Be sure your article is relevant to what he finds there, or he isn't likely to buy anything. Remember, you will almost certainly do best offering information and products of real value to the reader.

5. Submit your article to twenty or more article directories.

Most article directories don't allow affiliate links, but they usually allow links to a domain as long as you own it - even if it redirects to an affiliate link. Read the agreement to be sure this is the case. In any case, just use the directories that do allow this. You can also submit your articles directly to newsletter publishers, or post them on your own free blog (more about blogs in moment).

Helpful Hints

Want to try this money making scheme? Here are some tips.

1. Look for high-priced, high-commission products. "Conversion rates" don't usually drop proportionately with higher prices. In other words, if 10 out of 1000 visitors buys a $17 product, that number may only drop to 4 for a $100 product. Making 50% on either, you would make an average of $85 for each 1000 readers who clicked on that link in the first case, or $200 in the second case.

2. Don't try to "sell" anything in your article. Write good informational articles and let the affiliate sales page do the selling when your reader arrives there. However, do try to "sell" them on clicking that link in the resource box.

Important Point:

You can't take back those articles once they're out there, but you can redirect your domain to a different affiliate to experiment, or if the original one cancels its program. Just be sure that the affiliate product or service is relevant to the content in your articles. In fact, you may want to develop this plan around a set of possible products that all are meant for essentially the same market.

If you have three computer registry cleaners that you like, for example, you can promote all three and test to see which converts better. In each article you would have something like this in the resource box: "Visit now to get information on my favorite registry cleaner."

Does It Work?

Others have claimed to do well with this plan. My own success was somewhat limited, but then I barely tried out the plan. I spent just an afternoon on my first and only attempt. I owned a domain which I hadn't developed into a website (tenmoney.com). I set it up to redirect to an affiliate product that I liked.

That took a few minutes. Then I spent a few hours to rewrite five of my articles about making money online, and I linked to my domain in each resource box. I submitted each to about a dozen article directories.

The results? Over the next two months, I made exactly $84 - just two $42 commissions. It has been many more months now without a sale. There are certainly ways to "tweak" this system, and to do better than the $17 per hour I made for my effort, but I had and have enough other things in the works.

That was my one and only attempt at this no-website money making scheme. No great success, but I thought you might like to know about it. It takes nothing but $9 and your time to give it a try.

Sell The Rights To Your Articles

Some people sell the rights to their articles, or to the e-books they create from their articles. There are two basic ways this is done. One is to sell books or articles with "resell rights" included in order to sell them for more money. This means that the buyer has the right to sell them again.

For example, you might sell an e-book for $20. But if you give the buyer the right to not only read it, but to sell it to others, you might get $100 for it. Internet marketers are always looking for products to sell or to use as bonuses. A one-time investment of $100 can get them a quality e-book that can be sold alone or used as a bonus a thousand times.

The other way to sell your writing online is to sell "private label rights." This means that the buyer not only can put his or her own name on your book as the author, but they are also free to change anything they want to. The advantages to buyers are clear. They don't have to write their own articles or e-book, and they are free to modify a product in any way that suits their purposes.

This has become common with articles. You can enter "private label rights articles" into any search engine and find all sorts of offers. I have seen 20 articles with private label rights selling for as little as $20. The problem is the quality.

That's why you can make more if you have a collection of really good articles for sale. Of course the pricing is determined in part by the subject as well. Many more internet marketers are looking for decent articles or books on money-making topics, while few are searching for dog training articles.

You can get even more if you offer articles that are "exclusive," meaning you will not sell them to anyone else. You get more on that one sale, but then give up the opportunity to make multiple sales.

One final note: Keep all of this in mind if you find that you really hate writing or are not good at it. You can buy e-books to sell as your own, or buy as many articles as you need to promote your website (or even to use as pages). There are so many ways to make money online.

Paid Blogging

I recently discovered a blog where you're paid to voice your opinion. It's called Rant Blogger, at (sorry, this site is no longer online as of late 2010). When I visited, there were rants about college, rants about politics, and about everyday things. Send in your rant and they make you an offer if they're interested.

It really isn't worth my time, but as an experiment I spent twenty minutes rewriting a five paragraph piece on the exclusionary rule that I had put on my "ideas site" a couple years earlier. I sent it to them, and got an offer back an hour later. They would pay $8. I said yes, sent them my PayPal email address, and they paid me almost immediately. My "rant" was up on the blog an hour later.

I even got to have a link to my blog at the end, so I really got "paid" twice. Now, this is no get rich quick scheme, but if you had a lot to say and could type fast, you might make $50 or $60 in an afternoon. It requires no investment.

The idea is obviously to get others to create all their content, possibly for search engine "bait," but they don't seem to care if there is any keyword optimization of the rants. Possibly they hope to develop a following based on contributors returning and sending their friends there as well to see their paid and published work.

Either way, I'm not convinced that this business model will work for the blog, so if it is already changed, I apologize. You might try searching for "get paid to blog," or something similar to see if others are trying this.
By the way, they ask for the right to distribute your rant elsewhere, but then you give that with articles anyhow, so this isn't a big deal. These also do not have to be article-length rants - mine was perhaps 300 words.

Revenue Sharing Sites

There is another kind of website where you can get paid to contribute. You don't get paid up front for your work, but you get a share of the revenue that is generated on the page where they place your articles. The usual monetization method is Google AdSense, and I have seen a couple of these sites now that give you half or more of the revenue.

How much is that? It's impossible to say for sure, since there will be no traffic to some pages and a lot of traffic to those with "hot topics." Also, the ads displayed on a real estate investing article will pay them as much as 50 cents per click on average (thus 25 cents for you) while a poetry guide will get ads that pay 5 cents or less per click.

I suspect that many of these pages make nothing or only a few dollars per year. Some, on the other hand, if they are popular, might make as much as several dollars per month. This may not sound like a lot, but it is residual income, meaning it can keep coming in for years after you have done the work. Post enough content and these trickles of cash flow can add up. I would love to have each of my 1,000 or so articles making a couple dollars per month extra income from sites like these (but I haven't really tried it yet - so many projects, so little time).

Here are a few sites that were doing this the last time I checked. One of them was paying out 70% of the AdSense revenue generated on your pages.

http://thisisby.us
http://www.xomba.com
http://www.helium.com
http://www.oondi.com
http://www.mytripledub.com

Again, things change fast on the internet, and some of these may have changed their rules by the time you read this. If so you can always find more of this type. Just do a search for "revenue sharing web sites," "adsense revenue sharing sites," "get paid to post," or something similar.

One site I particularly like is Tutorial Tub, at http://tutorialtub.com. They deal exclusively with "how to" content. You submit a tutorial, like "How To Clean A Fish," "How To Open A Retirement Account," or anything that teaches readers how to do something. Once they approve it and post it on the site, you get a share of any advertising revenue that comes from that page (50% at the moment, though they reserve the right to change that).

What I like about this concept is that "how to" articles are some of the most popular articles out there. That should mean decent traffic to the pages, so you have a shot at actually making some money. Not having tried it, I have no idea what you can expect to make, but it is yet another way to make money writing, and with no investment except time.

Free Blogs

There are a number of places where you can start a blog. I have used the free service at Blogger.com to host my 999ideas blog. They make it relatively easy (although none of the technical stuff is really that easy for me), but there are others that are free as well. I never had the patience to do more than hang some Google AdSense ads on it, and have never promoted it heavily nor kept it updated, so it generates very little income.

The important point here, though, is that these things cost nothing to start, and have made thousands of dollars per month for some smart entrepreneurs. If you don't have a computer you could go to the public library today and using their free internet access have your blog up in a short while. Once it is going, you can sell affiliate products, get paid for clicks, sell advertising, sell you own products and more. There are a lot of ways to make money with a blog.

Essentially you can use a blog like a website. You can also promote it in all the same ways, including article distribution. However. I will warn you: A free blog may not always be free, or may be closed down for any reason. It is rare. Some blogs on Blogger.com have been around for years, some making thousands per month, but I feel that a paid service has no reason to ever close your account, so it is safer (of course these free ones are more likely to become paid ones than to just shut down).

I just don't like things being that out of my control. If I was going to really develop a blog, I would buy the appropriate software and let my wife figure out how to create a blog on one of our websites. Actually, she tells me that she has free software to do that anytime I am ready, which may be soon.

Now, if money is the problem, you could do this: Register a domain name, then start a blog with the same name. So far you will have spent just $9 per year for the name. Forward the domain to your blog and link to the domain name in all the articles you distribute. When readers click, they get redirected to the blog.

The point here is safety. After you have made some money on your free blog, you can start a real website using the domain you already have. You can keep the free blog and link to it from the website, or buy the software to host it on the website (or you can find free software - just do a search for "free blog software"). This is how you bootstrap your way to big business. A $9 investment can lead to a great income a few years down the road.

Free E-Books

How do you make money by giving away e-books? Actually there are several ways. You can give them away as a gift or "bribe" to get people to subscribe to a mailing list of some sort, whether a course or newsletter or whatever. Then you sell something in that newsletter or course or other mailings, or direct the readers to your website where they can click on ads or buy your products.

Another common technique is to create a short version of an e-book that you sell. You give it away and encourage others to give it away as well. In the book, you naturally offer something of real value to the reader, but you also make a few pitches for the full version, with links to the sales page where they can buy it.

Now I promised ways to make money without a website and without much - if any - investment. How do you do that with e-books that you give away? Here are a few ways you can try.

First, you can write a book or report to sell, as mentioned. If you truly have no money and no computer, write it in parts and email it to an email account - one that you set up for free of course. When you are ready, go to the library or use a friend's computer and open the emails to put it all together in some kind of document.

Convert it into a PDF using one or more of your five free trials at http://createpdf.adobe.com, if they are still offering that. Otherwise you'll have to find another free converter online. Search "free PDF conversion," and you'll find something. Make it into a PDF e-book in this way and download it for the moment onto the computer you're using. Email yourself a copy just to be safe. There are also some freeware programs out there. Cute PDF has worked for me just fine, and is available free at http://www.cutepdf.com.

Now go open a free account at Lulu.com. They will sell your e-book for you for a commission. They'll even sell it as a paperback - printing one at a time as they are ordered - if you want to try that too. Once your book is listed for sale, start a free blog (see the previous section) to promote the book. You can also then write some articles and distribute them to get traffic coming to the blog.

There may be other places where you can sell it as well, but Lulu is free at the moment (no up front cost - you only pay out of your sales). I use ClickBank to sell my e-books, but for that you have to have a website and pay a $50 fee to start selling your e-book.

Now, This was supposed to be about giving away free e-books. so where does that come in? It's your primary marketing strategy, using the technique mentioned above. You create a second e-book that is composed of excerpts from the one you're selling. It is so enticing that some readers naturally decide pay to read the "complete" version.

You give away the free version on your blog, and at places which distribute free e-books. For example, at http://www.free-e-books.net. There are many of these places if you search "submit free e-books" and similar search terms. You just upload the book from the computer, fill in the fields, and they post your book on their site. You can also offer it to web marketers who work in a related area and would like to use it as a bonus with their own products.

Another Way

Here is a much simpler way to make money giving away e-books. These will be short books too. The idea here is to have a great little informational book or report that helps the reader and has links to affiliate products in it - with your affiliate code in each of the links of course.

Find an couple products that you really like and which have affiliate programs. This could be brainwave entrainment CDs for meditation, for example (I love these things). There are several which pay from $6 to $50 to you for each sale you generate. Now do a ten-page book explaining how these things work and with a review of several that you like. Each time you mention one, of course, you will have a link there for the reader to click for more information Each of those links will have your affiliate code in it, so you get credit if the reader decides to buy any of the products.

Now find a half-dozen ways to distribute the book... Here they are:

Ways To Give Away E-Books

1. Put them on your free blog.

2. Send them to all your contacts and friends.

3. Promote your blog in your signature file in the forums you post in.

4. List the e-book at http://www.free-e-books.net and other distribution sites.

5. Find website owners who would like to give it as a gift to visitors.

6. Place ads in "free classified ads" sites.

Okay, now that you have started to distribute the free e-book in six ways, write another, and then another. Find the best products out there and write a book or report on a related topic just to get those links in there. You could put six of your best fishing stories in an e-book and then suggest that readers go buy a "How To Catch Trout" e-book that nets you $10 per sale (yes there is one at ClickBank - I just checked).

How well does this work? I don't know. I have made a few thousand dollars giving away e-books, but that was a different business model. I can tell you a quick true story that will show you the potential though.

I bought the e-book, Confessions of a Lazy Super-Affiliate by Chris Rempel. It was less than $20, and a great value. About a week after first reading it, I returned to it to find the link to a link building service he recommended. I clicked through and signed up for the service. I am guessing, but I think Chris made at least a $20 commission on my purchase, although it could have been more.

He suggested a directory submission service that cost me $42 to have my site submitted to 400 directories. I used it (and will use it again), and he probably made a $10 commission on that. I recently started using an article submission service that he recommends, using his affiliate link of course (it costs the same anyhow). He'll likely make another $20 or more from that one.

Now, if you do the math, you can see that even if he had given me his valuable e-book in the first place, he still would have made $50 from my having it. That suggests there is some real potential here, doesn't it?

(It may even be better than what I am guessing here. Many of the services that pay commissions do so for as long as the customer remains subscribed. If that is the case, and if he makes 10%, Rempel has likely made hundreds of dollars on the thousands I have now spent on the services he recommended.)

Now, it is true that some people do get irritated with "advertising" in an e-book. I happen to think it just adds more value to the e-book when I am told where to get products that I actually want and can benefit from. The important part is that the affiliate products which are linked to are relevant. In any case, if it is a free e-book and people are annoyed by a link or twenty, that's their problem.

And remember, you can create an e-book for free if you need to, using tools available online. You can market it for free too. What other businesses are there where you can invest no money at all and grow your revenue to six-figures?

2009 Update: I recently decided to try the plan outlined above in example about meditation CDs. I ended up with a forty-page e-book that took a few days to write, and focused on the mind power benefits of meditation. Of course it recommended a good product or two, linking to them with my affiliate code. I've only given it to my Brainpower Newsletter subscribers so far, but that resulted in a couple hundred dollars in commissions so far.

Note:

If you liked this chapter, you'll love the book You Can Make Money Writing, available at 999articles.com, also available as an Amazon Kindle e-book. It is primarily about making money with your own website or blog using short promotional articles, but cover several other ways to make money online. The table of contents can be found below. Some of the other e-books I publish can be found at 99reports.com.

Another great resource: Write Your Own Ebook

You Can Make Money Writing

(With Simple Online Articles)

By Steve Gillman

Table Of Contents

Lesson 1 - Making Money With Articles - The Basic Idea

Lesson 2 - Why Online Writing Is Different

Lesson 3 - An Easy Way To Write An Article

Lesson 4 - The Best Article Directories

Lesson 5 - Keyword Tools And Research

Lesson 6 - Article Titles

Lesson 7 - Article Descriptions

Lesson 8 - Writing An Article

Lesson 9 - The Author's Resource Box

Lesson 10 - Strategic Linking

Lesson 11 - Writing For Readers And Webmasters

Lesson 12 - How To Submit Articles

Lesson 13 - Software, Services and Other Tools

Lesson 14 - What Makes A Good Article Directory?

Lesson 15 - More Ways To Make Money With Articles

Lesson 16 - How To Get Ideas For Articles

Lesson 17 - Write - And Rewrite

Lesson 18 - Writing Tips

Lesson 19 - Copyright Violations

Lesson 20 - Writing For Money

Lesson 21 - Making Money Without A Website

Lesson 22 - Using Other People's Articles

Lesson 23 - Article Directory List