Google sites ranked as the most visited Internet property globally with 854 million unique visitors in July, an increase of 18 percent during the past year.

Google usage is more common in certain global markets than others. In July, 29. 8 percent of total time spent online in Brazil was spent on Google sites, with India only slightly lower at 28.9 percent. The next highest global market was Ireland at 15.9 percent.

“It’s interesting that the dynamics of Google usage would be so similar in Brazil and India given that the two markets are on opposite sides of the world and quite different culturally from one another,” said Alex Banks, managing director of comScore Latin America. “As it turns out, there are interesting similarities between Brazil and India as emerging Internet markets.

Google’s prevalence in these markets can perhaps best be explained by the fact that the time at which these markets really began to develop and flourish was around the same time that Google was becoming a major player in the search landscape. As a result, Google became the dominant Internet brand in these markets and its success appears to have bled from search into other areas of the web like social networking.”

In Brazil, Google sites account for 88.4 percent of all searches conducted, and had a commanding share of time spent in social networking with Orkut (68.2%), maps with Google Maps (63.9%), multimedia with YouTube (82.9%). Google also had nearly half of all time spent in the blogs category with Blogger (47.6%) and email with Gmail (46.8%).

In India, Google sites accounted for 88.4 percent of all searches conducted, and had commanding share of time spent in social networking with Orkut (68.2%), Google Maps (63.9%), multimedia with YouTube (82.8%). It also had nearly half of the time spent in the blogs category with Blogger (47.6%) and email with Gmail (46.8%).

Why start a blog contest?

Two words, TRAFFIC, and EXPOSURE. The PS3 contest we started, doubled our number of visitors in under three days, and this number has been growing steadily since.

How to publicize your contest?

The main way of doing this is through the use of blog contest websites, check out my post about Contest Beat. These sites will provide you with decent exposure reaping the benefits of a large number of visitors looking specifically for contests.

I also recommend perhaps buying blog posts, on reputable blogs that are related to your own. A well-written blog post can attract a substantial amount of targeted visitors.

What prizes for your contest?

The prize you choose for your contest should either be something popular, and in high demand or something related to your particular niche. iPods, MP3 players, mobile phones, and even TVs are great examples of popular items generally in demand by the large majority.

A niche-related prizes (such as advertising space on your blog) can be effective at attracting visitors that are targeted and more likely to show interest in your blog, rather than simply visiting your blog for the competition offer only, never to return. However choosing a niche-related prize means that you are likely to attract a smaller number of people to your blog than you would with a widely popular prize such as an iPod.

How much should you spend?

Contrary to popular belief, this doesn’t matter as much as you might expect. Although I recommend offering a prize with a price tag of at least $100, it is really down to how much money you can afford to spare. Even though a higher value prize can affect the level of interest in your contest, the monetary value of the prize is one of the least important factors of a blog contest. I will explain what other factors may determine the success of a contest later in this post.

Profiting from a contest efficiently.

Making sure you make the most out of your investment is undoubtedly, very important.
The best example of making use of your contest is for your contest to involve a type of ticket-system.
People who would like to enter your contest have to fulfill certain tasks, such as subscribing to your blog, or making a post about your blog contest and the completion of these tasks rewards them with tickets. The more tasks they complete, the more tickets they will gain which in effect determined the chance of them winning the competition. You can assign different values to each task depending on the importance of it for you.

Factors affecting the success of your contest.

• Initial popularity of your blog (if you already are getting 1k visitors each day then news of your competition will spread very quickly whether or not you actively market your competition.
• Your reputability will also affect the number of people taking interest in your blog, deciding whether or not they should invest their time and trust in your contest.
• Value of your prize can determine the level of interest in your blog.
• How well you market your contest.

For example, if you are good with photoshop and enjoy creating images then you can head over to the Contest Section, where there’s a limitless number of contests available to the public (Remember that you have to enter to win! If you are skilled with Photoshop then there’s no limit to the amount of money you can earn through this section).

If Photoshop isn’t your thing, then there are plenty of other sections where quick cash is available. For example, Chris (from the Money007 team) has developed webpages in under 1 hour and sold them for a hefty $40 profit on the DP forums. Other quick money resoloutions include (and are not restricted to) buying and selling domains, buying selling and trading websites, providing traffic for money and providing random services such as coding html, CSS or even creating Youtube videos!

There is no doubt that the DP forums can be a very useful place for a webmaster with the right knowledge and experience, but don’t be fooled, quick money comes to those who have experience in certain fields and who know what they’re doing, there’s no such thing as a free lunch (except at money007). Whether you’re a beginner wanting to earn money online, or an experienced online webmaster looking to expand your horizons, the DP forums will prove a valuable asset.

The Money007 Team.

Advertisers

obviously, Advertisers have the ability to obtain links from publishers for as little as 1 point a link. Currently at the time of this post the point-dollar exchange rate is 1000 points per dollar. So a dollar for 1000 links is not too bad if you ask me even if the links are all PR0.\

Starting your first link campaign is a peice of cake. It’s as easy as hitting the “create new campaign” button. You then are asked to name your campaign, and select the types of sites you would like your links to appear on. The value of links is measured through Yahoo Backlinks and Google PageRank, hence the higher the PR the more expensive a link is.

For accurate targetting TNX allows you to choose the most relevant category to the URL you are promoting. Even better, you can GeoTarget, and only select sites that are in a specific language.

Creating ads is easy too. In fact, it reminds me of the adwords setup. You are encouraged to create a diverse range of ads, just incase the one’s you want are not approved.

Publishers

Publishing, selling adspace is relatively simple too. Firstly you submit your site to TNX, not that your site must be hosted on a server that supports Perl or PHP, and it must already be indexed by Google.

You can decide how many links are displayed on which pages, and what links are displayed. Helping to prevent irrelevnt ads.

What’s special about contest beat then?

Firstly, unlike a number of other contest sites with this kind of coverage and frequency of readers this ContestBeat is free. Other sites often charge upto $150 to post your contest on them.

For those of you who know about our tragic ‘Win a PS3′ competition, we will not make the same mistakes we made last time. If we ever do hold another contest (and we will). One of the changes we will make to our strategy will be the use of contest sites, notably ContestBeat.

More Stats

• 15 posts have been written
• 14 comments were made
• We put created 1 video
• Altogether Money007 has 71 tags
• We have had one screwup
• Finally, sadly, we have only 4 blog subscribers

Though these results are not fantastic, I don’t believe they’re terrible either and it is difficult to measure our success at such an early stage in the blog’s life. Whose to say this isn’t the calm before the storm and were? not going to see an exponential growth of visitors in July, or perhaps even a surge in blog subscribers? Only time will tell.

1. Mailinator
2. MyTrashMail
3. MailExpire
4. TemporaryInbox
5. MailEater
6. Jetable
7. SpamBox
8. GuerillaMail
9. SpamHole
10. 10MinuteMai

Hopefully you’ve heard about RSS Hugger before and if you haven’t let me briefly explain it’s purpose. Putting it simply the site can be used as your feed reader as well as for including your own blog. You can then distribute these feeds with others, somewhat like social bookmarking for blogs.

Here is a quote from RSS Hugger:

The Idea – rssHugger is a unique website that aims to bring bloggers and readers together. rssHugger aims to provide blog owners with a unique easy-to-use way to promote their blogs by sending them traffic, building backlinks for search engine optimization, as well as attracting new rss subscribers if the content is interesting to the reader. rssHugger aims to help visitors be able to easily find blogs that write about subjects they are interested in. These subjects include: internet marketing, making money online, charity, sports, gambling, and many more. If the visitors find a blog that they had not previously heard about, they can easily add it to their RSS readers or bookmark it.

Not so long ago a $20 registration fee was necessary for sign up, however recently the service has been made free, Under the condition that you make a short blog post about them on your site, which explains the reason behind this post.

So as you might expect I was pretty pleased to find out about the new feature that allows you to find out statistics on particular websites.

The DigitalPoint.com trend.

If you have read my last thread, we will have already run through the basics of affiliate marketing. This time around I want to switch the spotlight onto the differences between Clickbank and other affiliate marketing sites and how this can affect sales and advertising.

As some of you may already know, Clickbank is used for digital products products only and does not sell real items (for obvious reasons such as postage and handling fees, insurance of products etc…). Although clickbank is the best affiliate system in the world, it’s products can be hard to advertise and are usually very competitive. Many people prefer to sell real world items, such as the items available through the affiliate website; Commission Junction. CJ (Commission Junction) offers affiliate marketing of wide variety of real world items such as clothes or ipods etc… But why would you sell real world items over digital items? Simply because they’re worth more and you can advertise real world products very easily.

Real world items are usually worth more than digital items because:

• Digital items can be infinitely produced.
• Digital items be downloaded illegally.
• Real world items take manual labor.
• Real world items need to be delivered, which means a delivery fee.

Advertising real world items can be considerably easier for a number of reasons, however I’ll go over the main ones:

• Real world items are desirable to more people. For example, why would a mother working full time need to download PSP games? That mother might want new shoes or some new pants, these are things that everyone needs.
• Real world products can be shown in action. For example, you could make a video of someone listening to an iPod in order to advertise your website.

This information is hardly surprising when you think about it, however it may not be as obvious to most people who promote an affiliate link. Most people simply rush in and advertise the first product they see. This may seem like a good strategy for a short while, but if you really want to reap the rewards of affiliate marketing then you need to know how to advertise on the web very effectively using many different methods and techniques. A lack of advertising skills will result in a waste of time for those who want to advertise any product over the internet.

Although I have talked about real world products being “better” so far, this is not always the case, it really depends on your situation. For example, if you have just started a site that reviews different clothes companies (using affiliate techniques desbribed in “Introducing Affiliate Marketing – Part 1), then you may not get sales until you have fully optimized your site, advertised on Google Adwords, worked on your site’s SEO etc… It also depends on how well the product (that you’re advertising or reviewing) converts, if your real world product doesn’t convert as well as a digital ebook, then you may get more money out of the digital ebook for the next few months. However if you have established a good site based on real world products, which is properly SEOd and converts well then you are almost certain to make more money out of this, than out of a site advertising cheaper digital products.

Just a quick note: Remember that word of mouth is a very very very important advertising tool. If you provide people with a helpful affiliate site, with lots of information about different products, then you might just find that your site will grow rapidly.

I hope that you enjoyed this post and I hope that I’ll be writing again soon,

Chris from Money007.