54 This is a follow up to my previous post regarding the PayPal funds withdrawals with Public Bank Visa Card.
My intention for writing that post was of course to try to discuss if there’s a way to remove the daily withdrawal limit imposed to Malaysian PayPal users. A reply from PayPal clearly states that the limit cannot be lifted for the time being.
But there’s one question that was asked repeatedly in the comments as people are curious how I made that money. I don’t blame them for asking, in fact, I think it’s a good post to share with my readers.
Personally though, I don’t think making around USD500 monthly from one affiliate network is a big deal, that is, if you compare that to what other super affiliates are making in this case from MaxBounty. However, what so good about this income stream for me is that it’s generated almost passively.
I spent nothing on pay-per-click marketing or any other form of advertising to attract targeted traffic that convert those MaxBounty offers. Most of the traffic comes from the organic search engine results – Google in particular. Every commission generated is basically pure profit for me.
I am going to reveal the website where I made the money from and how I made it. The income is generated mostly from one of my oldest websites at AbsolutelyFreebies.com. That website was created in 1997 but the domain name was only purchased in 1999. It offers free stuff, trial offers, sweepstakes, free samples and other pay per lead offers.
I guess I should point out that in addition to MaxBounty, I am also making money from other affiliate networks at AbsolutelyFreebies.com such as from CJ.com, COPEAC, ModernClick.com, AzoogleAds, ValueClick.com, BulletAds, ClickBooth, among others and of course from Google AdSense too. By the way, MaxBounty is not my biggest money maker at AbsolutelyFreebies.com.
This is the amount I am making from MaxBounty for the past several months. Not much, things add up though.

I guess the next question in almost everyone’s mind reading this is that, exactly, how do I make money from AbsolutelyFreebies.com in an auto-pilot mode? There are several factors but none has anything to do with the idea of just build it and they will come.
It’s crucial to identify your goals when you build a website and everything you do must contribute towards achieving those goals. Here are several reasons why the website is profitable.
First Page Rankings In Google for Several Competitive Keywords
All pages in AbsolutelyFreebies.com are fully optimized for the organic search engine. Obviously I don’t claim I know everything there is when it comes to getting high rankings in Google given the fact that their ranking algorithm changes almost on the daily basis.
I don’t devote my waking time trying to reverse engineer the search engines. It’s a futile attempt to “uncover†their secret via such method because what you find out today could well be outdated tomorrow. Just leave this to those SEO experts who are doing this for a living. You job is to create good content for your visitors and offer them better experience while browsing your website.
That said, I know enough SEO techniques to help me create pages that are likely to rank high in Google or Yahoo. Let me give you some examples. At the time of this writing, several pages in AbsolutelyFreebies.com are ranked highly for the following keywords
"Freebies" (yes that one word keyword) – currently AbsolutelyFreebies.com is ranked in the top ten in Google US organic search result (it used to be in the top three). In case you don’t know about this, the Google search results are tailored to your geographical location – there’s no such thing as Google global search result at Google.com.
The top ten search result for a particular keywords produced in Malaysia is often different from that of other countries even though you are searching through Google.com.
To find out the results that you would see as if you were located in a certain country, just append the following code in your search string where “gl†stands for geographic location. It can be set to “UKâ€, “USâ€, “CA†and so on.
gl=US
For example to see the organic and paid search results in the US for the keyword “freebies†you would type
http://www.google.com/search?q=freebies&gl=US
Instead of typing this manually though, I am using the Google Global Firefox Extension to perform this task
Alternatively, searching through Google country specific domain such as Google.com.my may show you results that are more relevant to you locally because the results comes from servers hosted in the area.
AbsolutelyFreebies.com is not in the top ten for the keyword “freebies†in Malaysia though which is good because Google is clever enough to know that I am trying to target the US traffic and not the Malaysian traffic.
Another thing to keep in mind is that if you enable personalization, the search engines will look at your search history and other preferences and tailor the results specifically for you.
Here are some more keywords:
Wedding sweepstakes – currently number five in the Google US organic search results.
Get free money – currently number two in Google US organic search result. I used to be number one for the phrase “free moneyâ€, sadly it had slipped to number 15
There are several other competitive keywords and phrases that the websites are ranked highly for. This ensures continuous arrival of highly targeted visitors to the websie. The only constant in Google is change so those high rankings won’t stay there forever. The good news is, if a keyword ranking drops, another might take its place.
If you are interested, here’s an article I wrote previously to give newbies an introduction to onpage SEO. Here’s another article about linking and off page factors that may affect your rankings.
Put Your Visitors First & Make Money Second
On the Internet, the saying “follow your passion and the money will follow†should be everyone’s mantra. When I first created the website, it made little money if any at all but that didn’t stop me from burning the midnight oil working till the wee hours.
Building the site was a joy and not a chore, and it was satisfying to find my visitors actually interacting with the content. Then the money followed, which was not much but it was fun to have when you were a poor student. That was in 1997, today I have someone to help me update the website.
I am aware that the website is far from perfect. While most of the content consists of affiliate links, I find that people do no really bother as long as you give them what they want. There are tons of non affiliate links sprinkled all over the site to ensure a balance content.
Visitors arriving from the organic search engines have a different mindset. Depending on the keywords, they can be highly motivated and when “lured†with the word free, it could do wonders to your conversion rates.
Update Your Content Frequently
My assistant updates the website almost daily with new offers. This will not only encourage visitors to return to see what’s new, many SEO experts believe that Google favours sites with fresh content too.
I admit that, if you search further you may stumble upon some expired offers and links on the site but that’s how things are on the Internet. As long as you are aware of this and replace expire links as soon as you can, then it’s not a big deal. That said offering fresh content doesn’t necessarily mean better ranking in the SERP but it tells the Google crawler that your site is worth check out often.
Little has changed in term of site design and navigation since the site was created. It’s still text heavy instead of graphically intensive as it has always been. The navigation is simple enough to help visitors find their way around easily.
Diversify Your Revenue Streams
While AbsolutelyFreebies.com has been making me some money since its early days I don’t depend on it as my main source of income.
It’s important to diversify your online income and as they said do not put all your eggs in one basket. I chuckled when I read someone wrote in a blog post that said I am probably making money doing “phantom blogging†whatever that means 😉
My latest posts here at Sabahan.com often give little clue as to how I make money online besides blogging, I suppose only my regular readers know what I do.
Besides promoting pay per lead programs from websites such as AbsolutelyFreebies.com, as some of you know I am also a part time blogger, an Internet marketer doing Pay Per Click marketing selling my own products as well as other people products and service.
In addition, I’ve started experimenting with direct advertising, starting at Sabahan.com. And who can ignore making money from AdSense – one of the easiest ways to make money online if you do it right. That said, there are still tons of things I’d have to do before I consider myself really successful.
Should You Start A Freebie Site Now?
Now I am sure some of you may wonder if you should drop everything and start a freebie site to make money. If you ask me, my answer is no.
Unless you have a highly motivated team behind you and you have money to spend on advertising, I doubt any individual could create a freebie website today that can be profitable solely from the organic search traffic. The competition in this niche is getting tougher by the day and you have to be really creative if you want to stand out from the crowd.
I am actually lucky that I’ve started early because a website age is one of the most important factors used to rank it in the search engines. That’s one reason why my website enjoys good ranking almost naturally.
That’s said, it’s not just the age of the domain that matters, but how long the website “talks†about a specific niche. The logic is simple, if you have been active in a certain niche for a while, you are probably into this for the long term and not one of the fly by night websites and this tells Google that your website is trustworthy and it will award you with some good rankings accordingly.
So there you have it. I hope the question how I make money from MaxBounty has been answered.