How do bloggers 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 looking to make money from their blogs. The most common way bloggers seem to earn money online is via the contextual ad program from Google - Adsense. A more recent addition that many are using successfully are Chitika’s eMiniMalls and WidgetBucks, Text Link Ads.
Azoogle Ads, Intelli Txt, DoubleClick, Tribal Fusion, Adbrite, Clicksor, AdHearUs, Kanoodle, Pheedo, TextAds, Bidvertiser, Fastclick and Value Click (to name just some of the options) 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 (YPN is only available to US publishers).


Lastly there’s BlogAds - one of the first blog specific ad networks.
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 blogging 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 . 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 fund raising 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. 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.

8 free SEO tools to analyze and optimize your website for speed and compatibility

When you first started blogging, you probably used to spend a lot of time refining the design and making sure your site loaded quickly. You basically made sure that is was technically sound and working well for your visitors. However, after some time, your concentration may have shifted to other important tasks such as writing good content, marketing your blog, commenting on other blogs, writing guest posts, etc.

Here’s a list of free tools you should definitely check out to make sure that your website is running at an acceptable level compared to your fellow bloggers. If your site is not running optimally, then you’re probably not getting the your full potential of traffic.

1.Website Grader - I wrote about Website Grader a few months back as a free search engine optimization tool that you should be using if you’re a webmaster. Website Grader will give you a report of many aspects of your site and a final grade out of 100. When I first ran it on my site, I was at 56, now I’m up to 98. And my traffic has gone from 100 visits a day to 5000. I’m not saying it’s because of Website Grader, but it helped me determine problem areas.

2.Xinu Returns - Another web site I had written about a couple of months back that lets you quickly check things like your pagerank, rating, backlinks, and indexed pages. It’s a great tool to get a quick overview of your the status of your site in the blogosphere. It also gives you tips for your title tags and meta keywords.

3.BrowserShots - This site is really awesome for webmasters. You type in your web address and then choose all of the browsers and OSs that you would like to see your website shown in. You can see how your web site looks on Linux, Windows or Mac and in all of the different browsers, including Firefox, IE, Safari, and Opera. You can also choose the screen size, color depth, etc. Really great tool.

4.YSlow - YSlow is a Firefox only addon, but it is an amazing tool for analyzing a website in terms of performance and speed. It checks 13 different factors for a web page and generates a final score for the site. It also lists out the improvements that need to be made to ensure the highest possible grade. I wrote two articles on YSlow, one about how it helped me reduce the load time of my site by 50% and another on how to setup YSlow. Make sure to read them and install Firefox just for this purpose.

5.WebSiteOptmization - Another tool you can use that is similar to YSlow, but no need for Firefox. It gives you a breakdown of various aspects of your site, including HTTP requests, DNS lookups, etc and gives you recommendations on how to make it load faster, etc.

6.BuiltWith - BuiltWith is a very cool site that creates a profile of your website based on what technologies your site is running on. This site really focuses on the actual technologies that your site is built with, i.e. PHP, Apache server, Google Analytics, etc. It also gives you a score out of 5 stars depending on how good those technologies are. Microsoft.com has a rating of 2/5! IIS sucks!

7.CSS Optimizer - Just about every website uses CSS in some way or another and each call to a CSS file takes time to download. If you can shrink the size of your CSS files, even by a little bit, you’ll save a lot of time on page loading. You can also go to the W3C CSS Validation site to make sure your CSS is valid.

8.Minify - A very powerful tool that will take your JavaScript and CSS files and combine them together and remove all unnecessary comments and whitespace. I have used this tool before to reduce the size of my Javascript files by almost 40%. You can imagine the savings in load time because of that, especially if you use Wordpress where each plugin usually has it’s own Javascript file

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Blog not making money? Read this

Some blog for money and some blog for fun, but it’s not fun to lose money blogging. What do you do if your blog is costing you more than it makes?


More Advertising
If you only have one well-blended block of adsense, maybe it’s time for a more prominent ad placement. Or if adsense isn’t performing well in a prime spot, maybe it’s time to try to sell that spot directly to an advertiser.


Affiliate Programs
There are many affiliate programs that you can make to fit your niche. I have been experimenting most with NeverBlueAds. NeverBlueAds has a lot of freebies, so it’s perfect for my blog It’s All Free Online. Not only can I display text and banner advertising for the ads, I can also post about them. I can still get paid to write about freebies


Expand Your Niche
If your niche is too specific, it could be limiting what you can do. If you’re blogging about tree frogs (bad example) try blogging about all frogs. You could even take it a step further and include other species of animals. Then you’re content isn’t as limiting and you can expand your niche.


Paid Blogging
Maybe you don’t want your blog to make money, that’s fine too. There are other ways on the internet to cover your costs. Some bloggers offer incentive to ‘guest bloggers‘. This month we are offering our two top bloggers 15$ each, which is enough to cover hosting costs. Not only do you get to earn money, you can further develop your blog and brand.

Those are just a few things you can do until your blog starts making money. What did you do before your blog started making money?

6 Tips for Hosting a Blogging Contest

The contests on blogs have been growing daily, and many bloggers are considering starting there own contests.

Blog about your Blog is definitely receiving some buzz, not only for the reviews we’ve purchased, but the contests we’ve hosted as well. I read every post about our site, and usually we get comments from their readers, saying they are glad they found our blog. This is just from people mentioning our contest on their blog.
Hosting contests can not only give you SEO for a key term with link back competitions, but they can also generate buzz for your website. However if you want to run a contest, you better make sure it is successful.

1. Have a Deadline
Make sure to have a deadline for your contest. The number one reason I will not participate in a contest, is if there isn’t a deadline. “Contest closes sometime” doesn’t work for me. I also may not participate if the contest deadline is months away. Why should I enter now… there’s months until it closes…


2.Make People Want to Enter
You don’t want your readers to wait, forget, and not enter your contest. Give them a reason to enter NOW. Limited time only, contest will end in 3 days! I’ll never run this again, it’s the best prize! You get the idea. If you are running the contest to generate buzz or SEO, you want it NOW not in 3 months. At least I do.


3. Offer a Prize
Any prize will do. If it’s free I’m there! You can never go wrong with cash. If you want to be different, being unique may also work. Have something you never used that would be great to giveaway? I have several items that are going to be “prizes” soon, still in the box. Not just the day planner, but there is also a digital picture key chain, and a nice thermos set that I will give away soon. (they were all free)



4.Make it Easy
If you want a big response, don’t make your contest complicated, make it fun. Leaving a comment on the contest post is the easiest contest there is. Asking for a 200 word review and 3 linkbacks to your website, is not as appealing. Why would I review your website/blog for FREE with the CHANCE to win 20$, when we charge 35$ for a review direct?


5. Pick What You Want to Promote
Make sure the contest has benefits for you. Whether you are trying to rank for a certain keyword in google, or get your RSS Feed Readership up, base your contest on that. You can even get that all in one. “Linkback to our website saying “Increase Website Traffic” and subscribe to our RSS feed to get extra entries!”


6.Publicize your Contest!
This is the most essential for a good contest. If no one knows about it, there won’t be many entries. Just for this reason there are many contest blogs that blog only about contests (too many to list here).
Forums are also a great way to promote your contest. Don’t underestimate the power of posties at PayPerPost. Try other forums as well, you can use forums to promote our day planner contest, I also posted about the contest on other blogs I contribute to.


The perfect blog contest is pretty easy, you just have to determine what you want. Make sure to have a deadline. Offer a prize, any prize! Publicize, promote, promote, promote. And last but not least, be sure of what you want. Don’t start the contest and figure it out as you go. Set the rules, prize, and deadline from the beginning.

7 ways to advertise my site

Below you will find 7 ways to promote your website or blog with a bit of money. You can use them to generate raw traffic, improve your search engine rankings, gain visibility on your niche and so on. Despite the initial investment most of those techniques will pay off on the short to medium term. If you are expecting to make money with your website there is no reason to assume that you will not need to spend some as well, right?

1. AdWords: Google make billions of dollars every year from the AdWords-AdSense combo. Why is that? Because they work. Adwords is probably the most efficient method to generated raw traffic for your website. In order to get started you should create an account, add lots (by lots I mean hundreds if not thousands) of keywords that are related your site and set the maximum Pay-per-Click rate at $0.01. After that raise the rate by $0.01 every week or so until you start getting the desired amount of daily clicks. Notice that at lower bids the keywords will be reported as “Inactive for Search”. Do not worry about it, it just means that your ads will not appear on the search network (Google’s search results), but they will appear on the content network (websites of people that use AdSense).

2. Site-Specific AdWords: if you pay attention to the AdSense units you will see that most of them have a link titled “Advertise on this site”. This feature enables AdWords advertisers to create customized ads that will be displayed only on specific websites. Those ads work on a CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) rather than a CPC (cost per click) basis, but they can generate a good amount of very targeted traffic since you will be in control of where the ad will be displayed and of the message. You can get even better results if you use some creativity when designing the ads, click here for some examples.

3. StumbleUpon Ads: StumbleUpon is a very innovative social bookmarking site that allows users to discover great websites by using a browser toolbar. When the user clicks on “Stumble” he will be delivered a website that people with similar interested rated positively. The user is also able to give positive and negative ratings to any website that he visits on the Internet. StumbleUpon also offers advertising campaigns, called StumbleUpon Ads, where you can deliver your website directly to those “Stumblers”. It costs $0.05 per page delivered, but since the websites that appear on StumbleUpon usually have a high quality it is very likely that part of that paid traffic will convert into regular readers.

4. Text Link Ads: if you are trying to increase your search engine rankings to leverage organic traffic you should consider buying some text link ads. While those text links can also generate direct traffic the biggest benefit you will have is an improvement on your search rankings, specially if the links are placed on authoritative and relevant websites. There are several places to buy text links, including specialized companies like Text-Link-Ads and Text Link Brokers or online forums like Digital Point’s market place.

5. Direct Banner Sales: most established websites sell banner ads or sponsorship plans directly. Those advertising deals usually are structured with weekly or monthly fees, regardless of the number of impressions or clicks that you will get. Despite this characteristic a banner placement can represent good value for money because apart from the direct traffic you will also create visibility and brand awareness. Readers of the website where you will display your banner will associate the message on the banner with your site or blog. Should they come across that banner or message two or three times it is very likely that they will get curious and decide to check what the buzz is all about. Another advantage of banner placements is the fact that people will unconsciously think that the author of the website endorses your content or product.

6. Sponsored Reviews: buying some sponsored reviews is a good way to kick-start a website. They will bring backlinks, traffic and RSS subscribers. There are many market studies confirming that “word of mouth” is the most efficient way to capture people’s attention, and that is just what you get with sponsored reviews. You can either pay a low price (sometimes as low as $5 per review) to get a large number of reviews from small sites or you can focus on large players (which can charge several hundreds of dollars for a single review) that are authorities on your niche. The best way to purchase sponsored reviews is through sites like SponsoredReviews.com, ReviewMe or PayPerPost.com.

7. Blog Networks: there are several blog networks founded around a traffic exchange principle. Basically you create an account for you blog and you earn credits by surfing other members’ blogs. Afterwards you can use those credits to make people visit your blog or to display your banners around the network. The interesting part is that most of those blog networks allow users to purchase credits with money, and the price is really convenient. You should be able receive hundreds of visitors or to get thousands of banner impressions for less than 10 dollars. Some blog networks that sell credits include Blog Explosion, Blog Soldiers and Blog Advance.

from dailyblogtips

How to Start Make Money Online?

1. NEVER PAY FOR ANYTHING
- Never give any money to anyone to join anything.
Serious companies that offer online jobs shouldn't be asking for money before they recruit you. Neither should you be spending your hard-earned money to buy e-books with titles like "get rich quick", "becoming rich online", "make money", "free money" or any other similar topics. You can get all the information you need for free on sites like this and thousands of others.
Also, forget pyramid schemes and programs which claim that you can invest a dollar and get five thousand back; they are scams and they just don't work. Finally remember that there is no such thing as free money. Be realistic, nobody is going to give away money but you can still earn some decent amounts online!


2. RESEARCH THE INFORMATION
- Before you join any scheme or any program that is offering you any revenue, research the owner well. Check where the site is hosted and if something looks funny DO NOT join. Check whether the site is scam by just using a google search (refer to the top of my blog)


3. DISAPPEARING ACT
- Many sites disappear overnight. Don't be surprised if you invest or join something and the owners vanish off the face of Earth. Always be cautious. If you are really sure that you want to invest money, never invest or rather gamble more then you can afford to lose. As an online money making advice site, we do not recommend that you invest in any kind of online schemes. Besides being illegal, they are also very risky!


4, PROTECT YOUR PASSWORDS - Keep your payment passwords safe and never use credit cards for "ID or age verification". There are many unscrupulous people waiting to find ways to get hold of your money. Passwords are considered to be the safest when they contain both letters and numbers. Also remember to change passwords regularly and not to have a standard password to use for every signup.


5. REPORT SCAMS - If you have been scammed or duped, don't be afraid to report it. Remember that reporting a scam site will help shut it down, before more damage is caused. Don't let scammers get away with your money.


6. ELECTRONIC PAYMENT SYSTEMS - Don't mix your personal money with money you make off the internet. Open a free international e-gold account and always request payment by it. E-gold can always be transferred online and changed into your own currency. Alternatively, one can always use PayPal, or Moneybookers and etc.


7. PROTECT YOUR COMPUTER - Install a firewall, antivirus and popup blocker and update them frequently. We use the Google tool bar to block popups and trust us, nothing goes past it. Also make sure to download spyware and adware removers It is impressive how much malware and other unwanted stuff gets installed on your computer without you knowing after just a few hours of browsing.


8. AVOID ADULT SITES - Avoid entering any adult and/or pornographic sites since many of these are more likely to contain spyware, advertisments and popups.


9. GET A NEW EMAIL ADDRESS - Never give your personal email address. Always open a new one so you don't get your personal mails mixed up with your business ones. Furthermore, should you receive any spam it will be easier to get rid of and your personal email remains clean. Never respond to spam since this only confirms that the email is actually being viewed. Actually, don't even open a message that appears to be spam. Some spam can come with a built-in code that will notify the sender that your address is legitimate if you just open the message. This will obviously result in more spam!


10. PROTECT YOUR EMAIL - Also do not post your email address in any public forum or site. There are harvesters which are sent to crawl websites and register anything that includes @, and the new intelligent ones even register "AT". As you can imagine, the addresses registered are then sold off to people who will happily fill your mailbox!


11. MAKE YOUR OWN WEBSITE / BLOG - If you do join any money making scheme, incentive or affiliate program, try to make your own website to show your wares. Advertise your site to get traffic, and keep it as professional as possible to make sure your visitors return. Promote your site for free with the major search engines and directories to get good quality traffic.


12. JOIN AFFILIATE PROGRAMS - When you have made your own site, it might be a good idea to signup with some affiliate programs that will provide you with a large percentage of the sale or lead that would be generated from your site by means of a uniquely coded text link or banner.

How To Make Money Online For Free

The best way to make money online for free is to get into affiliate marketing, which is to promote other people products and services. Next, you are going to drive tons of traffic to your affiliate pages using free channels and methods.

But before we talk about driving traffic, you are going to choose the right product to promote. Do some research to find out what things are hot currently and go to affiliate networks such as Clickbank to find a product that suits the trend. It is very important for you to focus on promoting one product first if you are new to affiliate marketing, before moving on to another winning product.

Now, let us talk about ways to drive traffic to your affiliate product page, strictly using free methods:

1. Create a Squidoo lens. Make sure that your lens is keywords optimized according to what you are promoting. The naming of the lens will play a big part on whether you will get to top of search engines.

2. Writing keyword-optimized articles. Research and gather keywords that are related to the products that you are promoting. Write an article for each keyword and make sure that it gets to prominent pages of search engines.

3. Create a report. Create a short report which talk about the topic or product that you are promoting. Use free source to convert it to a PDF file, and distribute it for free on the Internet.

4. Forum postings. Join relevant forums and include a signature to your affiliate product pages. Make sure that you do not spam but contribute informative ideas to the forum.

5. Classified ads. Post free ads talking about the product that you are promoting on popular classified sites such as Craigslist.

These are just some free ways to drive traffic to your affiliate product pages. The quality of the product that you are promoting also plays a big part on whether you will get any sales out of it.