There are few selected ways to choose a website design. One way is to hire a website design professional and get the website design created by the professional. The other way is to design your own website, which could again be very difficult, especially, if you do not know much about designs. The best way would be to go for a web design contest to choose a website design for your website.

Web design contest offers you a bucket full of designs. You can easily choose one, two or three, and even more designs for your website. There are endless opportunities for you to match various designs on the site, and then finally choose the best among the lot. Web design contest is also a little cheaper compared to other ways of designing a website. Consider the case, when you hire a web designer to design your website. You have to pay decent amount to get a single design, but with web design contest, you can get many website designs by paying only a small prize as a gift. Web design contest is indeed the best way to get web design for your site.

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Notebooks – Aside from the desktop computer at home. I keep two notebooks. The first one is a computer laptop. Actually, one of the first netbooks or ultralight computers that came out. The Asus Eee 701. Yes. It is still working and with a set of thumb drives and SD cards this is my mobile communication, mobile blogging device and my ‘typewriter’ when I am far away from home.

Having an ultralight it has its advantages. You can almost carry it anywhere.

Another set of notebook I still carry is a notebook. Quite handy when going from place to place or event to event. A pocket notebook is handy. Start up time is fast and it does not crash.

It is also good for brainstorming, mind webbing, doodling and playing tic-tac-toe.

Dongle, thumb drives and SD cards – The dongle is quite handy when connecting to the Internet where there is diffiultu getting wifi. Believe me there are such places. While thumb drives and SD cards are quite useful in storing data and running applications while at the same time not compromising the performance of the computer notebook.

A digital media player and a set of good headphones – Quite useful if you want to retreat into the coccoon of writing. Partially isolates you from the world and enables you to write under the musical environment of your choice. I prefer a different media player than the one in the notebook.

A camera – For capturing those moments in raw or jpeg or any other format. Most cameras come with video recording features. And this can also come in useful when capturing those precious moments and news worthy events.

A USB Microphone – This is good for podcasting on the road or when outside the house. A USB microphone can isolate sound and deliver quality podcast n terms of sound. But the content is still dependent on you.

A Dictionary – No matter how fast the Internet is. I still find it useful when writing and you need to check a specific detail. One of my favorite books.

A book – Of course something to reade during the free hours and when writer’s block descend.

Pens and pencils – These things are quite useful when scribbling things down and when doodling. I always carry a clutch pencil with me that its own sharpener.

Food and beverages – Most important for a scribbler and writer on the move.

Cash –

Of course as in all things a sense of humor – a self-effacing one is of great also.

What weapons of choice do you have?

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If they are doing one post per week at five hundred words, that would be around one thousand words a month, and at a $25 pay rate, they would be earning $0.025 per word, which isn’t a bad rate in my mind.

However, if they are producing two posts per week, at around five hundred words, and still making the same $25 pay rate, then they would be only earning $0.0125 per word, and that is pretty near slave labour.

Also, say those two posts per week took up an hour of your time, and so you spend four hours a month working for a blog network. Your hourly rate is $6.25 per hour, well below the current minimum wage here in Canada.

Again, doubling the equation will bring you to a saddening $3.13 per hour wage, which to me is closing in on slave wages once again.

How can business online survive and prosper when wages such as these are being handed out? I am not sure what kind of time and how many posts are being generated, but I have to believe that if people took a more rational look at what they are getting paid, that they would either come to the quick realization that opportunities elsewhere are more rewarding for their time, or only further create a situation where they expect to be strongly compensated at a later date.

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

For me it comes down to simple metrics. As a blogger, what is my potential “take home” pay when all is said and done?

Taking a quick look at the CPM offerings that b5media is looking to offer, how many page views would you need to generate to be able to make two thousand dollars a month?

You would need 500,000 page views per month to have b5media cut you a cheque for $2000.

While that doesn’t take into account bonuses or any other additions to pay that they come up with, I still think that is a very high level of traffic that very few blogs in their network will be able to get to.

The hardest part of growing a successful blog, and building it into your full time business is getting to the transition point. And the reason that it can be so hard is because your time is split, and blogging usually ends up at the end of the line. You work for a company, you take care of yourself and your family and then you blog for companies like b5media.

Even if you are skipping television, radio, reading and other distracting past-times, you are probably only able to put in around two or three hours of effort each night and, if you want to burn yourself out, weekends too.

I am not sure how extensive their “bonus” program is really going to be, as you have to remember that paying out bonuses, surely, hurts their bottom line when it comes to impressing investors, but even if their best bloggers could earn $500 in bonuses each and every month, that still makes blogging for b5media full time a difficult challenge.

As for the $4 CPM that the blogs will make. I agree that it seems like a great rate, until you consider that you could easily make around $1.5 – $2 CPM per ad on your blog, and if you were willing to have four or five advertisements at that rate, you could be bringing in around $6 – $8 CPM. Which, based on page view adjustments that b5media says statistic programs like AWStats inflate numbers by, is pretty much what this blog currently earns.

Of course b5media has to pay for servers, take time to find advertisers, pay for programmers, and a support staff, but as a struggling blogger, hoping to make writing online their full time occupation, that $2 – $4 CPM that the blog authors are loosing out on once their blog gets successful, is hard to live without.

I will give them credit though that their lower end tiers are more than fair, and that bloggers just starting out will most likely make more money being part of b5media than they will earn on their own. But, I worry about those successful few that make it to that top tier, after taking what might be as long as two or three years, only to realize, they are still hundreds of thousands of page views short of transitioning to full time blogging.

This new pay structure also doesn’t talk about bloggers working on multiple sites, but if I were a b5media blogger, and saw this new structure, I would probably want to focus on getting a single blog to higher tiers as quickly as possible, rather than trying to fuss around with two blogs stuck at the lower tiers of the pay structure.

Has b5media come up with the best pay system possible? From a balance sheet perspective, maybe so, but it will definitely put a crimp on many people’s dreams to become full time bloggers in their network.

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

A nice compact 230MB Quicktime Movie version.
A MP3 version and a M4A version as the audio is the most important part.

Very cool stuff for those that haven’t checked this out yet.

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

So many people try to follow the examples of others and find themselves hitting a wall. Sure, some of the general concepts work, and sure sometimes you can take the same route as someone successful if you tackle a different niche or market, but many of people that are doing so well today online couldn’t repeat their success if they had to start over and only use their original tactics, and so what makes you think that following their step-by-step advice will lead you to making tons of money online?

You would be better off learning how the web functions today, what people are looking for, how search engines work and capitalizing on that. I would also suggest again that everyone follow their passions as no niche is too crowded if you are passionate and persistent.

When I started this blog, everyone told me I was crazy, and that the competition and saturation was just too high, but here I am today, doing better and better thanks to my persistence while many competitors have disappeared long ago.

Blaze your own trail to success, and don’t just follow the stale advice of e-books.

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

So many people try to follow the examples of others and find themselves hitting a wall. Sure, some of the general concepts work, and sure sometimes you can take the same route as someone successful if you tackle a different niche or market, but many of people that are doing so well today online couldn’t repeat their success if they had to start over and only use their original tactics, and so what makes you think that following their step-by-step advice will lead you to making tons of money online?

You would be better off learning how the web functions today, what people are looking for, how search engines work and capitalizing on that. I would also suggest again that everyone follow their passions as no niche is too crowded if you are passionate and persistent.

When I started this blog, everyone told me I was crazy, and that the competition and saturation was just too high, but here I am today, doing better and better thanks to my persistence while many competitors have disappeared long ago.

Blaze your own trail to success, and don’t just follow the stale advice of e-books.

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

So many people try to follow the examples of others and find themselves hitting a wall. Sure, some of the general concepts work, and sure sometimes you can take the same route as someone successful if you tackle a different niche or market, but many of people that are doing so well today online couldn’t repeat their success if they had to start over and only use their original tactics, and so what makes you think that following their step-by-step advice will lead you to making tons of money online?

You would be better off learning how the web functions today, what people are looking for, how search engines work and capitalizing on that. I would also suggest again that everyone follow their passions as no niche is too crowded if you are passionate and persistent.

When I started this blog, everyone told me I was crazy, and that the competition and saturation was just too high, but here I am today, doing better and better thanks to my persistence while many competitors have disappeared long ago.

Blaze your own trail to success, and don’t just follow the stale advice of e-books.

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

So many people try to follow the examples of others and find themselves hitting a wall. Sure, some of the general concepts work, and sure sometimes you can take the same route as someone successful if you tackle a different niche or market, but many of people that are doing so well today online couldn’t repeat their success if they had to start over and only use their original tactics, and so what makes you think that following their step-by-step advice will lead you to making tons of money online?

You would be better off learning how the web functions today, what people are looking for, how search engines work and capitalizing on that. I would also suggest again that everyone follow their passions as no niche is too crowded if you are passionate and persistent.

When I started this blog, everyone told me I was crazy, and that the competition and saturation was just too high, but here I am today, doing better and better thanks to my persistence while many competitors have disappeared long ago.

Blaze your own trail to success, and don’t just follow the stale advice of e-books.

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

Aaron Brazell started me thinking about this thanks to a video on his blog Technosailor about blog consolidation.

Then I saw a post on Inquisitr talking about what Aaron said and Duncan added his own thoughts and opinions on bringing blogs together under one flag to sell advertising as a group.

These are both people that I highly respect, and who probably have more knowledge about the business of blogging than I do, but in this area, I don’t think they know what the heck they are talking about.

I am the co-founder of Grand Effect, a great blog network, with great blogs, written by great bloggers. We were all independent and came together for the purpose of passing traffic to each other, as well as a bit of link juice and of course banding together for network wide advertising sales.

I assumed because there would be a great deal of higher quality, focused blogs that we could get some high advertising rates, and when you bring our traffic together, we have a fair bit of page views, but still the advertisers aren’t running to our doors. I’ve shopped around the network a bit to some companies trying to gauge their response, and so far it has been a really lukewarm response.

We just don’t have the five or ten million page views that the big brands are looking for, or a tight enough demographic or the required star/networking power to make those big deals with friendly companies. We also aren’t high enough currently on the thought leader chain in the blogosphere for certain brands, making things even more frustrating as we work hard to show how powerful our brands have become.

While we have a lot to offer an advertiser that can come in with a three to five dollar CPM rate, we haven’t been able to secure that yet across the network of nine sites, and so bringing together a few blogs under a banner is definitely not enough to entice companies to sign up and tap into that combined traffic.

Also, I have found that the more page views that you bring together, the lower these companies want their overall CPM rates to be. So while a 50,000 page view blog might be able to sell some advertising space for a consistent $2 CPM, or $100 per advertising spot per month, a 500,000 page view blog, won’t instantly get $1000 for the same advertising positions.

Everyone also seems to be forgetting the time and effort that needs to go into selling these companies on buying advertising from you. This can take an immense amount of time depending on the company and it can also be difficult when the coalition is young and thus the brand everyone is flying is unknown. I always thought 9rules should have done something to help its membership make money through a network advertising service, but I realize now, in working with Grand Effect, that it just takes so much time.

You either have to develop an advertising platform, use one that already exists (thus giving them a cut) or do things manually. Development costs a fair bit of time and/or money. Using one that already exists can be frustrating because it might not have the features you want, and they’ll want their cut. Doing things manually can take huge amounts of time, and lends itself to mistakes.

How does everyone expect to manage network wide advertisements? Who will take the lead to create relationships with companies and sell them on advertising positions, and does this person get extra money? Who will handle the receiving and disbursement of advertising payments?

The information that the others have put up don’t really cover the important questions, instead lingering on about other less important things like freedom of creative control on your own blogs, and trying to quickly pull everyone under your wing in hopes of selling big advertising blocks.

Too many unanswered questions. I think people are going to jump in with both feet, only to find themselves disappointed. Doesn’t anyone plan things out properly in the blogosphere anymore?

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.