Making Money Online With Missing Pages

Written by John Cow on January 8th, 2008

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Websites update their link structures, and visitors sometimes have fat fingers, so they make typos when trying to get to your blog. We’ve all seen the ‘404 Oops, sorry, we couldn’t find the page you’ve requested’ right? And what a waste of perfectly good virtual real estate! Just because there’s nothing there doesn’t mean it should be neglected and not make you any money! Its one of the best spots on your blog to create a passive income stream. We’ll show you how simple it is to monetize the missing pages on your blog.

404.jpg

25969 hits equals a lot of missed opportunities to make some money online, wouldn’t you agree? Sure, we could have put up a cute 404 page with some wierd stuff on it, but besides the occasional chuckle, you’re pretty much not getting anything else out of it.

So here’s what we did; create a special page that revolves around making money online and you make sure that you have this line of code in your 404.php file:

< ?php

header ('Location: http://www.johncow.com/tools-and-ebooks/' );

?>

*(There’s no space between the first < and ?php )

All this does is redirect any typos after your domain.com (http://www.johncow.com/resistanceisfutile-youwillmakememoney) directly to your money making page so all those poor visitors that got lost will be able to click on your affiliate links! This is an easy fix and will definitely start to make you more money in the long run. Make sure you update the ‘landing page’ regularly with new products to keep the crawlers coming back for more. Needless to say, try to link back to that same or a linked ‘landing page’ with one set of keywords. It will get you on the first page of Google in the long run!

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41 Comments »

Comment by Johny Cow
2008-01-08 21:04:28

Cow , this is one thing that affiliate marketeers make money from. It is from the same thing that you will make Mooney again.

 
Comment by John Cow
2008-01-08 21:15:23

Thanks, Cow.

 
Comment by Mike Goad Subscribed to comments via email
2008-01-08 21:51:40

Interesting idea ( and it’s now been stumbled upon.)

 
Comment by Debby Subscribed to comments via email
2008-01-08 22:07:18

Great post! I think 404 pages aren’t utilized because people don’t know how to set it up.

 
Comment by Steve
2008-01-08 22:27:48

Sneaky move. Good idea though.

 
Comment by Steven
2008-01-08 22:29:18

LOL there is another Johny Cow now…

 
Comment by Rhys
2008-01-08 23:17:14

Interesting.

Should be interesting to see if you actually have any success from it. There’s no harm in trying though - particularly if you moved to Wordpress from Blogger.

 
Comment by iantrepreneur
2008-01-08 23:20:14

nice - I do teh same thing with my blog but I put the post, archives, categories, and a contextual ads to help them out a little bit - a lot of people do not understand they can be making money off someones mistakes

 
Comment by Richard Bizick Subscribed to comments via email
2008-01-08 23:27:41

hey cow i tried that code and it didn’t quite work for me…instead i used this for my link and had success:

 
Comment by Richard Bizick Subscribed to comments via email
2008-01-08 23:31:52

damn, the code didn’t show up let me try to wordpresstize it

<? header("Location: http://www.YourLinkHere.com"); ?>

if i can’t get this affiliate link to show up this time i’ll email you

 
Comment by sir jorge
2008-01-09 00:01:28

i’ll test it, but I don’t know, it might only work sites like this one

 
Comment by Webkinz
2008-01-09 00:19:05

sneaky little tip that never even crossed my mind. off to to put some code on my sites now.

 
Comment by Celebrity Scandals
2008-01-09 00:38:14

Very good idea…You are really the evil :evil:

 
Comment by Allen Johnson
2008-01-09 05:11:06

I dont have any lmissing pages yet I wonder can you use this on regiular websites because i see some people selling 404 pAGES ON SITEPOINT

 
Comment by max Subscribed to comments via email
2008-01-09 06:27:52

Great stuff, I got this post stumbled and SiteHopped.

 
Comment by Investor Loans
2008-01-09 07:11:53

Your article is very much interesting but I don’t understand the technical suggestions. So I have passed your link to my designer and hope this could be a good tool for him, if it work- My thanks for your suggestion. :smile:

 
Comment by David Chew
2008-01-09 08:24:14

Nice post.

 
Comment by Mike Mason
2008-01-09 13:02:13

Outstanding idea! You guys keep coming up with just the right simple fixes. It’s astounding how many hits that 404 page gets.

 
2008-01-09 15:20:14

Shouldn’t that redirect be a 301?

 
Comment by vhxn.com
2008-01-09 15:56:59

thanks for this article , I also wanna put 404 page with some wierd stuff on :mrgreen:

 
Comment by kid
2008-01-09 17:19:32

Cow,,,,, Chow was eaten at entrecard. He is third now and the girl is first. :))))))))

 
Comment by Stock Exchange News
2008-01-09 18:24:07

Really interesting but a little bit hard to understand and follow. Try to simplify the instructions so that others can follow.

 
Comment by Emmanuel Subscribed to comments via email
2008-01-09 19:24:26

Hi,

I never know I can monetise the 404 page. Thanks for the tips. I am definitely going to apply this now.

 
2008-01-10 00:18:44

That was a really nice tip! Now I can finally put good use to my 404 page instead of just plugging in links to my other posts.

 
Comment by redspace
2008-01-10 00:42:23

Great tips. You never know what people would look for or when we would just deleting some page. It is a just simple script but could worth millions. :razz:

 
2008-01-10 13:42:10

This is definitely a great idea. Not letting any of your pageviews go to any waste. :smile:

 
Comment by Natalie
2008-01-10 20:30:52

What a great idea. The 404 pages get tons of hits, so why not overload them with ads. I know what I will be doing later tonight.

Thanks for the cool idea.

 
Comment by RichBeaver
2008-01-11 00:43:59

Great money making tip. I also want to show you a tutorial I’ve written few days ago related to link cloaking and link redirected that can be mixed with your technique to achieve even more profits

http://richbeaver.com/webmasters/link-cloaking-step-by-step-guide/

 
2008-01-11 06:18:47

Nuts!!!!!!!! these 404 Errors really make the internet marketers go crazy unless they know how to make money out of the errors. great tip cow.

 
Comment by Lord Matt
2008-04-14 08:01:32

Ideally you should send a http code 301 or 404 (I’d send 404) otherwise you return a “Found” code (can’t remember the number) for everything which might hurt your SEO but will suggest that you try to respond to every possible URL (spammy).

 
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