Your Car Needs Insurance

You have your own car, right? But do you know it needs insurance? Of course you know. Where to get the information about car insurance? There are too much information in the internet, you must choose carefully. In my opinion, Best Car Insurance Quotes is a reliable one.

Best Car Insurance Quotes Provides useful information about best car insurance quote. Not everyone like to search information through search engines, because that's really a time consuming work. The truth is we want to save our time. So Best Car Insurance Quotes is a good choice.

I think there are too many cars today, that's very waste, but we do need them. I have my own one. It looks like good, I use it to travel all over my country. Wonderful thing, right? I started to buy insurance for it when I brought it. I found information at Best Car Insurance Quotes.

20+ Websites anyone can make money with

1. Bitwine.com | Ether.com - sell your knowledge by offering consultancy services

2. About.com - become a guide (publisher) on about.com, and get paid for writing content. Based on your performance, your salary can be anywhere between $500-$8500/month. Check out the list of available
topics here

3. Chacha.com - chacha is a human powered search engine that’s maintained by search guides. It has more than 10.000 guides already and pays them between $5-$20/hour depending on performance.

4. Cafepress.com | Zazzle.com - these websites lets you put custom graphics or photos on popular, easy-to-ship, high-selling products i.e. t-shirts, mugs, hats, bags….etc. If something is sold you receive a commission. Since both of these websites receive lots of traffic, it seems quite promising

5. Elance.com | Getafreelancer.com | Odesk.com | Guru.com - mainly for techies; SEO professionals, web designers, developers…etc

6. Associated Content - write a story, how-to articles, rant etc, and if they like it they’ll pay you somewhere between $3-$20 for it

7. Clicknwork.com - get paid $5-$150/hour for doing some freelance work on a per-assignment basis. You’ll have to pass a tough test before you can start with it

8. Squidoo - squidoo won’t pay you but lets you publish articles with promotional content (ex; amazon products). It has lots of traffic and if you figure out what’s popular there, it can be well worth your effort

9. AGLOCO - how about getting paid whenever you browse the web? That’s exactly what agloco does, it pays you for browsing the web. There is a lot more to it though, check it out here.

10. H3 - Get paid to find the right candidate for particular jobs. Commissions range from $50-$5,000 depending on how desperate the hiring company is.

11. VIDEO: (post a video and share whatever revenue it generates from ads. To get an idea of how well paid this can be, check out metacafe’s top earners list)
Break.com | Metacafe.com | DareJunkies.com | Blip.tv | Revver.com | Flixya.com | Atomfilms.com + Addictingclips.com | Shopwiki.com (create reviews and get paid 50$/review) | and some more

12. Domain Parking: The idea behind domain parking is the following; 1)you simply register some domain, usually a misspelling of something popular (ex; yoitube.com instead of youtube.com or dominoespizza.com instead of dominospizza.com), 2)add relevant ads to them and 3)earn money as visitors click on them. It’s a gold mine once you get familiar with it, a friend of mine used to make around $2000/month from it. Read more on it here

13. Affiliate Programs: What you do here is promote someone’s product and earn money from each sale/referral you make. It’s much easier when you have own website but you still can do quite well even without one. It really works! I used to do it myself. I would find affiliate program on cj.com and afterwards advertise it either on Yahoo or Google. In the end, my costs were considerably lower then my commissions. It’s way harder than domain parking but also has higher potential. More on affiliate programs here.

14. Some Extra info for bloggers and website owners

• 40 ways to make money on internet (dumblittleman.blogspot.com)
• Making money on the internet (Stromcode.com)
• How to make money from your blog (Stevepavlina.com)
• Problogger.net
• Business-opportunities.biz
• Other advertising networks besides google adsense (JohnChow.com)

A Guide To Making Money With A Video Blog

An Introduction to Video Websites
There's a lot of them about, a lot. Apart from the old-timers like ebaumsworld, Google's acquisition of YouTube has really seen them starting to eat up this market. The great thing is, that doesn't matter, videos are a disposal media - people look at them once, show their mates and then it's old news. You're only as good as your last video! What we're going to look at doing here is setting up a video website with minimal cost & time and maximising our profit.

Now, I'm not claiming this will make you a millionaire, but you can earn around £500 ($1000 to our American friends) per month without too much trouble. So it's well worth it for the day or two it will take to set up!

Step #1: Monetization Strategy
Okay, for this site we are going to make our bucks from a couple of different sources. Our main income will be made from Google Adsense. If you haven't got yourself a Google Adsense Publisher account, click the big button below and sign up. Adsense will display contextual adverts which you can neatly blend in with the design of your website, to make them non-intrusive, yet a natural click away. For this website we are aiming at generating a 25% click-through rate while staying well inside the Adsense Terms Of Service.

An important note: I'm going to give you some tips on optimising your Adsense placement and layout later, if you want to take the optimisation further, you may be pushing the limit on what Google does and doesn't allow. The Adsense team can be merciless at times if they think you are breaking their ToS, which can be quite "grey" at times. So, stick to the guidelines and you'll be fine, cross the line at your own risk!



Step #2: Setting up the website with Wordpress
Yay for Wordpress and its many uses! Wordpress gives you an off the shelf platform for out video blog (vlog). It allows comments, pings, trackbacks, easy archiving, it's SEO friendly and has loads of plugins. For this kind of mission, it's definitely the number one choice.

There are two ways you can go about getting Wordpress up and running:

1) You can go to wordpress.com and sign up for a wordpress account, they will provide you with a hosted blog such as myvideoblog.wordpress.com

or

2) You can go wordpress.org and download Wordpress and install it on your server. This is really the preferred option as it will give you the power to use some neat features in the future, which will smooth out the money making process! If you haven't got web hosting, I use Site5 (aff link) and they've always been good to me and are fairly priced.

Once you've uploaded Wordpress to your server, follow the installation guide (it's pretty simple) to get your Wordpress installation and database up and running.

Step #3: Choosing a domain name
Probably the hardest part of building any website is finding a domain name! Don't worry too much about getting keywords in there, organic SEO isn't how we'll be doing the bulk of our promotion, try and focus on getting something short, snappy and memorable. (That means no hyphens!). If you can get something with a keyword or two (funny, video, comedy, humour - reach for your thesaurus) all the better, but as I say - don't sacrifice the name for it. Once that's sorted, point it at your server so it will have resolved by the time you're ready to launch.

Step #4: Plugins Galore
There are some great plugins for Wordpress that will save you a hell of a lot of time and coding. I've experimented with quite a few and whittled the list down to some essentials.

Viper's Video Quicktags - This plugin will save you having to rip out all the embed code from videos on major sites like YouTube, all you need to do is paste in the video ID and this plugin will do all the rest of the code & alignment for you. It's essential to make adding videos as quick as possible.

WP-Email - This plugin adds an "E-mail This To A Friend" option at the bottom of every post (which will be your videos). I've been using these for a while and although you don't get loads of people use them, personally recommendation is the best kind of marketing your website could hope for.

WP-PostRatings - This will add the "rate this video" 0-5 stars function at the bottom of each post. It's a nice addon to get people to try and interact with your site if the can't be bothered to post comments. Interaction is good - it's the first step in relation building with your visitors and ultimately trying to get them to come back.

Sociable - Adds a mini-bar of just about every popular social bookmarking site worth mentioning at the bottom of each post. Digg, Reddit, Bloglines, they're all there. Optimisation Tip: From experimenting, I found it is best not just to select all the social sites going, choose a maximum of 5 major ones, then rotate to see what is most successful. Having a line of 20 social bookmarking icons looks a bit confusing and seems to ultimately put people off using them.

StumbleUpon It! - StumbleUpon is a really great way to promote sites with entertainment and disposable content. This plugin gives you a "stumble it" button at the bottom of each post, which will play a part in our future marketing strategy.

Did You Pass Math? - Did you? This is just a basic anti-spam measure that puts one of those sums before you're allowed to comment. Spam is a major problem, so I'd recommend this one, just to save you some time.

Akismet - This should be present in your default Wordpress installation, you require a Wordpress API key - but this little gem has stopped more spam than anything else I've ever tried.

Step #5: Get Feedburnt
Okay, with further promotion in mind it's time to sign up to Feedburner. RSS is going to be one of the main ways we keep in touch with our readers, letting them know we've put more videos on our site and Feedburner offers a load of other ways to let people subscribe to your content.

..and here is Part 2...

Step #6: Theme Design
There are loads of great Wordpress themes at themes.wordpress.net. Have a good look through them until you find something you like. I would generally recommend going for something fairly simplistic and neat with an either 2 or 3 column design. Or, if you're feeling adventurous, you could always design your own!

Once you've got your theme and uploaded it, I'd suggest tweaking some of the graphics to make it your own. Get your branding up there, design a logo and base your site around the domain name. This is why we wanted something easy to remember and relevant earlier, it's no good calling your site "Video Hustler" then having www.my-funny-internet-videos.cc and hoping people will remember it.

Some Wordpress essentials
There are a couple of other tweaks you can do in Wordpress to make your job easier.

1) Add a few categories, I used "Funny Videos", "Extreme Videos" and "Sexy Videos" just so I could tag my content as I add it.

2) Use custom permalinks! This will make your URLs easier to remember and will help various bots crawl your site. To do this go to the "Options" menu, then "Permalinks" and at the bottom check the "custom" radio button and put /%postname%/ in the field.

3) Change page titles.

What we want to do is to swap the position of "Post Title" with "Blog Name". This is because:

* Search engines uses your Page Title as the linking text in its search engine results page (SERP).
* The search keywords are bolded for page titles in search engines
* It makes it easier for search engine users to know right away if what they are looking for is correct

Now, this will involve some editing to your template files, which is normally called "header.php". Find this:


and replace with:

And you're done!


I'm not going to tell you how to design your layout pixel by pixel, because one of the keys with maximising your profit is experimentation. Here are some guidelines:

Adsense Placement & Optimisation
This is how you're going to make your money, so it's pretty important! On your main index page you want to have an Adsense content unit at the very top, below your site header, but above the first video. This for me, is by far the highest click though, achieving around 30-40%, with the right keywords later on we can marry these adverts up with your content beautifully.

In your Adsense control console, under Adsense for content, go into your "Ad Units". These will get you paid after 1 click, whereas link units require a click to bring you to a results page, then a click on the results to get paid. So select link unit and leave "text only" (default) selected. There is 468x60 pixel size which fits perfectly above your standard Google or YouTube Video.

You second biggest earner will be the ad unit which will create a gap between the first video and the rest of the videos on the site. Your first video will obviously be visible above the scroll, but being an average 10-30 second long funny clip, people will never be able to resist at least looking at the other videos on your front page. You must exploit this human curiosity! The 336x280px "large rectangle" unit fits the bill perfectly. Again it will fit in nicely below your video and will give a nice chunk of adverts. This ad unit must only be displayed below the first video as there are limits on the amount of ad units you are allowed on 1 page. You will however, want this ad unit again on the "single post" page. So, if somebody links directly to one of your videos, you still have max Adsense coverage.

I would recommend showing the first 5 videos on the first page. Having less, will reduce the chances of people looking at anything but the first video on your site and will effectively reduce the page size - minimising advert space. Having a lots of videos will distract people from using other parts of your site navigation (well, by this I mean will keep people too amused to click on your ads!). It's a fine line between wetting their appetite but then keeping them hungry for more.

It's also worth having a vertical unit (skyscraper) near your navigation. You want both of these units clearly visible without scrolling down, so you've got the top of the page and the central part covered in lovely adverts, which is where people’s mousey clicks tend to go!

It is important to blend your Adsense into your site and there are two schools of thought on this. The default "blue" hyperlinks on websites will get the most clicks, always. This colour has been drilled into our head since the dawn of the www and your brain just says "click", so if any of your other links on your site use this colour, you will need to use this colour for your Adsense titles. I however, think this colour is ugly, so I refrained from using it anywhere on my site at all. If you follow this approach as well, then you simply want to make your Adsense units the same colour as your standard hyperlinks. If you're using Firefox there is a great Colour Picker addon, which gives you the hex code for any colour, live on a web page. Since you're allowed a link unit on the page as well, I tend to put one of these in the footer, just because it looks okay and it does earn a few pennies every now and again.

Beating Adsense Smart Pricing
"Smart Pricing" is Google's way of trying to keep its advertisers happy by lowering the cost of junk traffic. Unfortunately, they do this at your expense. Having poor advertisers on your site, will lead to you users clicking the adverts, then leaving the horrible site they land on almost instantly. When people do this, Google will think you're sending out junky traffic, when actually it's the advertiser's site that is at fault. This will lead to the money you get per click, going down.

Fortunately, Google offer a "competitive ad filter", which allows you to block certain advertisers from showing ads on your site. Login to your Google Adsense account and go to "Adsense Setup" and you'll see a "Competitive Ad Filter" tab. Click this and you'll be given a box of URLs to block.

Copy & paste this list into your competitive ad filter and this should help you keep a strong amount per click.

Google Coop
Google Coop is a custom search engine (CSE) which basically allows you to click a few buttons and make a custom search engine. The great thing is, you can tie this in with your current Adsense account and it will pay out when somebody clicks on a sponsored result from your custom search engine. So, rather than leave in the standard Wordpress search, you might as well make some money from it!

Find the bit of code in your theme that shows the default Wordpress search box and comment it out. Create a Google Coop account and you will be presented with if you would like your search engine to search the entire web, with preference to selected sites, or simply search specific sites. Choose the option to select specific sites and just add your own URL. Don't forget to enter your Adsense Publisher ID!. Google will then generate a chunk of code for you, which you can paste in place of your current Wordpress search. Voila! Monetized search! My search box generates around an extra 30% of my site revenue.

Get Feedburner on there
Login to your Feedburner account and get it to give you the code for an e-mail subscribe box. I've found I get more e-mail subscribers than RSS readers. I believe this is because RSS is really only embraced by the more "web savvy" user and they will be fully capable of finding videos on Digg, YouTube, Google and are more likely to be aware of the bigger sites. So for your regular Joe Blogs (heh), e-mail a nice, easy to understand way to get them to sign up to updates. If you can squeeze your Feedburner RSS subscribe button in above the scroll, all the better - but I have found people that want an RSS feed will find it.

Feedburner also offer "chicklets" which is a little button that shows the world how many subscribed readers you have. Generally, I'd advise not to install this until you have 100 or so readers, there's no point showing people how unpopular your site is to begin with! Leave it for bragging rights later. It is quite possible to achieve 500-1000 readers within 6-12 months.

Here's one I made earlier:



In Green: Our main above the scroll adsense
In Yellow: CPM advertising (we'll talk about this later, but save some banner space!)
In Red: Our monetized Google Coop box
In Brown: The feedburner subscribe bits

That's most of the design info covered.

Step #7: Sourcing and adding video content to your website

Okay, so how do we go about getting videos onto your site? Well there's a quick and profitable way and a longer but more profitable away.

The quick and profitable way
I don't recommend this method to begin with, even though it's quicker, this is only something you should be doing after your site is established, or if you are very short on time.

Go to digg.com/videos and see what other people find funny. Follow the link through to the video site, grab the video ID and pop it in a post.

When you are post a video, make sure every 2-3 videos you have the words "funny" and/or "video" in the post title. Wordpress uses header tags for these titles and it will help make your Adsense adverts more relevant. Below the video, type a couple of lines explaining the video (without giving too much away!). Be as funny/sarcastic as you like, but keep it short and interesting - and write your own descriptions!

The longer but more profitable way
Okay, this takes a bit more work, but will really, really help you promote your site. One neat thing about Google Video is that they allow you to download the videos. So, go have a search around Google Video and download 20-30 videos that you think are funny. Download them in "PSP" format which will give you a .mp4 format file.

If you have some decent video editing software that can handle mp4 files you can skip this step:

If you're stuck using Windows Movie Editor you'll have to convert the file before you can edit it. Now, if you can find a free program, let me know. I've been using Riverpast Video Cleaner, which will convert the mp4 files to avi without any real quality loss. It's $30 but it will be your only expense in this operation. Riverpast will be able to convert all your videos in batch, so go make yourself a cuppa.

Once you've got your video in .avi format, create yourself a bitmap image with your site logo and site URL on it. Use your video editing software to show your logo for 5 seconds at the beginning and end of your video, so it's all branded to you now!

Get your branded videos out there!
Once you've got branded videos, you're really onto a winner. I pull in around 500-800 visitors per day from YouTube alone. Google have a batch video uploader, so your first port of all is to re-upload your newly edited videos onto Google Video.

Once they are uploaded you can add the video information. Generally in the title I again try and get the words "funny video", "extreme video" or similar in. These help pick up a bunch of generic searches. I've found the description doesn't make a huge difference to whether the video is viewed, as long as the title is good. If you're uploading to Google, using the batch uploader there is a separate field to link to your website, which becomes an active link, so you may as well type a description. Keep it short and snappy to try and get as many views as possible. For tags, I use a set of standard: funny, video, humour, humor, comedy, laugh, lol, cool, extreme, stupid, insane, accident - then add a couple of video specific keywords on the end.

Repeat this process with YouTube. The only difference with YouTube is that there is no separate field for your own site URL. If you just pop your URL into the description, this will automatically become a clickable link. YouTube is a bit more of a pain because you can only upload 1 video at a time, but you can always do other stuff at the same time! The sheer amount of traffic that YouTube gets makes it worthwhile doing this.

Once you have a "base" of around 30 videos, you don't need to keep finding new ones. You just create a new YouTube account under a hotmail address every week or so, since you're a new user and uploading new content, your videos will more often or not appear on the front page briefly which will get you spurts of traffic.

Using your imagination, there are loads of places that accept video uploads that you can use. MySpace anyone? MySpace Video is taking off big-time at the moment, so if you have access to some large MySpace accounts, this can be a great way to get traffic. One other technique is taking a screenshot of your video at 00:00 then posting this picture on a MySpace profile or bulletin, so it looks like an embedded video, but will take people through to your site with the video on. Hey, that's pretty scrappy - but it works. Make sure you use the border="0" attribute on such images so you don't get a blue border around them!

Step #8: Kick Starting Promotion
Following this recipe so far, you'll probably make $5-$10 per day. If you want to get up to the $40 per day mark to make your $1,000 a month, you'll need to give your site a kick up the backside. Here's how:

Go to www.stumbleupon.com and register yourself with an account and install their browser toolbar.

Once you're all ready to rock with StumbleUpon, make your way over to www.stumblexchange.com. Stumblexchange is a system where you sign up, stumble a whole list of other people's sites, then in return they stumble you back. StumbleUpon is fairly simple - the more stumbles your site gets, the more traffic they send you. StumbleUpon has a ton of users and this step will get you 200 more uniques a day for months to come. So login, register your account details and stumble everyone's site. (If your so inclined, you could script this). Well done, you just added another $200 a month onto your earnings! There's also a diggxchange and deliciousxchange in this network, however I haven't experimented with them to comment on this.

Get some links
Everybody loves links, especially Google. There's a massive list at RSSTop55 of directories and blog aggregators. I would start with these:

*** Yahoo
*** Open Directory
*** Globe of Blogs
*** Blogarama
*** Blog Universe
*** Feed Shark

Next Steps
Now you've got some readers and some regular traffic, you can sign up for a CPA advertiser. Burst Media is quite easy to get into and has a large inventory. Having CPA ads will earn you money for page views, without clicks and makes for an excellent secondary income.

Above all, experiment, experiment, experiment! Let me know how you get on!

How to Make Money with a Video Blog: An Introduction and Guide

Making money from a video blog has always been something on my mind, particularly in the last month or so. To clarify the title, I’m referring to blogs which are entirely made up of videos taken from other sources such as YouTube or MetaCafe.

This is distinct from vlogs, which are blog posts done in the form of videos by creative bloggers. While I think interesting and creative personal vlogs have huge monetization potential, they are obviously not for everyone.

On the contrary, a simple blog that regurgitates online videos from other websites can still make you a tidy sum of money through contextual-based advertising like Google Adsense.

Here’s why I like video blogs:

• Easy to create and maintain. Nothing can be easier than plugging in some embedded code from a video website like YouTube. Updating the blog will take probably take less than an hour a day.
• Videos are social media friendly. Videos can go viral very easily and are extremely easy to promote through social websites.
• Video blogs are fun!. Let’s not forget the possible fun factor behind this money-making exercise. Videos are very light on the mind and generally stress-free. You don’t have to write a good article, check your copy and constantly think of blog post ideas.

Making Money with Video Blogs - The Method

Instead of writing a lengthy article on the topic, I’ll just point you to a Digital Point forum thread that offers a guide to setting up a video blog. The thread was started by thetafferboy83 aka Mark Cook who posted the same article on his blog.

Mark has offered this information freely to both Digital Point and Site Point forum members (great way to build a reputation btw) so I think its only polite to link through and give him some credit here.

I suggest starting at the Digital Point thread because there’s several pages of discussions where Mark answers questions from fellow forum members about the whole process of setting up and monetizing a video blog.

Here is a summary of the steps in his article:

1. Sign up for Google Adsense. This is the first step to take if you’re not already an Adsense publisher.
2. Pick a domain name. This should be short and memorable.
3. Set up Wordpress on the domain.
4. Install various video plugins for Wordpress. These help to speed up the process of uploading videos on your blog.
5. Burn your feed with FeedBurner. This is the first step towards building up defensive traffic through a feed subscriber base.
6. Pick a WP theme and brand it with your logo.
7. Search optimize your theme. Several manual methods were listed in the section but I would suggest using SEO plugins, one of which is the very essential SEO Title Tag plugin.
8. Set up your Adsense units for maximal click through benefits. The easiest way to do this is to use Adsense Ready Themes with already optimized ad placement. A little tweaking will be needed but it saves you a lot of time.
9. Source for video content. You can either repost videos or download videos and rebrand them with your site logo and URL.
10. Promote your blog with StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon is really useful in driving traffic to any site and I suggest reading my comprehensive guide to StumbleUpon if you are interested in fully utilizing its potential.
11. Build Links to your blog. Mark only suggests RSS or blog directories and I would suggest linking to the blog from a variety of other places as well: Other sites you own, forum signatures, social bookmarking sites etc.

The basic strategy is to drive traffic from social websites like StumbleUpon, YouTube and Reddit to the blog, whereby you’ll monetize the visitors through effective Adsense placement. Organic search traffic is not a primary emphasis here.

Mark suggests that this method will allow you to make around US $1000 a month, without much trouble. His website also currently sees an impressive 25% click-through rate.

Some Thoughts about Making Money with a Video Blog

I’ve never owned a dedicated video blog before so I can’t personally confirm that his earnings are actually achievable.

I have no doubt about how easy it is to get large amounts of referral traffic to the blog itself. The only question is the actual CTR and according to some comments, video blog owners have difficult hitting that 25% range.

I’ve owned several picture-gallery style blogs and the CTR has always been consistently around 10%. There is however, a possibility of achieving a higher CTR gradually over time as ad tweaking and placement skills come together with stronger traffic.

Mark’s video blog marketing tips were primarily focused on social websites and referral traffic, which inevitably will involve some consistent marketing and promo work everyday before you build up a strong enough feed subscriber base that will naturally pitch or link to your posts.

In terms of search traffic, a video blog might be an interesting way for anyone who is truly interested in exploring the potential of longtail keywords, simply because it would be far too difficult to rank for competitive terms.

I’ve always been wondering if the lack of on-site textual content might affect keyword ranks and a video blog will probably be a good way for me to find out.

Are Video Blogs Profitable? A Possible Case Study Scenario

I do own several domains at the moment and I’m thinking of setting up a video blog on one of them just to test the profit potential of video blogs and find out if it is actually a worthwhile money-making venture.

Should I do so, I will of course put up detailed traffic stats and TOS-friendly earning screenshots so everything is open and accessible by everyone. I’m not too worried about making the domain public as well.

What do y’all think.. would you be interested in reading some a case study about video blog monetization?

http://internetprofitguide.blogspot.com/

ShopWiki is a website that is currently paying its users to submit video reviews of individual or multiple products. They’ll pay US $50 through Paypal for each accepted video and payment will be made within two business days after the video review is published.

Products available for review must be found through ShopWiki’s onsite search engine and do note that ShopWiki will only be paying for video reviews until February 28th, which is approximately a month from today. I went through the website and came up with some more details on the entire process.

• Videos should be normally kept between 1 to 3 minutes in length
• Videos should be objective and informative.
• ShopWiki will contact you in around 2 days if your video is not accepted.
• Only reviews on items that have not been reviewed are accepted.
• You can submit as many reviews as you like.
• You retain ownership of the rights to your video.
• Videos will not be edited by ShopWiki.

An interesting way to make money online if you’re well versed with video software or have a trustworthy digital video camera that you want to put to good use. Browsing through the usual popular gadgets, I’ve noticed that not a lot of video reviews were available, even for widely acclaimed products such as Creative’s range of mp3 players. This means that there a lot of products are still available for review.

The ubiquitous iPod however, has already been done. Here’s a good example of what kind of reviews are accepted at Shop Wiki.

If you’ve ever had a video successfully accepted, do leave a link and a comment. It’ll be interesting to know more about the payment process.

A Real Home Based Internet Business

Building a real home based internet business is not as difficult as you might imagine. But if you fail to plan properly, or even at all, you should plan to fail! Because without a well thought out plan, your home based internet business most likely will not succeed.

That may sound harsh, but for the majority of people seeking to build a real internet business from their home, that is going to be a fact of life. Statistically speaking, we know that over 90% of businesses (including real online home based businesses) fail during the first two years of operation.

There is no business, online or offline, which can survive without a good plan based on solid market research for your product, customers and competitors. I've witnessed many newbies, eager to create a real home based internet business, all getting into a business venture without investigating the niche or market they are targeting.

If you plan on building any real home based internet business, it is vital that you plan ahead and research. Just because some guru says that you can make money online, doesn't mean that you will.

Consider this: How do you expect to make lots of money if you don't know or understand your market or what you will be doing?

How many competitors are in the same market/product? Do you know your target market? Do you know whether or not demand exists for your product or service?

How are you going to build a successful, real home based internet business and be beat your competitors so that you can secure decent market share?

What steps do you need to take in order to build a real home based internet business that will allow you to generate a steady stream of income? Do you have a timeframe setup for each step?

Have you figured out how much money will be required to reach your goal? Do you even have a goal? And what exit strategy do you have if things don't go as expected?

I am not trying to demoralize those of you that want to build a real home based internet business, but if you can't answer even one of the questions above right now, the probability of success for you is not very high.

Thankfully, building a successful real home based internet business can be started for a lot less than you might expect. It can actually be done for free. All it takes is a little planning, and with the right structure, your dreams can become reality.

What Others Won't Tell About Credit Card

We can't live without credit cards in this new century, they are so convenient and easy taking. But we have many questions about this, for example, how to choose a believeable credit card company? As in fact, we don't need to worry about it at all, since there are companied providing useful information about this. http://www.goldstarcredit.net/is such one. They teach us how to choose a great credit card company.

Sometimes your card may be bad, you have to repair it, but how? You just have no idea, you need someone help you. In fact, you can do it, you just need some information. http://www.goldstarcredit.net/is a googd place you shoud go.

You shoud raise your credit card's score. How? You shoud see a report of your credit card, How? There are many sites providing such information, but I believe http://www.goldstarcredit.net/.
Now you can make good use of your credit card. Enjoy your life.


Technorati tags: credit card

Make Money Blogging

You have created a blog and your blog is dedicated to a niche industry. Have you ever thought that the blog could make money for you? We would look here in this article, ways and means, to make money blogging. Lets first have a look at what are the prerequisites for a blog needed to make money:

1. Blog needs to be dedicated to a niche market.

2. Updated regularly.

3. Enough back links (Don't worry for it. Directory submission would be enough to begin with)

4. Good blog host or application (blogger, Xanga or typepad recommended), and

5. High quality articles or news items supported with images.

Get the above criteria in place and Hurrah... You are ready to Make Money Blogging.

Top 5 Ways to Make Money Blogging

Lets now take a look at top 5 ways using which you could make money blogging:

1. Google Adsense

Google Adsense delivers text and image ads to the authorized websites/blogs depending on the content of the website. Small code is required to be pasted at proper locations on a webpage and Google automatically recognizes the page. Google shares the revenue it gets from the advertisers whenever a visitor clicks on these ads.

Google bills advertisers on price per click basis (PPC). Advertisers are required to pay only when any visitor clicks on their ads. They bid against each other for the keywords in order to receive better placement and thus prices for each keyword differ from one another. It is better to choose keywords for your blog which pays high $ per click.

2. Amazon

Amazon Associate program is another important way to make money blogging. The Amazon Associate program gives opportunity to website/blog publishers to promote any product from its inventory by adding a predefined code to their website/blog, which, when clicked by a visitor, takes them to the relevant product page. Once the visitor buys the product, the blog owner will be compensated with a commission.

3. Blogads

You can use Blogads as an effective tool to have a better control over the advertisers in your blogs. You can analyze and compare your profits with any one of your online agencies. Blogads can be simply specified as an advertising service used for the web logs or blogs. From the total money generated by Blogads, it retains 20% of it and the remaining money is paid to you through PayPal or checks.

Alternative Services:

• Crispads is another useful network focused on the blogs. You can put your advertisements in their blogs using Crispads. You can move through their RSS/ATOM feeds that help in generating revenues.

• Tagword – It is similar to Blogads. It makes you select the ads and their price.

Users can place their text-based ads in the site within minutes and the ads will be displayed instantly on the website.

4. Affiliate Programs

Your affiliate programs can help you earn a lot of money for selected products and services. Lot of websites offers you to become affiliate members. These affiliate programs can provide a better reach and an in-depth exposure to the products. The commissions for the sales differ according to the quality of the product, sales and marketing strategy involved. You can gather information related to the commissions by looking into the catalogues of Link Share and Commission junctions.

5. Text Links

Text links has emerged out to be the best form of moneymaking source that you can use instead of cluttering or crowding the page with ads. You don’t have to make these text links prominent within your website. This link can act as an extra value to your site and will also help to promote the rankings of other sites. In most of the cases you will find these text links placed in the bottom of the web pages. The best part of this strategy is that the publishers send and accept links as the market continues to grow.

Technorati tags: make money profit make money online Ron Paul ron paul Galilea Montijo galilea montijo murray waas RailsConf railsconf youtube gtd myspace popfly paris hilton bebo mario lopez immigration wolfowitz aquantive joost

10 Tips for College Students »

Do you actually want to monetize your blog?

Some people have strong personal feelings with respect to making money from their blogs. If you think commercializing your blog is evil, immoral, unethical, uncool, lame, greedy, obnoxious, or anything along those lines, then don’t commercialize it.

If you have mixed feelings about monetizing your blog, then sort out those feelings first. If you think monetizing your site is wonderful, fine. If you think it’s evil, fine. But make up your mind before you seriously consider starting down this path. If you want to succeed, you must be congruent. Generating income from your blog is challenging enough — you don’t want to be dealing with self-sabotage at the same time. It should feel genuinely good to earn income from your blog — you should be driven by a healthy ambition to succeed. If your blog provides genuine value, you fully deserve to earn income from it. If, however, you find yourself full of doubts over whether this is the right path for you, you might find this article helpful: How Selfish Are You? It’s about balancing your needs with the needs of others.

If you do decide to generate income from your blog, then don’t be shy about it. If you’re going to put up ads, then really put up ads. Don’t just stick a puny little ad square in a remote corner somewhere. If you’re going to request donations, then really request donations. Don’t put up a barely visible “Donate” link and pray for the best. If you’re going to sell products, then really sell them. Create or acquire the best quality products you can, and give your visitors compelling reasons to buy. If you’re going to do this, then fully commit to it. Don’t take a half-assed approach. Either be full-assed or no-assed.

You can reasonably expect that when you begin commercializing a free site, some people will complain, depending on how you do it. I launched this site in October 2004, and I began putting Google Adsense ads on the site in February 2005. There were some complaints, but I expected that — it was really no big deal. Less than 1 in 5,000 visitors actually sent me negative feedback. Most people who sent feedback were surprisingly supportive. Most of the complaints died off within a few weeks, and the site began generating income almost immediately, although it was pretty low — a whopping $53 the first month. If you’d like to see some month-by-month specifics, I posted my 2005 Adsense revenue figures earlier this year. Adsense is still my single best source of revenue for this site, although it’s certainly not my only source. More on that later…

Can you make a decent income online?

Yes, absolutely. At the very least, a high five-figure annual income is certainly an attainable goal for an individual working full-time from home. I’m making a healthy income from StevePavlina.com, and the site is only 19 months old… barely a toddler. If you have a day job, it will take longer to generate a livable income, but it can still be done part-time if you’re willing to devote a lot of your spare time to it. I’ve always done it full-time.

Can most people do it?

No, they can’t. I hope it doesn’t shock you to see a personal development web site use the dreaded C-word. But I happen to agree with those who say that 99% of people who try to generate serious income from their blogs will fail. The tagline for this site is “Personal Development for Smart People.” And unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your outlook), smart people are a minority on this planet. So while most people can’t make a living this way, I would say that most smart people can. How do you know whether or not you qualify as smart? Here’s a good rule of thumb: If you have to ask the question, you aren’t.

If that last paragraph doesn’t flood my inbox with flames, I don’t know what will. OK, actually I do.

This kind of 99-1 ratio isn’t unique to blogging though. You’ll see it in any field with relatively low barriers to entry. What percentage of wannabe actors, musicians, or athletes ever make enough money from their passions to support themselves? It doesn’t take much effort to start a blog these days — almost anyone can do it. Talent counts for something, and the talent that matters in blogging is intelligence. But that just gets you in the door. You need to specifically apply your intelligence to one particular talent. And the best words I can think of to describe that particular talent are: web savvy.

If you are very web savvy, or if you can learn to become very web savvy, then you have an excellent shot of making enough money from your blog to cover all your living expenses… and then some. But if becoming truly web savvy is more than your gray matter can handle, then I’ll offer this advice: Don’t quit your day job.

Web savvy

What do I mean by web savvy? You don’t need to be a programmer, but you need a decent functional understanding of a variety of web technologies. What technologies are “key” will depend on the nature of your blog and your means of monetization. But generally speaking I’d list these elements as significant:

• blog publishing software
• HTML/CSS
• blog comments (and comment spam)
• RSS/syndication
• feed aggregators
• pings
• trackbacks
• full vs. partial feeds
• blog carnivals (for kick-starting your blog’s traffic)
• search engines
• search engine optimization (SEO)
• page rank
• social bookmarking
• tagging
• contextual advertising
• affiliate programs
• traffic statistics
• email

Optional: podcasting, instant messaging, PHP or other web scripting languages.

I’m sure I missed a few due to familiarity blindness. If scanning such a list makes your head spin, I wouldn’t recommend trying to make a full-time living from blogging just yet. Certainly you can still blog, but you’ll be at a serious disadvantage compared to someone who’s more web savvy, so don’t expect to achieve stellar results until you expand your knowledge base.

If you want to sell downloadable products such as ebooks, then you can add e-commerce, SSL, digital delivery, fraud prevention, and online databases to the list. Again, you don’t need to be a programmer; you just need a basic understanding of these technologies. Even if you hire someone else to handle the low-level implementation, it’s important to know what you’re getting into. You need to be able to trust your strategic decisions, and you won’t be able to do that if you’re a General who doesn’t know what a gun is.

A lack of understanding is a major cause of failure in the realm of online income generation. For example, if you’re clueless about search engine optimization (SEO), you’ll probably cripple your search engine rankings compared to someone who understands SEO well. But you can’t consider each technology in isolation. You need to understand the connections and trade-offs between them. Monetizing a blog is a balancing act. You may need to balance the needs of yourself, your visitors, search engines, those who link to you, social bookmarking sites, advertisers, affiliate programs, and others. Seemingly minor decisions like what to title a web page are significant. In coming up with the title of this article, I have to take all of these potential viewers into consideration. I want a title that is attractive to human visitors, drives reasonable search engine traffic, yields relevant contextual ads, fits the theme of the site, and encourages linking and social bookmarking. And most importantly I want each article to provide genuine value to my visitors. I do my best to create titles for my articles that balance these various needs. Often that means abandoning cutesy or clever titles in favor of direct and comprehensible ones. It’s little skills like these that help drive sustainable traffic growth month after month. Missing out on just this one skill is enough to cripple your traffic. And there are dozens of these types of skills that require web savvy to understand, respect, and apply.

This sort of knowledge is what separates the 1% from the 99%. Both groups may work just as hard, but the 1% is getting much better results for their efforts. It normally doesn’t take me more than 60 seconds to title an article, but a lot of experience goes into those 60 seconds. You really just have to learn these ideas once; after that you can apply them routinely.

Whenever you come across a significant web technology you don’t understand, look it up on Google or Wikipedia, and dive into it long enough to acquire a basic understanding of it. To make money from blogging it’s important to be something of a jack of all trades. Maybe you’ve heard the expression, “A jack of all trades is a master of none.” That may be true, but you don’t need to master any of these technologies — you just have to be good enough to use them. It’s the difference between being able to drive a car vs. becoming an auto mechanic. Strive to achieve functional knowledge, and then move on to something else. Even though I’m an experienced programmer, I don’t know how many web technologies actually work. I don’t really care. I can still use them to generate results. In the time it would take me to fully understand one new technology, I can achieve sufficient functional knowledge to apply several of them.

Thriving on change

Your greatest risk isn’t that you’ll make mistakes that will cost you. Your greatest risk is that you’ll miss opportunities. You need an entrepreneurial mindset, not an employee mindset. Don’t be too concerned with the risk of loss — be more concerned with the risk of missed gains. It’s what you don’t know and what you don’t do that will hurt you the worst. Blogging is cheap. Your expenses and financial risk should be minimal. Your real concern should be missing opportunities that would have made you money very easily. You need to develop antennae that can listen out for new opportunities. I highly recommend subscribing to Darren Rowse’s Problogger blog — Darren is great at uncovering new income-generating opportunities for bloggers.

The blogosphere changes rapidly, and change creates opportunity. It takes some brains to decipher these opportunities and to take advantage of them before they disappear. If you hesitate to capitalize on something new and exciting, you may simply miss out. Many opportunities are temporary. And every day you don’t implement them, you’re losing money you could have earned. And you’re also missing opportunities to build traffic, grow your audience, and benefit more people.

I used to get annoyed by the rapid rate of change of web technologies. It’s even more rapid than what I saw when I worked in the computer gaming industry. And the rate of change is accelerating. Almost every week now I learn about some fascinating new web service or idea that could potentially lead to big changes down the road. Making sense of them is a full-time job in itself. But I learned to love this insane pace. If I’m confused then everyone else is probably confused too. And people who only do this part-time will be very confused. If they aren’t confused, then they aren’t keeping up. So if I can be just a little bit faster and understand these technologies just a little bit sooner, then I can capitalize on some serious opportunities before the barriers to entry become too high. Even though confusion is uncomfortable, it’s really a good thing for a web entrepreneur. This is what creates the space for a college student to earn $1,000,000 online in just a few months with a clever idea. Remember this isn’t a zero-sum game. Don’t let someone else’s success make you feel diminished or jealous. Let it inspire you instead.

What’s your overall income-generation strategy?

I don’t want to insult anyone, but most people are utterly clueless when it comes to generating income from their blogs. They slap things together haphazardly with no rhyme or reason and hope to generate lots of money. While I’m a strong advocate of the ready-fire-aim approach, that strategy does require that you eventually aim. Ready-fire-fire-fire-fire will just create a mess.

Take a moment to articulate a basic income-generating strategy for your site. If you aren’t good at strategy, then just come up with a general philosophy for how you’re going to generate income. You don’t need a full business plan, just a description of how you plan to get from $0 per month to whatever your income goal is. An initial target goal I used when I first started this site was $3000 per month. It’s a somewhat arbitrary figure, but I knew if I could reach $3000 per month, I could certainly push it higher, and $3000 is enough income that it’s going to make a meaningful difference in my finances. I reached that level 15 months after launching the site (in December 2005). And since then it’s continued to increase nicely. Blogging income is actually quite easy to maintain. It’s a lot more secure than a regular job. No one can fire me, and if one source of income dries up, I can always add new ones. We’ll address multiple streams of income soon…

Are you going to generate income from advertising, affiliate commissions, product sales, donations, or something else? Maybe you want a combination of these things. However you decide to generate income, put your basic strategy down in writing. I took 15 minutes to create a half-page summary of my monetization strategy. I only update it about once a year and review it once a month. This isn’t difficult, but it helps me stay focused on where I’m headed. It also allows me to say no to opportunities that are inconsistent with my plan.

Refer to your monetization strategy (or philosophy) when you need to make design decisions for your web site. Although you may have multiple streams of income, decide which type of income will be your primary source, and design your site around that. Do you need to funnel people towards an order form, or will you place ads all over the site? Different monetization strategies suggest different design approaches. Think about what specific action you want your visitors to eventually take that will generate income for you, and design your site accordingly.

When devising your income strategy, feel free to cheat. Don’t re-invent the wheel. Copy someone else’s strategy that you’re convinced would work for you too. Do NOT copy anyone’s content or site layout (that’s copyright infringement), but take note of how they’re making money. I decided to monetize this site with advertising and affiliate income after researching how various successful bloggers generated income. Later I added donations as well. This is an effective combo.

Traffic, traffic, traffic

Assuming you feel qualified to take on the challenge of generating income from blogging (and I haven’t scared you away yet), the three most important things you need to monetize your blog are traffic, traffic, and traffic.

Just to throw out some figures, last month (April 2006), this site received over 1.1 million visitors and over 2.4 million page views. That’s almost triple what it was just six months ago.

Why is traffic so important? Because for most methods of online income generation, your income is a function of traffic. If you double your traffic, you’ll probably double your income (assuming your visitor demographics remain fairly consistent). You can screw almost everything else up, but if you can generate serious traffic, it’s really hard to fail. With sufficient traffic the realistic worst case is that you’ll eventually be able to monetize your web site via trial and error (as long as you keep those visitors coming).

When I first launched this blog, I knew that traffic building was going to be my biggest challenge. All of my plans hinged on my ability to build traffic. If I couldn’t build traffic, it was going to be very difficult to succeed. So I didn’t even try to monetize my site for the first several months. I just focused on traffic building. Even after 19 months, traffic building is still the most important part of my monetization plan. For my current traffic levels, I know I’m undermonetizing my site, but that’s OK. Right now it’s more important to me to keep growing the site, and I’m optimizing the income generation as I go along.

Traffic is the primary fuel of online income generation. More visitors means more ad clicks, more product sales, more affiliate sales, more donations, more consulting leads, and more of whatever else that generates income for you. And it also means you’re helping more and more people.

With respect to traffic, you should know that in many respects, the rich do get richer. High traffic leads to even more traffic-building opportunities that just aren’t accessible for low-traffic sites. On average at least 20 bloggers add new links to my site every day, my articles can easily surge to the top of social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, and I’m getting more frequent requests for radio interviews. Earlier this year I was featured in USA Today and in Self Magazine, which collectively have millions of readers. Journalists are finding me by doing Google searches on topics I’ve written about. These opportunities were not available to me when I was first starting out. Popular sites have a serious advantage. The more traffic you have, the more you can attract.

If you’re intelligent and web savvy, you should also be able to eventually build a high-traffic web site. And you’ll be able to leverage that traffic to build even more traffic.

How to build traffic

Now if traffic is so crucial, how do you build it up to significant levels if you’re starting from rock bottom?

I’ve already written a lengthy article on this topic, so I’ll refer you there: How to Build a High Traffic Web Site (or Blog). If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to bookmark it or print it out for later. That article covers my general philosophy of traffic-building, which centers on creating content that provides genuine value to your visitors. No games or gimmicks.

There is one other important traffic-building tip I’ll provide here though.

Blog Carnivals. Take full advantage of blog carnivals when you’re just starting out (click the previous link and read the FAQ there to learn what carnivals are if you don’t already know). Periodically submit your best blog posts to the appropriate carnivals for your niche. Carnivals are easy ways to get links and traffic, and best of all, they’re free. Submitting only takes minutes if you use a multi-carnvival submission form. Do NOT spam the carnivals with irrelevant material — only submit to the carnivals that are a match for your content.

In my early traffic-building days, I’d do carnivals submissions once a week, and it helped a great deal in going from nothing to about 50,000 visitors per month. You still have to produce great content, but carnivals give you a free shot at marketing your unknown blog. Free marketing is precisely the kind of opportunity you don’t want to miss. Carnivals are like an open-mic night at a comedy club — they give amateurs a chance to show off their stuff. I still submit to certain carnivals every once in a while, but now my traffic is so high that relatively speaking, they don’t make much difference anymore. Just to increase my traffic by 1% in a month, I need 11,000 new visitors, and even the best carnivals don’t push that much traffic. But you can pick up dozens or even hundreds of new subscribers from each round of carnival submissions, so it’s a great place to start. Plus it’s very easy.

If your traffic isn’t growing month after month, does it mean you’re doing something wrong? Most likely you aren’t doing enough things right. Again, making mistakes is not the issue. Missing opportunities is.

Will putting ads on your site hurt your traffic?

Here’s a common fear I hear from people who are considering monetizing their web sites:

Putting ads on my site will cripple my traffic. The ads will drive people away, and they’ll never come back.

Well, in my experience this is absolutely, positively, and otherwise completely and totally… FALSE. It’s just not true. Guess what happened to my traffic when I put ads on my site. Nothing. Guess what happened to my traffic when I put up more ads and donation links. Nothing. I could detect no net effect on my traffic whatsoever. Traffic continued increasing at the same rate it did before there were ads on my site. In fact, it might have even helped me a little, since some bloggers actually linked to my site just to point out that they didn’t like my ad layout. I’ll leave it up to you to form your own theories about this. It’s probably because there’s so much advertising online already that even though some people will complain when a free site puts up ads, if they value the content, they’ll still come back, regardless of what they say publicly.

Most mature people understand it’s reasonable for a blogger to earn income from his/her work. I think I’m lucky in that my audience tends to be very mature — immature people generally aren’t interested in personal development. To create an article like this takes serious effort, not to mention the hard-earned experience that’s required to write it. This article alone took me over 15 hours of writing and editing. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to earn an income from such work. If you get no value from it, you don’t pay anything. What could be more fair than that? The more income this blog generates, the more I can put into it. For example, I used some of the income to buy podcasting equipment and added a podcast to the site. I’ve recorded 13 episodes so far. The podcasts are all ad-free. I’m also planning to add some additional services to this site in the years ahead. More income = better service.

At the time of this writing, my site is very ad-heavy. Some people point this out to me as if I’m not aware of it: “You know, Steve. Your web site seems to contain an awful lot of ads.” Of course I’m aware of it. I’m the one who put the ads there. There’s a reason I have this configuration of ads. They’re effective! People keep clicking on them. If they weren’t effective, I’d remove them right away and try something else.

I do avoid putting up ads that I personally find annoying when I see them on other sites, including pop-ups and interstitials (stuff that flies across your screen). Even though they’d make me more money, in my opinion they degrade the visitor experience too much.

I also provide two ad-free outlets, so if you really don’t like ads, you can actually read my content without ads. First, I provide a full-text RSS feed, and at least for now it’s ad-free. I do, however, include a donation request in the bottom of my feeds.

If you want to see some actual traffic data, take a look at the 2005 traffic growth chart. I first put ads on the site in February 2005, and although the chart doesn’t cover pre-February traffic growth, the growth rate was very similar before then. For an independent source, you can also look at my traffic chart on Alexa. You can select different Range options to go further back in time.

Multiple streams of income

You don’t need to put all your eggs in one basket. Think multiple streams of income. On this site I actually have six different streams of income. Can you count them all? Here’s a list:

1. Google Adsense ads (pay per click and pay per impression advertising)
2. Donations (via PayPal or snail mail — yes, some people do mail a check)
3. Text Link Ads (sold for a fixed amount per month)
4. Chitika eMiniMalls ads (pay per click)
5. Affiliate programs like Amazon and LinkShare (commission on products sold, mostly books)
6. Advertising sold to individual advertisers (three-month campaigns or longer)

Note: If you’re reading this article a while after its original publication date, then this list is likely to change. I frequently experiment with different streams.

Adsense is my biggest single source of income, but some of the others do pretty well too. Every stream generates more than $100/month.

My second biggest income stream is actually donations. My average donation is about $10, and I’ve received a number of $100 donations too. It only took me about an hour to set this up via PayPal. So even if your content is free like mine, give your visitors a means to voluntarily contribute if they wish. It’s win-win. I’m very grateful for the visitor support. It’s a nice form of feedback too, since I notice that certain articles produced a surge in donations — this tells me I’m hitting the mark and giving people genuine value.

These aren’t my only streams of income though. I’ve been earning income online since 1995. With my computer games business, I have direct sales, royalty income, some advertising income, affiliate income, and donations (from the free articles). And if you throw in my wife’s streams of income, it gets really ridiculous: VegFamily.com advertising, direct book sales, book sales through distributors, web consulting, affiliate income, more Adsense income, and probably a few sources I forgot. Suffice it to say we receive a lot of paychecks. Some of them are small, but they add up. It’s also extremely low risk — if one source of income dries up, we just expand existing sources or create new ones. I encourage you to think of your blog as a potential outlet for multiple streams of income too.

Automated income

With the exception of #6, all of these income sources are fully automated. I don’t have to do anything to maintain them except deposit checks, and in most cases I don’t even have to do that because the money is automatically deposited to my bank account.

I love automated income. With this blog I currently have no sales, no employees, no products, no inventory, no credit card processing, no fraud, and no customers. And yet I’m still able to generate a reasonable (and growing) income.

Why get a regular job and trade your time for money when you can let technology do all that work for you? Imagine how it would feel to wake up each morning, go to your computer, and check how much money you made while you were sleeping. It’s a really nice situation to be in.

Blogging software and hardware

I use WordPress for this blog, and I highly recommend it. Wordpress has lots of features and a solid interface. And you can’t beat its price — free.

The rest of this site is custom-coded HTML, CSS, PHP, and MySQL. I’m a programmer, so I coded it all myself. I could have just as easily used an existing template, but I wanted a simple straightforward design for this site, and I wanted the look of the blog to match the rest of the site. Plus I use PHP and MySQL to do some creative things outside the blog, like the Million Dollar Experiment.

I don’t recommend using a hosted service like Blogger if you want to seriously monetize your blog. You don’t get enough control. If you don’t have your own URL, you’re tying yourself to a service you don’t own and building up someone else’s asset. You want to build page rank and links for your own URL, not someone else’s. Plus you want sufficient control over the layout and design of your site, so you can jump on any opportunities that require low-level changes. If you use a hosted blog, you’re at the mercy of the hosting service, and that puts the future of any income streams you create with them at risk. It’s a bit more work up front to self-host, but it’s less risky in the long run.

Web hosting is cheap, and there are plenty of good hosts to choose from. I recommend Pair.com for a hosting account. They aren’t the cheapest, but they’re very reliable and have decent support. I know many online businesses that host with them, and my wife refers most of her clients there.

As your traffic grows you may need to upgrade to a dedicated server or a virtual private server (VPS). My web server is hosted by ServInt.net. What I like about ServInt is that they have a nice upgrade path as my traffic keeps growing. I’ve gone through several upgrades with them already, and all have been seamless. The nice thing about having your own server is that you can put as many sites on it as the server can handle. I have several sites running on my server, and it doesn’t cost me any additional hosting fees to add another site.

Comments or no comments

When I began this blog, I started out with comments enabled. As traffic grew, so did the level of commenting. Some days there were more than 100 comments. I noticed I was spending more and more time managing comments, and I began to question whether it was worth the effort. It became clear that with continued traffic growth, I was going to have to change my approach or die in comment hell. The personal development topics I write about can easily generate lots of questions and discussion. Just imagine how many follow-up questions an article like this could generate. With tens of thousands of readers, it would be insane. Also, nuking comment spam was chewing up more and more of my time as well.

But after looking through my stats, I soon realized that only a tiny fraction of visitors ever look at comments at all, and an even smaller fraction ever post a comment (well below 1% of total visitors). That made my decision a lot easier, and in October 2005, I turned blog comments off. In retrospect that was one of my best decisions. I wish I had done it sooner.

If you’d like to read the full details of how I came to this decision, I’ve written about it previously: Blog Comments and More on Blog Comments.

Do you need comments to build traffic? Obviously not. Just like when I put up ads, I saw no decline in traffic when I turned off comments. In fact, I think it actually helped me. Although I turned off comments, I kept trackbacks enabled, so I started getting more trackbacks. If people wanted to publicly comment on something I’d written, they had to do so on their own blogs and post a link. So turning off comments didn’t kill the discussion — it just took it off site. The volume of trackbacks is far more reasonable, and I can easily keep up with it. I even pop onto other people’s sites and post comments now and then, but I don’t feel obligated to participate because the discussion isn’t on my own site.

I realize people have very strong feelings about blog comments and community building. Many people hold the opinion that a blog without comments just isn’t a blog. Personally I think that’s utter nonsense — the data just doesn’t support it. The vast majority of blog readers neither read nor post comments. Only a very tiny and very vocal group even care about comments. Some bloggers say that having comments helps build traffic, but I saw no evidence of that. In fact, I think it’s just the opposite. Managing comments detracts from writing new posts, and it’s far better to get a trackback and a link from someone else’s blog vs. a comment on your own blog. As long-term readers of my blog know, when faced with ambiguity, my preference is to try both alternatives and compare real results with real results. After doing that my conclusion is this: No comment.

Now if you want to support comments for non-traffic-building reasons like socializing or making new contacts, I say go for it. Just don’t assume that comments are necessary or even helpful in building traffic unless you directly test this assumption yourself.

Build a complete web site, not just a blog

Don’t limit your web site to just a blog. Feel free to build it out. Although most of my traffic goes straight to this blog, there’s a whole site built around it. For example, the home page of this site presents an overview of all the sections of the site, including the blog, article section, audio content, etc. A lot of people still don’t know what a blog is, so if your whole site is your blog, those people may be a little confused.

Testing and optimization

In the beginning you won’t know which potential streams of income will work best for you. So try everything that’s reasonable for you. If you learn about a new potential income stream, test it for a month or two, and measure the results for yourself. Feel free to cut streams that just aren’t working for you, and put more effort into optimizing those streams that show real promise.

A few months ago, I signed up for an account with Text Link Ads. It took about 20 minutes. They sell small text ads on my site, split the revenue with me 50-50, and deposit my earnings directly into my PayPal account. This month I’ll make around $600 from them, possibly more if they sell some new ads during the month. And it’s totally passive. If I never tried this, I’d miss out on this easy extra income.

For many months I’ve been tweaking the Adsense ads on this site. I tried different colors, sizes, layouts, etc. I continue to experiment now and then, but I have a hard time beating the current layout. It works very well for me. Adsense doesn’t allow publishers to reveal specific CPM and CTR data, but mine are definitely above par. They started out in the gutter though. You can easily double or triple your Adsense revenue by converting a poor layout into a better one. This is the main reason why during my first year of income, my traffic grew at 20% per month, but my income grew at 50% per month. Frequent testing and optimization had a major positive impact. Many of my tests failed, and some even made my income go down, but I’m glad I did all that testing. If I didn’t then my Adsense income would only be a fraction of what it is now.

It’s cheap to experiment. Every new advertising or affiliate service I’ve tried so far has been free to sign up. Often I can add a new income stream in under and hour and then just wait a month and see how it does. If it flops then at least I learned something. If it does well, wonderful. As a blogger who wants to generate income, you should always be experimenting with new income streams. If you haven’t tried anything new in six months, you’re almost certainly missing some golden opportunities. Every blog is different, so you need to test things for yourself to see what works for you. Failure is impossible here — you either succeed, or you learn something.

Pick your niche, but make sure it isn’t too small

Pick a niche for your blog where you have some significant expertise, but make sure it’s a big enough niche that you can build significant traffic. My wife runs VegFamily.com, a popular vegan web site. She does pretty well within her niche, but it’s just not a very big niche. On the other hand, my topic of personal development has much broader appeal. Potentially anyone can be interested in improving themselves, and I have the flexibility to write about topics like productivity, self-discipline, relationships, spirituality, health, and more. It’s all relevant to personal development.

Pick a niche that you’re passionate about. I’ve written 400+ articles so far, and I still feel like I’m just getting started. I’m not feeling burnt out at all. I chose to build a personal development site because I’m very knowledgeable, experienced, and passionate about this subject. I couldn’t imagine a better topic for me to write about.

Don’t pick a niche just because you think it will make you money. I see many bloggers try to do that, and it’s almost invariably a recipe for failure. Think about what you love most, and then find a way to make your topic appealing to a massive global audience. Consider what will provide genuine value to your visitors. It’s all about what you can give.

A broad enough topic creates more potential advertising partners. If I keep writing on the same subtopic over and over, I may exhaust the supply of advertisers and hit an income ceiling. But by writing on many different topics under the same umbrella, I widen the field of potential advertisers. And I expand the appeal of my site at the same time.

Make it clear to your visitors what your blog/site is about. Often I visit a blog with a clever title and tagline that reveals nothing about the site’s contents. In that case I generally assume it’s just a personal journal and move on. I love to be clever too, but I’ve found that clarity yields better results than cleverness.

Posting frequency and length

Bloggers have different opinions about the right posting length and frequency. Some bloggers say it’s best to write short (250-750 word) entries and post 20x per week or more. I’ve seen that strategy work for some, but I decided to do pretty much the opposite. I usually aim for about 3-5 posts per week, but my posts are much longer (typically 1000-2000 words, sometimes longer than 5000 words, including the monster you’re reading right now). That’s because rather than throwing out lots of short tips, I prefer to write more exhaustive, in-depth articles. I find that deeper articles are better at generating links and referrals and building traffic. It’s true that fewer people will take the time to read them, but those that do will enjoy some serious take-away value. I don’t believe in creating disposable content just to increase page views and ad impressions. If I’m not truly helping my visitors, I’m wasting their time.

Expenses

Blogging is dirt cheap.

I don’t spend money on advertising or promotion, so my marketing expenses are nil. Essentially my content is my marketing. If you like this article, you’ll probably find many more gems in the archives.

My only real expenses for this site are the hosting (I currently pay $149/month for the web server and bandwidth) and the domain name renewal ($9/year). Nearly all of the income this site generates is profit. This trickles down to my personal income, so of course it’s subject to income tax. But the actual business expenses are minimal.

The reason I pay so much for hosting is simply due to my traffic. If my traffic were much lower, I could run this site on a cheap shared hosting account. A database-driven blog can be a real resource hog at high traffic levels. The same goes for online forums. As traffic continues to increase, my hosting bill will go up too, but it will still be a tiny fraction of total income.

Perks

Depending on the nature of your blog, you may be able to enjoy some nice perks as your traffic grows. Almost every week I get free personal development books in the mail (for potential review on this site). Sometimes the author will send it directly; other times the publisher will ship me a batch of books. I also receive CDs, DVDs, and other personal development products. It’s hard to keep up sometimes (I have a queue of about two dozen books right now), but I am a voracious consumer of such products, so I do plow through them as fast as I can. When something strikes me as worthy of mention, I do indeed write up a review to share it with my visitors. I have very high standards though, so I review less than 10% of what I receive. I’ve read over 700 books in this field and listened to dozens of audio programs, so I’m pretty good at filtering out the fluff. As I’m sure you can imagine, there’s a great deal of self-help fluff out there.

My criteria for reviewing a product on this site is that it has to be original, compelling, and profound. If it doesn’t meet these criteria, I don’t review it, even if there’s a generous affiliate program. I’m not going to risk abusing my relationship with my visitors just to make a quick buck. Making money is not my main motivation for running this site. My main motivation is to grow and to help others grow, so that always comes first.

Your blog can also gain you access to certain events. A high-traffic blog becomes a potential media outlet, so you can actually think of yourself as a member of the press, which indeed you are. In a few days, my wife and I will be attending a three-day seminar via a free press pass. The regular price for these tickets is $500 per person. I’ll be posting a full review of the seminar next week. I’ve been to this particular seminar in 2004, so I already have high expectations for it. Dr. Wayne Dyer will be the keynote speaker.

I’m also using the popularity of this blog to set up interviews with people I’ve always wanted to learn more about. This is beautifully win-win because it creates value for me, my audience, and the person being interviewed. Recently I posted an exclusive interview with multi-millionaire Marc Allen as well as a review of his latest book, and I’m lining up other interviews as well. It isn’t hard to convince someone to do an interview in exchange for so much free exposure.

Motivation

I don’t think you’ll get very far if money is your #1 motivation for blogging. You have to be driven by something much deeper. Money is just frosting. It’s the cake underneath that matters. My cake is that I absolutely love personal development – not the phony “fast and easy” junk you see on infomercials, but real growth that makes us better human beings. That’s my passion. Pouring money on top of it just adds more fuel to the fire, but the fire is still there with or without the money.

What’s your passion? What would you blog about if you were already set for life?

Blogging lifestyle

Perhaps the best part of generating income from blogging is the freedom it brings. I work from home and set my own hours. I write whenever I’m inspired to write (which for me is quite often). Plus I get to spend my time doing what I love most — working on personal growth and helping others do the same. There’s nothing I’d rather do than this.

Perhaps it’s true that 99 out of 100 people can’t make a decent living from blogging yet. But maybe you’re among the 1 in 100 who can.

Technorati tags: make money profit make money online Ron Paul ron paul Galilea Montijo galilea montijo murray waas RailsConf railsconf youtube gtd myspace popfly paris hilton bebo mario lopez immigration wolfowitz aquantive joost

How Bloggers Make Money from Blogs

How do bloggers make money from blogs?

I’ve been reflecting this week about the amazing diversity of opportunities that are opening up for bloggers to make money from blogs.

I’ve long advised that bloggers seeking to make money from blogging spread their interests across multiple revenue streams so as not to put all their eggs in one basket.

The wonderful thing is that this is becoming easier and easier to do 2005 has seen many options opening up. I thought I’d take a look at some of the methods that bloggers are currently using to make money through blogs.

Income Streams for Bloggers - How they Make Money from Blogs

Advertising Programs - Perhaps the most obvious changes in the past few months have been with the addition of a variety of viable advertising options for bloggers. The most common way bloggers seem to earn money online is via the contextual ad program from Google - Adsense. Another two popular ones with many is BlogAds. A more recent addition that many are using successfully are Chitika’s eMiniMalls and CrispAds, Text Link Ads.

Adgenta, Azoogle Ads, Intelli Txt, Peak Click, DoubleClickTribal Fusion, Adbrite, Clicksor, Industry Brains, AdHearUs, Kanoodle, AVN, Pheedo, Adknowledge, YesAdvertising, RevenuePilotTextAds, SearchFeed, Target Point, Bidvertiser, Fastclick Value Click and OneMonkey (to name just some of the options - I’m sure I’ve forgotten some) and there is a smorgasbord of options. Of course there is more to come with MSN Adcenter and YPN both in beta testing and with a variety of other advertising system currently in development (so I hear).

RSS Advertising - The past 12 months have seen some advances in RSS Advertising also. I’m yet to hear of any bloggers making big money through it to this point - but as improvements are made to the ad programs exploring this I’m sure we’ll start to see examples of it being profitable.

Sponsorship - In addition to the array of advertising programs that are available to join there is a growing awareness in the business of the value and opportunity that exists for them to advertise directly on blogs. I’m hearing more and more examples of this and have been fortunately to have a couple of ad campaigns of my own in the past month - one with Adobe a couple of weeks ago and another just completed with Ricoh for a new digicam over at my Digital Camera Blog. These are not isolated cases - as I say I know of many blogs exploring sponsorship with advertisers at present and suspect we’ll see more of it in the year ahead. Sponsorship is also happening on a post by post basis with some bloggers being paid to write on certain topics by companies - either in one off or a regular fashion - and they are able to make big money from their blogs doing so.

Affiliate Programs - There are larger affiliate programs like Amazon, Linkshare, Clickbank and Commission Junction but also literally thousands of others from the large to the very small.

Digital Assets - Increasing numbers of bloggers have been developing other digital assets to support and add revenue streams to their blogs. By this I mean that I’m increasingly seeing e-books, courses and tele-seminars being run by bloggers. My recent foray into this with the first series of the six figure blogging course that Andy and I ran a few weeks ago and have just released the study version of. This type of activity will only increase in future - in fact this week I’ve seen numerous examples of bloggers running courses.

Blog Network Opportunities - with the rise in popularity of Blog Networks - bloggers are also being presented with more places to earn an income from their blogging - by writing for and with others. While it might be difficult to get a writing gig with one of the bigger networks - there are plenty who are always asking for new bloggers to join and who are willing to pay bloggers using a variety of payment models. While there are distinct advantages of blogging for yourself - blogging for an established network who will handle a lot of the set up/promotion/admin/SEO etc has it’s advantages also. More and more bloggers are combining writing for themselves on their own blogs with taking on blog network blogs as additional income streams.

Business Blog Writing Opportunities - as blogging has risen in it’s profile as a medium more and more businesses are starting blogs. Many of these companies have internal staff take on blogging duties - but an increasing number of them are hiring specialist bloggers to come on and run their blogs. I know of a number of bloggers who in the past month or two have been approached for such paid work. Check out Bloggers for Hire if you’re looking for this type of work.

Non Blogging Writing Opportunities - Also becoming more common are bloggers being hired to write in non blogging mediums. Manolo’s recent coup of a column in the Washington Post is just one example of this as bloggers are increasingly being approached to write for newspapers, magazines and other non blog websites. Along side this is the rise of bloggers as published book authors - this is to the extent that one blogger I spoke with this week complained to me that they were one of the few bloggers than they knew who didn’t have a book deal!

Donations - Tip Jars and donation buttons have been a part of blogging for years now but this last year saw a number of bloggers go full time after fundraising drives. Perhaps the most high profile of these was Jason Kottke of kottke.org who through the generosity of his readership was able to quit his job and become a full time blogger.

Flipping Blogs - Also more common in 2005 was the practice of ‘Blog Flipping’ - or selling of blogs. This has happened both on an individual blog level (I can think of about 20 blogs that sold this year) but also on a network level (the most obvious of these being the 8 figure sale of Weblogs Inc to AOL).

Merchandising - My recent attempt to sell ProBlogger.net T-shirts wasn’t a raging success, but it is an example of how an increasing number of bloggers are attempting to make a few extra dollars from their blogs by selling branded products through programs like Cafepress (although I have to say they’ve lost one of my own orders and are being quite unresponsive to my requests to follow it up at present). While I didn’t have a lot of success with merchandising - quite a few larger blogs are seeing significant sales - especially blogs with a cult following. I’m not at liberty to discuss details - but I know of one largish blog which will see sales over $20,000 in merchandise for the calendar year of 2005.

Consulting and Speaking - While it has been popular for established consultants to add blogs to their businesses we’re also starting to see bloggers with no consulting background able to make money by charging readers for their time in consulting scenarios BECAUSE of the profile that their blogs have built them. Blogging has the ability to establish people as experts on niche topics and we all know the value of being perceived as an expert. I spoke to one blogger last month who charges himself out at over $200 an hour for speaking and consulting work - his area of expertise was something that he knew little about 18 months ago - but through his blog he’s become a leader in his field and a minor celebrity in his industry.

As time rolls on there are more and more ways that bloggers make money from their blogs opening up. Feel free to suggest your own ideas and experiences in comments below.

Technorati tags: make money profit make money online Ron Paul ron paul Galilea Montijo galilea montijo murray waas RailsConf railsconf youtube gtd myspace popfly paris hilton bebo mario lopez immigration wolfowitz aquantive joost