Author Archives: Admin

Top Make Money Online Blogs

Leave a reply

Top 100 Make Money Online Blogs

Mark at 45n5 has created a great little list of the top one hundred blogs relating to making money online. The list currently only has seventy-three blogs but Mark is adding more as people submit their sites.

eXtra for Every Publisher is currently sitting at sixty-one, not the greatest, as I’d like to be better than half way up the list, but give me a little time, and I will get there.

Currently, the list only uses Google PageRank, Technorati, and the very hated, Alexa. I am hoping Mark will add more things to the tool so that sites rank where they should be, rather than higher due to weird Alexa stats.

The great thing about the idea is that the more traffic it gets, the more traffic is filtered down to the people on the list, and the more people promote it, the more links Mark gets. So it ends up being a win-win for all involved.

A very cool list, and one I am glad to be part of. Check it out at 45n5.com/top100.

Ack! I have slipped down to 103 thanks to all the new competition that has been added. I knew I had a long climb to do well in this niche, but I don’t think I deserve to be ranked so low on the list.

If you’d like to help Xfep do better, please favourite this site on Technorati, link back to me or one of my posts from your site, or browse my site using the Alexa toolbar (I wouldn’t make anyone do that).

Originally posted on September 9, 2007 @ 10:10 pm

Failures to Becoming a Problogger

Leave a reply

There are many routes to the goal of being a problogger. To me a problogger is someone that can pay his way in the world from his efforts in blogging. Under this definition, I am a problogger. I work for Bloggy Network doing various things including blogging, though that has become less and less part of my daily job.

What I wanted to point out with this article though are some failures on the part of people that want to be probloggers.

Don’t Undervalue Your Time

One of the biggest mistakes that I see people making is that they don’t put enough value in their time. Writing articles takes time, especially if you want to create quality content. Especially, when you are going to be working for anyone else, you will want to figure out what your per hour wage is going to be. If you are doing twenty-one posts a month for twenty-one dollars, and each post takes you twenty minutes. You will be making three dollars an hour.

You can’t think of your per hour rates when you are working on building up your own blog or blogs, but you still have to find value in your time. You can’t just give all of yourself to your writing without getting something back in return.

Currently, with this site, my return on investment is traffic. If I hit certain goals in my traffic, I feel as though writing here is time well spent.

Realistic Goals

So many bloggers think that if they set up a blog that it will only take them a few months before they are earning a full time wage off their blog, and while this has happened to some people, it is the exception, not the rule. Most bloggers that get to the full time income level are able to leverage something else. Maybe they had a fair bit of celebrity, money, or a product, but there is something that set them apart from the rest of the blogosphere, but for every success, there are thousands of failures.

I have witnessed many blogs that I thought were amazing in concept, dry up and disappear only half a year later, as the writer wasn’t getting the kind of income he expected for his efforts.

You have to set realistic goals, and the only way you can do that is to research the business behind blogging, which brings me to my next point.

Lack of Research

So many bloggers throw up a site, not checking to see if there is any major competition in their niche, or how much competition they will have to fight against. Most don’t even research the blogging tools they will use. They settle on Blogger, WordPress, or Typepad. They have no idea what it takes to really make a business from blogging.

I have seen bloggers amazed at a blog that gets twenty unique visitors a day because they don’t understand how much traffic a blog needs to be successful.

Take your time, check out all the great resources online about making money from blogging. Also, making sure to listen and learn before you leap into such a huge community, will help you get off on the right foot.

Some sites I have been part of took two months to organize, research and prepare before launching the blog, and you would be amazed to see how fast and high its traffic continued to double.

Conclusion

With a little common sense, preparation, research and realistic goals, I do believe that anyone can get to the point where their blogging is making them enough income that they can live off their efforts. When it comes to blogging, it is better to do it right the first time, or else you will be lost in the noise that is your competition.

Originally posted on September 10, 2007 @ 7:08 pm

PayPerPost: Selling Your Audience?

Leave a reply

Before I begin this post, I want to mention that I have sat down and broken bread with Ted Murphy of PayPerPost before. He is a great guy, and his simple idea, turned company, has had the blogging world in a fury more than once.

PayPerPost

What is PayPerPost?

The simple explanation is that it is exactly what it’s name implies. I pay money to advertise a product, service or site using PayPerPost’s system, and members write about it on their blog, and collect the money for doing so.

From PayPerPost’s website:

Get paid for blogging. You’ve been writing about Web sites, products, services and companies you love for years and you have yet to benefit from all the sales and traffic you have helped generate. That’s about to change. With PayPerPost advertisers are willing to pay you for your opinion on various topics. Search through a list of Opportunities, make a blog posting, get your content approved, and get paid. It’s that simple.

The Good

This system sounds great for a variety of reasons. Instead of getting pennies a day, or sometimes a month through systems like Google’s AdSense, or Yahoo Publisher’s Network, you can now make a fair bit of money by reviewing products, services and websites through PayPerPost.

We are just coming into the half way point of the month, and some bloggers have already earned over $900 so far this month from this one advertising system. The top earner since the beginning has earned nearly $16,000 from the PayPerPost system. So it is easy to see why this whole type of advertising has become a success.

There are many people in this and other niches that seem to make around twenty to a hundred dollars per post on their blog, and so assuming that you can secure just one review per month, you would be bringing in $20 to $100 using just PayPerPost Direct. In conjunction with other forms of advertising, this could mean the difference between buying coffee once a month, to buying a dinner at a fancy restaurant.

As the service has grown, many great opportunities are now on PayPerPost. I found it very lacking when it first began, many of the better opportunities to make money being created by PayPerPost itself, which worked very well as a means to create buzz about the service.

The Bad

What will your readers think? This is one thing that many bloggers are struggling with. As you build up your blog, you are also building up a profile as well as certain expectations. Some readers will see you as selling out if you take the PayPerPost route.

Are you willing to sell out your readership to make some money by pushing a product, service or website

Others will see you as being fake, since the posts you might have to write will require you to put a positive spin on whatever you are reviewing. It then becomes a game of dollars versus ethics. Are you willing to sell out your readership to make some money by pushing a product, service or website that you don’t have in depth knowledge about? Can you really give a non-bias opinion when money rides on your answer?

I have heard of bloggers losing readership from using the PayPerPost service, and while that is understandable, is it worth worrying about?

The Ugly

There is also a pretty big group of bloggers out there that are willing to slam the service, the idea of the service, and anyone using PayPerPost. They find the whole thing unethical and compare it to selling out, or selling one’s soul. While you are required to post that a PayPerPost post was a paid advertisement, does that really excuse the act of putting advertising in your content?

Conclusion

Before you join PayPerPost or any similar service, you have to weigh the pro’s and con’s. I think that PayPerPost, like any advertising service has it’s place, but if the draw to your blog is based on your opinions on any subject, you might want to take an extra pause, or at least only accept posts that allow you to write your true feelings, positive or negative, about a particular product, service or site.

Also, make sure you think to yourself, “would I read a blog that had a full post of advertising, even just once every month?”

Originally posted on September 14, 2007 @ 7:11 pm

Building Readership by Monitoring What Other Bloggers are Writing

Leave a reply

Darren Rowse has put up another great post on Problogger.net about growing your blog one reader at a time by helping your fellow bloggers.

Darren wrote helpful and informative comments on other blogs in his niche, and found it a great source of traffic.

Here is a small bit from the article:

I spent half an hour that day leaving helpful and relevant comments on each of those blogs – making suggestions for new cameras, giving tips on how to use them etc. In each case I left the URL of my camera blog in the URL field so that they could find my blog – and in a couple of the posts I even left links in the comments pointing to useful pages on my blog to help the blogger find more information.

What I found was that around half of those that I left these comments for responded to me either with follow up comments or emails. In each case they said they’d check out my blog. Not only did they do this – but I found that many that I helped with comments actually linked up to my blog in days and weeks following me making contact.

Darren then goes on to give some tips on how you can monitor other blogs in your niche and build up your blog one new reader at a time. A great readership building tip for your blog from Problogger.net.

Originally posted on September 14, 2007 @ 9:57 pm

What You Can Learn from Three Recent Guest Posts by Me

7 Replies

Recently, I decided to take part in a project put forward by my friends at Performancing. They asked me to be part of their guest blogging extravaganza. I thought it would be fun, and so I selected three blogs from their list that I thought I could do well on, and began writing away.

Geeks are Sexy

The first guest post I worked on was for Geeks are Sexy. This post was about getting cheap wireless access to your Xbox 360, but it works well as a way to get wireless Internet access to other desktop computers in your house as well. Once they published my post, entitled “HOW TO: Cheap Wireless For Your Xbox 360“, both they and I began giving it a nudge on the promotional scene, and since going up, the post has brought in over 12,000 unique visitors to their blog.

It has been linked to by LifeHacker, and many other amazing blogs, and was featured on the Delicious Popular page, thus also being listed on PopURLs, one of my favorite sites.

This post was what I thought to be common knowledge, and honestly, was even more cost effective about a year ago when I first did this to my Xbox 360. Now, many people are commenting about how you can buy a simple wireless bridge for around the same price, and without any of the fun changing of a routers firmware.

Just because you think something is common knowledge and not all that amazing, it doesn’t mean that everyone has heard about it. Sometimes the best posts are the ones that get what you think to be common knowledge out to the masses.

Freelance Writing Jobs

My second and third guest posts were more along the same lines as what I write on eXtra for Every Publisher.

Over on Freelance Writing Jobs, a blog I highly respect, Deborah, put up a post entitled “What Blog Networks Look For in a Writer?”

In this post, I thought I would shift the focus and talk about my experiences both hiring and firing writers, including some of what I think are great tidbits on how a potential problogger can entice blog networks, or even just blog owners, to hire them over someone else.

I kept the post simple, but informative, and so far, I have been getting nothing but a positive response from the post.

Sometimes it is best to take time, and search for a new point of view. It can really help your readers, and bring new life into a blog.

Net Business Blog

Over on Net Business Blog, another amazing blog, and one ranked a fair bit higher than me in this niche, I put up a post entitled “Marketing Your Blog in a Saturated Niche“.

This one was very easy for me to write, as eXtra for Every Publisher is in a very crowded niche, and even with all my recent work, I still rank below the 100 mark on 45n5’s Top 100 list.

I do believe that I have made some amazing headway though, thanks in part to my friends, my competition and social networking and bookmarking site.

My post at Net Business Blog is very common sense in many respects, but I think I brought some unique opinions to my points, having just gone through the process. Sometimes the best way to write about something is to personally go through it. I haven’t really owned and operated a blog in a highly competitive niche before. I have written on some, but I didn’t really have to promote them like I do this site.

So far, I haven’t heard much of what people thought of my post on Net Business Blog, but hopefully some people will enjoy it, and use it as a reminder of what they need to do. Reminding people of what they already know, isn’t always a bad thing, especially if you add your own unique personality to the details.

Conclusion

Not only can guest posting be exceptionally rewarding in a networking sense, but also it can allow you the freedom to write outside your blogs own normal niche, connect with larger audiences, and allow you to hone your writing skill and style. With someone else’s graphics around your words, your personality has to shine through more than ever.

Also, I wanted to thank Geeks are Sexy, Freelance Writing Jobs, and Net Business Blog for letting me guest post on their blogs. It was truly an honor.

Originally posted on October 3, 2007 @ 10:38 pm