Obviously there are more ways of making money, especially on a short term basis. Take a successful concept and copy it and milk it until there’s no value left. Promise people the world, but don’t deliver. Con and deceive them, and be gone when they find out. You’ll make money, sure (you may get arrested), but you’ll never build a lasting business on these models. That’s because you’re sucking value out of things, instead of creating value and giving it to others. These are models of destruction, not models of creation.

The only lasting way of making money is by creating value for others. Creation…not destruction!

Subjective profit

People want to make good deals. They want value for money, and they want to get more value than they think their money is worth. A good deal is a deal that gives you a subjective profit. If you feel that you’ve gotten more value than you paid for (in money), you will feel you’ve made a subjective profit. You’re better off after the deal, than you were before the deal.

Although this may feel like a psychological trick to make people feel good about a bad deal, it in fact is not. People differ, and as such have a different appreciation of value. Something that’s very valuable for one person, may be substantially worth less to an other. The difference needn’t be great for people to experience making a good deal, and in fact actually making a good deal. Buying a blu-ray player won by a person that doesn’t own an HDTV, for a discount compared to the retail price is a good deal for both (provided you do own an HDTV).

The same goes for the age-old scarcity vs. abundance mindset. To the shepherd with a hundred thirsty sheep, the woman that owns a well but no warm clothes is rich. He would happily trade a sheep for water for his herd. For both this is a good deal. The shepherd has a herd of 99 that will survive and the woman has a sheep that will provide wool for warmth. The water is more valuable to the shepherd than the one sheep. For the woman the one sheep is more valuable than the water consumed by the herd. Both are better off, so both make a subjective profit from this deal.

Even when combining talents this mindset still stands. The awesome guitar-player with the mediocre voice is better of working together with the awesome singer with mediocre instrument skills, than both are competing against each other. In competition they make mediocre music and won’t feel awesome, in cooperation, they make awesome music and feel great. And they’ll provide awesome music to the world, instead of mediocre music.

Not the everyday make money online scam artist

A lot of the make money online websites out there, are not based on providing real value. There are more variations to this theme than I could ever make up. I know I’ve fallen for some of them, and it sucks. People know when they’re getting conned. But to a lot of these site owners, that’s not a big deal, because they already have your cash! After that: screw you! They don’t care about you, or your money making abilities. They already cooking up some other scheme of getting your cash.

That’s not how I want to earn a living. I’m all in favor of the value creation model. I believe that it’s the only lasting way of making a living. I hadn’t updated Scraping Pennies, because it left me feeling like one of those make money online scam artists. That’s just not congruent with who I am, so I’m transforming this blog into an outlet for my thoughts on creating businesses based on the value creation model. It’s the only model that works. It’s also the hardest to set up, and the hardest to maintain. Yet it’s the most gratifying model of all.

Creation!
Not destruction.

• Platinum: a 468 x 60 advertisement in the header
• Gold: a 300 x 250 inline advertisement in the posts
• Silver: six 125 x 125 buttons in the sidebar
• Bronze: text links in the footer

OIO Publisher now manages these ads, including the payment process, the approval process and it monitors when ads should go up and when they should go down again. Click any of the four buttons on the Advertise screen to see the ordering and payment screen.

Hey and if you’re interested in advertising here, don’t hesitate to follow through!

Browser frustrations

I noticed that I managed to break the design in Internet Explorer 7 in the mean while. I checked with the great free service of browsershots.org to see if the design was okay in other browsers. Thankfully most browsers display the site as intended, while some show it a little different, but nothing to worry about.

But even Internet Explorer 6 looks better than IE7, which is a first to me. Usually IE6 is the culprit, to the extent that there’s even a site about urging people to upgrade: Save The Developers. This time that’s not my advice… I won’t even be able to fix it this weekend, so if you’re using IE7…sorry.

Why don’t you try FireFox or Opera? They’re both free and stick to web standards (as opposed to Microsoft, who insists on making their own standards).

I use FireFox, because it has so many great add-ons that make online life so much easier. Especially if you’re a web worker or a blogger.

Advertiser Networks

There are several advertiser networks that will match advertisers to publishers (bloggers and other people with websites). They have the advantage that they have a bigger mass than the average blog on the internet and are able to publish advertisements to a much larger audience than a single blog can do.

They are the middle men. Now the term middle men may bring up all kinds of negative feelings, but that’s not necessary. Sure they get take a (large) cut of the advertisers paycheck, but they do provide the service of finding advertisers. Or of advertisers finding them, but that’s kind of like the same thing. Advertisers will not find you if you’re a small new blog, like Scraping Pennies is right now.

Signing up as a new blog

Last night I tried to sign-up for three rather well known advertiser networks:

Text Link Ads
Text Link Ads sells text links in several forms and shapes. As links in a sidebar, beneath a single post, in RSS feeds, or even within the content of a post. Google isn’t particularly fond of them, but advertisers are. So for Making Money Online it’s an interesting alternative.

Signing up was easy. The account was set up in a matter of minutes, but that doesn’t mean you’re taken into the inventory of publishers automatically. TLA reviews the submissions (mostly automatic I assume), and it didn’t take long (less than 24 hours) for the rejection to hit my mailbox. As a consolation I’m enrolled into the affiliate program. Yay! I’ve got a banner now.

ReviewMe
ReviewMe is a site that pays you for writing blog posts with reviews about blogs, products, books, services and more. You’ve got the liberty to choose what you review, so you can review the things you like and discard what you don’t. That is…if you’re allowed into the program

They let me fill in all the forms, and declined my application automatically and instantly. Not enough traffic and inbound links (that’s not surprising). “Try again in a few months.” Okay, that’s not nice! I understand it of course, but please let people check their eligibility before they fill out the forms! Or wait 24 hours before telling them like TLA does. That at least gives the appearance that you gave it some thought.

And why is there no affiliate program?

Kontera Content Links
Kontera provides a system that scans your content live to find words that they have advertisers for. If they find these keywords, they turn them into recognizable links. Hover over the links and a small pop-up appears with the site or product from the advertiser. If visitors click on the link inside that pop-up, you’ll get a share of the revenue.

Signing up here was easy as well. But they warn you beforehand that you need to comply with some (not so stringent) program terms. Again, I’m not admitted into the program instantly. They need to review my application. Oh boy. No answer yet, but I can guess what it will be.

UPDATE (2008-05-13): I actually got approved into the program. That was highly unexpected, but a nice surprise nevertheless!

The giants win…for now anyway

I did not expect that I would excite the advertiser networks with my new unknown, but soon to be very famous blog. I mean, they probably get a lot of applications like this on a daily basis.

The reason I applied for the networks so early was to report the experiences here. When you’re starting out as a new blog and you intend to monetize, you should focus on getting traffic and links. This little experiment just showed you why.

No traffic and no links, and they drop you like a brick. So it’s time to create some buzz around Scraping Pennies!