Updated the make money online for free article April 2014 including updating the free AdSense ready Blogspot template file.
A visitor to my site mentioned my AdSense income is a lot of money to someone living in India, a little research later and my eyes were open to how hard it must be for poor people living in places like India to afford my premium SEO WordPress theme.
For the record I know there’s more millionaires in India than the UK, but those in poverty from India are really poor. Poverty in the UK is measured in can you afford the latest games console or iPhone rather than being able to buy food!
Make Money Online Startup Costs
I’ve been thinking how I can help poor people: those who can’t risk spending money on a premium WordPress theme like the theme I develop, $10-$15 on domain registration fees a year and $60 a year on hosting a WordPress blog:
Startup cost including Stallion Responsive is around $175 in the first year and $75 for future years ($75 per site on hosting and registration fees: Stallion Responsive is a one off cost).
There’s ways to bring this down, I own around 130 domains and don’t pay anywhere near $60 per year per domain (would be $8,000 a year) on hosting because I use virtual private servers which host multiple sites which brings my costs for hosting down to under $2,000 a year.
If your long term goal is to make a lot of money online what I do (network of domains) is one good way to achieve it, but let’s start with making money online for free.
Thought about how I could use my SEO/AdSense knowledge to get started in making money online without spending money and that’s what this article is about.
It’s not the best/fastest way to make money online (get what you pay for), but it’s free money other than time required to create content, research Clickbank products to review and learn search engine optimization etc…
How to Make Free Money Online
There are many options for making money online without spending any money up front, I’m going to cover using free Blogspot Blogger blogs (completely free to use, Blogger is owned by Google) and using AdSense (free and also owned by Google) to monetize via ads and Clickbank (free as an affiliate) to make money reviewing products and generate free search engine traffic to your Blogger blog using an AdSense Blogger template I’ve made (free: see later).
So nothing mentioned in this article costs a penny/dime/rupee.
At the end of the article is a list of links to some of my other SEO tutorial articles, I strongly advise you read them all as I’m not going to cover much search engine optimization techniques here and it’s important for generating search engine traffic for free.
Get Rich Quick
Firstly this is not a quick money making scheme, it’s going to take serious effort and it’s highly unlikely to make you rich, in fact if someone completely new to this managed to get to $50 a day within a year of using these free make money ideas I’d be very, very impressed.
If you have money to spend WordPress is where I’d put my time, it’s better search engine optimized and you have full control of everything (LOTS you can’t do with Blogger), but it does cost money to start: although the WordPress software (a content management system: CMS) is free, hosting and domain registration fees aren’t free.
For a poor person living in India or Pakistan, which is where a LOT of my traffic to my money making and SEO information articles comes from even $5 extra a day could make a big difference to the quality of their life.
As you can see from the screenshot below (from Blogger) you can generate a fair amount of traffic over time.
I don’t put any real effort into Blogger blogs (too busy with my network of domains!), but you can see they can generate quite a bit of traffic. If I were serious about Blogger I wouldn’t have stopped at only adding 2 posts to the “World of Warcraft Clickbank Affiliate Opportunities” and even there the posts are low quality. Personal preference that I just don’t enjoy working with Blogger blogs.
Using Free Blogger/Blogspot Blogs to Make Money Online
Obviously the first step is register a free Blogger account and Blogspot sub-domain at Blogger. If you’ve never used Blogger before don’t worry too much right now which sub-domain you register as it’s free to register as many as you want (I have more than a few myself :-)) when you read the SEO tutorial linked at the base on this article you’ll learn what sub-domain is best to register.
I’ve been selling AdSense/SEO Blogger/Blogspot themes for years at £5 each, but barely get any orders. They use the old Blogspot legacy code (it’s much easier to SEO and add AdSense to) and that might be one of the reasons why they don’t get ordered much, also they are based on two of the original Blogger themes, so not a great deal of choice.
I’ve created a new Blogger/Blogspot AdSense/SEO theme based on an original Blogspot theme Rounders 2.
Free Blogspot AdSense Template Txt File
Using my Free Blogspot AdSense Theme to Make Money
The Blogspot theme is fully search engine optimized (for Blogger: not as good as WordPress with Stallion Responsive) and AdSense optimized and requires one simple search and replace in a text editor to replace my Google AdSense publisher ID with yours.
Sign up for a free Google AdSense account.
I understand it’s normally easy to get an AdSense account via a Blogger blog, but before applying for an AdSense account via Blogger add some quality content to your new Blogspot blog. You will not be accepted by Google AdSence if your blog is empty, since I’ve never applied for an AdSense account via a blog I’d suggest at least add half a dozen decent quality posts before applying for an AdSense account. If anyone has experience of applying to AdSense via Blogger please post your experiences as a comment below.
Do NOT Click Your Own AdSense Ads
Don’t take shortcuts with AdSense, there’s a lot of pwople trying to make money with AdSense by cheating (fraud). If you are reading this article to learn how to use Bloggger/AdSense/Clickbank etc… you are NOT knowledgeable enough to pull off cheating AdSense.
I’ve been using AdSense for over a decade and I don’t think I could get away with cheating AdSense to a degree of it being worthwhile.
Blogger Template Setup
The AdSense Blogger theme uses the old Blogspot legacy code which means your Blog has to use the original Blogger coding (can’t use their new widgets/gadgets), but it’s a small price to pay for an SEO/AdSense ready Blogspot theme (especially a free one).
To install the SEO/AdSense themes code, log into your Blogger account and under your accounts Dashboard click the “Layout” link, followed by the “Edit HTML” link and near the bottom of the page click the “Revert to Classic Template” link, click OK on the warning box and on the next page paste the free Blogspot SEO/AdSense theme code (that you’ve already replaced my AdSense publisher ID with yours).
Click the “Save Template Changes” button and you have an SEO/AdSense Ready Blogspot Blog just waiting for new content.
SEO Your Blogger/Blogspot Blog
There’s a few basic settings to change to get the best SEO out of Blogger.
Under Settings/Basic
Add a relevant Title for your Blog. For SEO reason it makes sense to have a keyword rich title (see the links at the bottom of this article). If I’d have made this site on Blogspot I’d have used the same title as I use here “Stallion WordPress SEO Themes & Plugins” (it’s keyword rich).
Below it is a tag line (labeled Description), again if it was this blog on Blogspot I’d have used “Best Hummingbird SEO WordPress Theme, Responsive AdSense Ads” You will see this description near the top of your blogs page.
All other settings on that page can be left as default.
More settings to change:
Under Settings/formatting
Show: change to “5 posts on the main page”.
Enable Float Alignment: no (if you leave this as yes it messes with some of the AdSense ads placement).
The rest of the settings aren’t important and can be left or changed depending on your needs.
Under Settings/Comments
If you don’t want to deal with comment SPAM (can be a problem on blogs) I’d change these settings, definitely do this if you plan to run lots of Blogspot blogs (absolute pain to manage the comments):
Comments: Hide
Comments Default for Posts: New Posts Do Not Have Comments
Backlinks: Hide
Backlinks Default for Posts: New Posts Do Not Have Backlinks
Under Settings/Archiving
Archive Frequency: Monthly
Enable Post Pages?: Yes
That’s it, you’ll have a Blogspot blog as good as any of my Blogspot blogs.
Next step is creating posts.
Under Postings/New Posts
Is a very easy to use posting form. Anything added here will be visible as a new Blog post on your blog.
The Title is VERY important, make it keyword rich and descriptive (see the links below for how to optimize a pages title).
The other box is where the main content goes.
Now you have an AdSense ready Blogspot blog that’s been setup with SEO in mind and you know how to create new posts.
Lets Make Money with Clickbank
Clickbank is an affiliate marketing network (free to join) where product publishers (selling ebooks etc…) get people like us to promote their products for a fair share of the revenue generated.
I’ve tried a lot of affiliate schemes and Clickbank is the one that gives most money relative to effort because of it’s very fair revenue sharing (can be as high as 75% goes to us).
Sign up for a Free Clickbank Account
Make Money Reviewing Clickbank Products
One way to make money from Clickbank is to review Clickbank products. I’ve used this technique successfully, but the hard part is finding decent Clickbank products to promote (a lot of trial an error I’m afraid).
My sons have all made money from Clickbank before the age of 16 reviewing Clickbank products just like I do, in fact it was my eldest son (age 15 at the time) that introduced Clickbank to me :-)
Anyone can make money this way.
Use the Clickbank Marketplace to find relevant products you could review and promote.
I find writing an honest review of a Clickbank product has worked well for me, this has meant I’ve had to buy the Clickbank product to review it, but if you don’t mind trawling the Internet to read other peoples Clickbank reviews and copy their thoughts into your own reviews (don’t copy the actual reviews, you’ll get your site banned from Google for duplicate content, just the ideas: it’s a good product because sort of thing), when you’ve made a few sales of a Clickbank product consider contacting the author of the product for a free review copy so you can do a better review.
My advice would be to add Clickbank product reviews to your Blogspot blog along with other articles and posts, in this way you have two ways to make money from your traffic. If someone likes the Clickbank product you’ve reviewed they buy it, if not they might click an AdSense ad.
Unless you review a lot of rubbish Clickbank products and say they are all great (I personally don’t do that, some products really SUCK), you are going to find it hard going finding lots of Clickbank products to review.
What I do on a site with Clickbank reviews is also add other articles, so you are always creating new content and generating new search engine traffic and even though most of my pages don’t promote products, they do have AdSense ads on them. The article you are reading now will make money for me long term as some of you will click the ads and you might go to other parts of the site that includes other ways I make money.
Search Engine Optimization Links
As promised here’s a list of SEO resources (on this site) that you might find helpful in learning search engine optimization techniques to drive traffic to your Blogspot blogs. Without traffic you won’t make any money from your Blogs and I’ve found the best way to generate free traffic is through SEO means.
SEO Articles : this is WordPress category on this site with general SEO articles.
SEO Tutorial for WordPress : the first article in a series of SEO tutorials for WordPress users. Although a lot of the SEO tips are WordPress specific the general SEO techniques are exactly the same for Blogger blogs.
Free Blogspot AdSense Template Txt File
Good luck making lots of money online and if you do use the free Blogspot blog to make money drop a comment below.
David Law
Website - SEO Gold
Blogspot Template XML Error
Please Help me Sir
Blogspot Template parsing XML, line 4, column 28
Error parsing XML, line 4, column 28
New AdSense Blogspot Template
I tried to upload it, but it keep saying error, Why it won’t upload, I think others have the same problem like me, because It is old, can u provide me with a new one ?
Blogger Template Revert to Classic Template
As described in the main article this template uses the old Blogger Classic Template system, NOT the new XML template system. If the instructions aren’t clear there are tutorials for converting back to classic, do a search in Google for:
How do you revert to classic template in Blogger
It’s a starting point for those looking to make money from AdSense using Blogger, it works. It’s not meant to be about getting all the new bells and whistles built into Blogger now, the AdSense blogger template has good SEO built in and very good AdSense ad placement, but it’s not pretty, highly featured, advanced…
And it’s free, perfect for those looking to make a start in making money from AdSense without spending a dime.
I run this old AdSense Blogger template on all my Blogspot blogs (dozens of them) except one (that one is about AdSense Click Fraud, so didn’t add AdSense ads in case idiots clicked them!) and blogs not suitable for AdSense (use a Chitika Blogget template version for those: I should give that away for free as well). It works, I’ve not seen a better search engine optimized Blogger template with AdSense built in. Not a great deal you can do SEO wise with Blogger (limited template system), so not hard to create an SEO template.
David Law
Blogger Template Revert to Classic Template