Make Money From Blogging

 

 

Continuity Programs

This is another newer category for me but one that continues to grow.

A continuity program is a site where you earn a recurring income from people who subscribe to a service you offer. For me this includes two sites – ProBlogger.com and Third Tribe Marketing. Both programs are membership sites and generate monthly income from the thousands of members that they have as a part of them.
  
Give the Reader A Beautiful Experience
It doesn’t matter if you have the most amazing, jaw-dropping, slap-yo-mamma content in the world, if people don’t read it. When someone lands on your webpage you have five seconds or less to prove that your site and its content is worth their precious time. So if your web design is cluttered, hard-to-read and visually unattractive, you’re content may not have the chance it deserves.
One of the primary reasons people continue to visit and read my blog (rather than just through an RSS reader or email) is because the reading experience is enjoyable.
With all the templates, themes, and examples of good design permeating the digital space, there’s no excuse for poor design. You don’t have to be a designer in any sense of the word to create a beautifully-designed, content-focused blog. Just find what’s working, what you would enjoy looking at, and imitate it.

 Write For Real People 

Once your canvas is ready (your design) you can now fill it with glorious content that knocks people’s socks off! But the most important thing to remember is just that— you want to knock people’s socks off. Not robots: real people.
Having a voice that people can relate to is crucial to growing your readership. If people can’t relate to what you’re saying or how you’re saying it, why would they return?
One thing that has helped me to communicate effectively to my readership is focusing in on exactly who I’m speaking to. No, I’m not talking about my demographic or target audience— that’s not specific enough. To effectively write from an authentic, relatable voice you need to write as if you’re talking to one person.
Try this as an exercise– the next time you draft up a blog post, think of one person in your life that could benefit from the information you’re about to write, and write it in such a way as if you’re talking directly to them. This will help you communicate your message more clearly and your voice will be more authentic.
And people will love you for it.  Engaging Content (Actionable)
Another thing I’ve found when crafting content is that the actionable always wins out on engagement. Give people clear, easy-to-do actions and watch your engagement soar.
People don’t always know right off the bat how to take the action you may be moving them towards, so make it easy for them. Tell them exactly what to do.

Compelling Content (Sharable)

Making your content sharable is a crucial peice to the continued organic growth. When people share with other people there is power that no degree of marketing could ever capture.
In order to compell people to share your content, you have to first understand why people share things. The motivations are many but here’s just a few powerful reasons someone would share your content:

• It makes them look smart
• It makes them look funny
• It makes them look cutting-edge
• It makes them look interesting

Do you see a pattern there? People tend to share content based on how it will make them look to others. So if your content gives someone the chance to look better in front of their peers, they will be compelled to share it.

Investing Online

 Understand basic options for online investing. Knowing a bit about the cluttered landscape of trading options that are available through online brokers can help the beginning investor to figure out his primary focus and goals.

• Look at single stocks against commodities, mutual funds, index funds, exchange traded funds and all of the other items that can be traded online. It's good to start out with a focus on single stocks, but knowing about some of these other products will make an investor more flexible in how he uses the smaller amount of capital over the long term. Understanding more online trading options can often help the account holder do more with less money.
  
•   The Advisor provides advice as to allocation and specific investments, but you implement the recommended changes to the allocation and specific investments. It is up to you to return for future advice. The Advisor does not monitor or proactively call you when a change occurs. The advice does not include the payment of commissions. 
• 
  There are many facets to managing your investments; opening accounts, transferring accounts or assets, buying and selling investments in each account, monitoring individual investments and your overall allocation on a periodic basis, re-balancing the asset allocation, removing poorly performing investment options and replacing with more appropriate alternatives, all in a tax-efficient manner.
• The Manager invests the money according to a pre-determined plan, monitors the portfolio and investments and makes changes as needed. You are an observer to the process and the results.
• 
  
  Many brokerages and platforms offer test accounts where you can trade with play money, the equivalent of Fantasy Football, until you become experienced with the ebb and flow of the markets and the behavior of individual ticker symbols. Or $1,000 could be used for courses at Online Trading Academy, giving you the start of a comprehensive trading and investing education.
• Options allow you to control a stock or other asset and capitalize on its price movement without actually owning it. Because options expire in a few months (or even weeks) they’re priced low, far below the per–share price of the underlying asset.
  
  Unlike futures, the most you can lose is your stake; there’s no threat of an additional margin call. But like futures, options are a complex (though exciting) asset class and you need training and experience to trade successfully.

Top 5 Ways to Invest Your Money

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            Here is my Top 5 Ways to invest Your money
1. Increase your 401k contribution

         This is incredibly simple, and it involves nothing more than adjusting your allocation. Save a mere $83 a month more (that's less than $20 a week) and you're investing $1,000 a year.

2. Buy an indexed ETF
If you want access to more investing options, consider opening up an individual retirement account or brokerage account to buy exchange-traded funds. These investments are similar to mutual funds, but they trade like stocks and come in much broader varieties.

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3. Buy a bedrock stock

If you already have a diversified 401k and are looking to supplement your retirement funds with some growth, or if you're ready to take on a little more risk for the shot at greater rewards, a $1,000 investment is more than enough to get you actively involved in the stock market.
Not too active, of course, because the vast majority of brokerage accounts are going to charge you for every transaction. So if you pay $7.50 each transaction, buying and selling 10 stocks in a year will cost you $150 -- or 15% of your entire $1,000 investment! You'd need to pick significant winners each time just to break even.
A better plan is to buy a "set it and forget it" stock that you can rely on for long-term growth and a decent payout via dividends. These are most commonly large companies with stable operations -- such as Apple (AAPL), Coca-Cola (KO) or McDonald's (MCD)

4. Replace doors or update a bathroom

The housing market is battered, but many experts believe a recovery is under way -- or at least, that a bottom is being formed. If that's true, one of the best investments you can make right now is to fix up your home with the expectation of boosting its resale value.
Replacing an entry door with a midlevel 20-gauge steel door costs a little more than $1,000, and it pays back about three-quarters of that in resale value, according to industry estimates. Decent garage doors are more like $1,500, but they pay back at a similar rate. A much cheaper option is to buy storm doors for the front and back -- decent-quality doors cost only a few hundred bucks apiece.
Another quick fix? Redo the vanity, faucet, mirror and light fixture in your bathroom. If the walls aren't fully tiled, slap on a quick coat of paint -- a weekend project that's reasonably easy to do yourself and costs about $1,000. Bathrooms are small and thus easy to update.

5. Invest in yourself

Author and Web entrepreneur James Altucher says his best investments have been "in either myself or people I knew very well who were building companies." I fully believe in this notion.

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Money Through Adsense

How to Earn Money Through Google Adsense

Creating an Ad UnitHow to Design Your Ad CampaignWhat's it Worth?

Edited by Zoe Volt, Krystle, Tom Viren, Brandywine and 63 others

Money for nothing? Well, not quite—but close! Google’s AdSense is a revenue-sharing opportunity for small, medium and large web sites that places ads for goods and services that are relevant to the content of your site, targeted to the people who frequent your pages. In turn, you get paid a small amount when the ad is either displayed on your page, or clicked on. We'll show you some good ideas that added to your own, will help increase your AdSense revenue.

Method 1 of 3: Creating an Ad Unit

1. 1
   Sign into your AdSense account. Go to AdSense, and click on My ads in the upper left.
   • Create a new Ad unit. In the main screen area, under Content > Ad units, click the +New ad unit button.
2. 2
   Name your ad unit. This can be any name that suits you, but many find creating a standard naming format helps them manage large amounts of data.
   • For example, using [target site for the ad]_[ad size]_[ad date] is one approach, that would look like this: mywebsite.com_336x280_080112. Whatever format you decide to use for naming, make that your standard.
3. 3
   Pick a size. See "How to Do It" below for details, but Google has found best practices that generate more clicks.
4. 4
   Set your ad type. This determines the types of ads you will see on your website: text only; text and image/rich media; and image/rich media only.
5. 5
   Create a custom channel. A custom channel lets you group ad units however you choose, such as by size or location on a page.
   • You can track performance by custom channel, and turn your channel into a targetable ad placement so advertisers can target their ads to your ad units.
6. 6
   Create your ad style. This lets you choose colors for the various components of an ad: border, title, background, text, and URL. It also lets you choose corner styles, from square to very rounded, a font family, and a default font size.
   • It's good practice to create an ad style that harmonizes with the look and colors of your website.
   • You can use Google's presets, or use your own custom settings. In either case, a sample ad on the right will show you how your ad will appear
   
   
   
   • 
7.  7
   Get the code for the ad. When you're done with the ad setup, either save your ad unit, or click the Save and get code button at the bottom to get the HTML code for your site.
   • If adding code to your site is a puzzle you want help with, click here for Google's code implementation guide.

Method 2 of 3: How to Design Your Ad Campaign

1. 1
   Analyze your content. In designing any kind of ad campaign, it's crucial to know who your target is. If you're writing a food blog that caters to single men on a budget, for example, you've narrowed the scope of who you will be appealing to. You've also got a very good focus point for your ads. What are things single men who cook drawn to? Here are some possibilities: dating, cars, movies, politics, and live music.
   • Think about who frequents your website, write down what you feel are the most important characteristics of your viewers.
2. 2
   Fine tune advertisements. While AdSense will auto-populate your page with what they feel are relevant ads, use their tools to provide tighter controls.
   • Set up channels. Channels are like labels that let you group your ad units your way—by color, category, or pages. By setting up channels, you can get detailed reports on the performance of your ad units, and use that to your advantage. For example:
     • Use one style of ad on one group of pages, and another style on another group. Track and compare the performance of the two styles, and pick the best performer.
     • Compare performance on pages that focus on different things. For example, if your pages about gardening perform better than your pages on cooking, you might consider adding more to your gardening pages.
     • If you have separate domains, set up a channel to track each of them to see which is generating the most clicks.
3. 3
   Optimize your ad placement and site design. Google has found there are places where ads are more effective, and places where they are less effective.
   • Ads that appear when you first arrive at your page (i.e., "above the fold" as they say in the newspaper world) tend to be more effective than those that are below the fold.
   • Ads on upper left tend to perform much better than ads on the lower right.
   • Ads directly above the primary content, and ads that appear at the bottom of the page and above the footer tend to perform very well.
   • Wider ads are generally more successful, as they are much easier to read.
   • Ads that display images or video perform very well.
   • Using colors that complement your website colors will make them more readable, and so more effective.
4. 4
   Learn how AdSense works. AdSense automatically sends ads to your site based on a few different criteria:
   • Contextual targeting. AdSense crawlers scan your page, analyze your content, and serve up ads designed match your content. They do this using keyword analysis, word frequency, font size, and the link structure of the web.
   • Placement targeting. This allows advertisers to choose to run their ads on specific subsections of a publisher's website. If your website matches an advertisers criteria, their ad will appear on your page.
   • Interest-based advertising. This lets advertisers reach users based on their interests and the user's previous interactions with them, such as a visit to their website. Google's Ads Preferences Manager allows users themselves to choose their interest categories, which further helps advertisers focus their ad campaigns. This method is good for monetizing your site more efficiently, as it increases the value for advertisers and provides a more relevant experience for users.

Method 3 of 3: What's it Worth?

1. 1
   Manage your expectations. When you sign up for AdSense, you'll want to know what kind of revenue can you expect to see. There is a lot that goes into what kind of return you can expect, and managing those things will help you maximize your earning potential.
2. 2
   Traffic. First and formost, in order to generate any kind of revenue from AdSense you must have people clicking on your ads. In order for this to happen, you need to have people on your site, reading your content! Whether you have a business website, or a personal blog, the rule is the same: Get the word out!
   • Heavily trafficked large sites can see over a million hits a day, whereas a blog might feel lucky if they have 100 visitors a day.
   • For every thousand page impressions (views) you receive, you may earn from $.05 to $5. Yes, that's a broad range—over a month, that is between $1.50 and $150.00! Where in that range you can expect to frequent depends entirely on you, your site, and your promotion efforts.
3. 3
   Cost Per Click (CPC). This paid every time somebody clicks an ad on your page. No, you can't click your own ad—Google will see this, and shut you down so fast your head will spin. The advertisers set the price for these ads, and they can vary greatly.
   • An advertiser may spend a lot on a per-click basis, but that ad may generate very little interest on your site.
   • An ad that may generate $.03 per click may get 100 hits, but that doesn't add up to much.
4. 4
   Clickthrough Rate (CTR). This is the percentage of visitors to your site compared to how many them actually clicked on an ad. If 100 people came to your site, and 1 of them clicked an ad, your CTR is 1%, and that's not an unreasonable number. You can see how getting more traffic to your site will really make a difference.
5. 5
   Revenue per 1000 impressions (RPM). This is an estimate of how much you might receive if you have 1000 impressions (page views).
   • If you made, for example, $1 for 100 impressions, your RPM would be $10. There is no guarantee you'll make that, but it's a good way to check the overall performance of your site.
6. 6
   Content is king. The quality of your content is an important factor in understanding your earning potential. If your site provides rich, compelling content and a great user experience, you will have more interested users. Google's crawlers will also have an easier time determining the type of ad content would best fit on your site. Interested users + targeted ads = $$$
7. 7
   Start building keyword-rich pages. Liberally seed with well researched, profitable keywords, and get lots of high quality links to your site.
   • If your site is about topics such as debt consolidation, web hosting or asbestos-related cancer, you’ll earn much more per click than if it’s about free puppies.
   • If you concentrate only on top-paying keywords, you’ll face stiff competition. What you want are keywords that are high in demand and low in supply, so do some careful keyword research before you build your pages.
     

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Top 5 Ways to Earn Money Quick

1. Sell Stock Photography

The Internet has caused an explosion in the demand for stock photography. As the number of media and commercial outlets has increased dramatically with the growth of online media there’s an enormous need for high quality stock photos.
Yuri Arcurs is the man everyone turns to for their stock photo needs. As the world’s top selling stock photographer he sells an image every 8 seconds, 24 hours a day (that works out to over 4 million images each year). Arcurs makes millions of dollars each year simply by being the best at what he does. There are lots of great photographers in the world and the barrier to entry is as low as ownership of a camera, but Arcurs has managed to build a reputation online for consistent, high quality and imaginative images.
If you’re a professional photographer (or even just a hobbyist) you should consider the possibilities of selling stock images online.

2. Offering a Service

Providing a service may be the easiest way to start is you don’t need any investment to get this going. My podcast editor Ian Robinson is helping podcast creators edit their shows to increase production value. There are many different ways to provide a service and it’s just about realizing where your talent lies and what solution you can provide for others.

3. B2B Marketing

An online business model I love is utilized by GetVoiP, an affiliate marketer based in New York. GetVoiP acts as an agent for business communication providers. They maintain updated listings of VoiP providers, including ratings, comparisons, consumer reviews, in-depth knowledge of market and end-user trends, and expert opinions from business professionals on a variety of topics related to business consumers. By not only keeping abreast of news, but providing detailed analysis of products being offered, GetVoiP is able to generate traffic to their site and increase their clout with businesses.

4. Google Adsense

If that sounds like too much technical information for you, there is an easy button – Google’s advertising platform is as simple as signing up, enabling (on Blogger) or pasting a small code on your website, and allowing the advertisements to automatically roll in. The problem with this program is that you don’t get any commissions – and you don’t get to control the ad content. This is useful for some, but powerful users will want something a little more robust.

5. Flip domain names

Domain names are valuable internet real estate and some people actually make a nice living off of buying and selling them. One strategy is to use Google Adwords to find keywords that are trending and use that information to buy domain names that you think may soon be in demand. However, since short, snappy, or straightforward domain names have already been mostly snatched up, you can also get lucky buying domain names that are random acronyms, as you never know when a person or company with those exact initials will decide to set up a website. (CPC.com, for example, sold for over $200,000 when Contract Pharmaceutical Corporation decided to go online. Not bad for three letters.) For more advice, read How to Buy a Cheap Domain Name.

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How to Make Money Blogging

You must know the key for your online success. Internet is a 24/7 marketing medium. It is a global medium where people look for information to solve their problems. If you use this medium to market them the crucial information or online product and solve their problems, in return they pay you for the solutions.

1

Think about 3-5 topics that you know a lot about or are passionate about. Some examples are hobbies that you have, a career that you are in or some specific and miscellaneous knowledge that you have.

• One of the truly great things about blogs is that they are a means of self-expression. In a world where it can be difficult to be heard, they provide a convenient way of airing your opinions and broadcasting your ideas. There is nothing more rewarding than blogging about your passions and interests. It is also a brilliant way to enter the world of writing.

2

Research reliable blog hosts and blogging systems. You can start on one of the free systems to learn about blogging but if you are serious about making money you will want a webhost that provides reliable hosting and support. A reliable host will have daily backups and help you in setting it up.

• Blogs are very cheap to set up and maintain. Another great benefit from blogging is that they are very cheap to run. There are only two components to a blog that cost you: your domain name and web hosting fees. For as little as EUR10 a month you can have your blog up and running. There are even websites that provide free hosting and domain names, thereby, costing you nothing. Although I would recommend that you pay for both hosting and having your own domain name, as in the long run it is much more beneficial.

3

Use a blogging system or software. There is many support from dedicated websites, such as WordPress. In addition, there are also many forums and guides available to giving the novice a helping hand.

• A blog is a very easy way to generate income. There are many ways to earn money from advertising, sponsorship, affiliate programmes, to selling your own products. Many people successfully earn healthy incomes from blogging.
• Install plugins if you are using wordpress to further optimize your blog. You will need something that creates metatags.
• Having a blog can really add to your credibility in the marketplace. It allows your readers to get a sense of who you are as a person. This is very important in building rapport for future business relationships. A blog is also a great way of giving you a platform so that you will be heard above the masses.

4

Target niche markets. Choose a niche to create a blog about. Narrow down your niche into a specific niche. Example: Weight loss is to broad of a niche. Lose weight in two weeks is a more specific niche that you can compete in.

• Earn money through affiliate marketing by sending interested readers to product vendors. When you refer people to buy products, you will receive a portion of the sale.

5

Write articles and post them to other blogs or article directories to get back links to your blog. This helps in getting traffic to your site as well as helps with your search engine rankings.

6

Generate a lot of traffic through your blog with relatively little effort thanks to great support structures in place for blog users.

http://socialmediatoday.com/ericsornoso/1674001/10-ways-generate-web-traffic-your-site-free

7

Enrich your blog's content. The better the content, the more chances of a successful result. You can make money using Google Adsense which will require that you create a lot of high quality content on your blog using specific keywords. You can use the Google Keyword Research tool to get an estimate on how much Google is being paid for keywords by advertisers.

8

Put website traffic at a top priority. You can use:

 Email marketing

Social networking

Article marketing software

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                    Earn Money at Home

How to Make an Extra $500 a Month Online

What would you do with extra money every month? If you’re looking to fatten your wallet, you may want to consider an online business. Many online businesses can be started with little to no overhead costs, giving you the chance to try something new without large financial risks. Read Full Article »

Where to Find Online Freelance Job Opportunities

Are you self-employed or thinking of doing some freelance work? Are you looking for ways to grow your part-time workload and find new clients? Depending on your skillset, there are various online job boards where you can find new projects and build your business. Let’s look at some good online freelance job opportunities for Canadians. Read Full Article »

Product Testing in Canada

Have you ever wondered how companies decide which new products to bring to the market? New goods are quite expensive for companies to produce. They must complete several phases, including research, design, production, testing and advertising. In order to make sure a new product will be a profitable one, companies use a series of tests to determine how well it works. Once companies are done testing their new product in a lab environment, they often want their item tested in real-life situations. This is when in-home product testing comes into... Read Full Article »