Archive for July 26th, 2010

I promised a couple of weeks ago a series based on ways to turn your blog into a money making machine, so about time I actually started to put down the ideas!

So, to start with, my most successful and probably my favourite way to monetise a blog is via PayPerPost.com. I’ve already talked in a lot of detail on these pages about using PayPerPost, so what is it that makes it so good?

Well the latest version, PPP4, is just an open market place between bloggers and advertisers. There are absolutely no acceptance criteria, other than you own a blog. That blog might have been created 10 minutes ago on a free system and you can still submit it to the system and hope for work to appear.

Earning Money
You earn money quite simply by posting on your blog. The system provides the link (or links) that you have to post to your blog, maybe a few requirements and a minimum word count. You write the post, submit the link and the advertiser approves it within 3 days, or can request changes or just reject it outright. Should they not approve it in 3 days, it is auto approved.

30 days after submitting the post, as long as it is still found on the same URL and the link is still in place, the fee for that post is transferred from your confirmed balance to your earned balance. When this reaches $50 you can cash it out, although if you are desperate, you can cash out less than that for a $2 fee.

How You Are Paid
By PayPal. There are no PayPal fees to cover – these are all prepaid by PayPerPost, hence the minimum cashout or $2 fee. Payment usually arrives in seconds into your PayPal account.

Who It Is Suitable For
One word – bloggers!

Whether you are low or high traffic, low or high Page Rank, few or many Yahoo backlinks you can sign up and get posts. Recent changes have made it easier for advertisers to pick those bloggers who are from native English speaking countries, which seems to be moving opportunities to these places and away from non-native speaking countries, so if you are from one of these then you might not get as much work.

Also, there are many complaints from bloggers about low levels of opportunities. But, usually the blog is full of spelling or grammatical errors, or too much advertising or other aspects that are putting advertisers off.

If you have a good blog, say PR2 or above, then there can be plenty of work at a price that you set yourself.

The Disadvantages
Yes, there are a few problems. Advertisers set up the opps themselves and sometimes get the setup wrong, demanding hundreds of words per post having clicked the option for just a link only. However, maybe there has been a system change as I haven’t seen that recently.

On the same theme, some advertisers request 30 word posts and 3 links and other equally silly requests which do them no good and can harm the blog.

Summary
If you have a well written blog with a few Yahoo Backlinks showing, then you should be able to get at least a few opportunities from the system. PR0 / PR1 blogs seem to get a lot less work, but there is some there for them to get going. As with any of these systems, the work is in fits and starts. But it is well worth joining and probably the best of the lot.

Digg This
Reddit This
Stumble Now!
Buzz This
Vote on DZone
Share on Facebook
Bookmark this on Delicious
Kick It on DotNetKicks.com
Shout it
Share on LinkedIn
Bookmark this on Technorati
Post on Twitter
Google Buzz (aka. Google Reader)

How To Promote A Blog

Promoting a blog is easy! You can get loads of new traffic quickly and easily and improve your Page Rank whilst you are at it. You just need to know how. So follow these tips!

Promoting a blog is all about getting your blog noticed in as many other places as possible. The more places that your blog is mentioned the more likely it is that visitors will start arriving at your blog. Here is what you need to do.

Install A Stats Package, Or Two!
It seems daft that the first part of promoting a blog is installing a statistics tool, but you need to know which techniques are working for you to concentrate on them. However, one is not enough! I like to use two packages together. This seems like overkill, but if one stops recording or is showing strange results, the other works as backup. I use the WP-Stats plugin and Google Analytics together.

Target Some Keywords
Head over to the Google Keyword Selector tool, of a title suggestion tool on an article directory and work out some keywords that are being used that have traffic. Your own website stats will also reveal this information – look for keywords that the lesser search engines are sending traffic on and then target these on the higher volume search engines

Write For These Keywords
Now, write content based around these keywords for your blog. Use the keywords naturally in the title and throughout the post. Next, write more articles based on these keywords and submit as articles and guest posts, linking back to your blog with the keywords. Targeted writing will give far more benefits than random writing.

Take Part In Forums
Find a few support forums that talk about subjects related to your blog and sign up to them. Upload a picture of yourself to your profile and add your blog URL to the profile. Now look for questions that you can provide answers and suggestions to and start answering. Over time, people will see your answers, click your photo and visit your site. It really works,

You can also try the same with general discussion forums as well, but they don’t quite carry as much traffic to your site, although there might be more chances of leaving a post.

Join In With Blogs
Look for other people’s blogs that are talking about similar subjects and read their recent posts, If you have something sensible to add to the post then leave a comment. Comments such as ‘Nice post’ quite often get deleted and if they don’t, attract no traffic. But if you can leave a comment adding to the subject or backing it up with your own experience, then your comment is seen as being valuable and should be accepted, whilst other people will see that you are talking sense and might want to know more.

With all of these, be watching your traffic logs and seeing where your traffic comes from. If you see hits from certain forums, blogs and article directories then you know which you should be concentrating on posting to in the future to create more traffic to your blog.

Digg This
Reddit This
Stumble Now!
Buzz This
Vote on DZone
Share on Facebook
Bookmark this on Delicious
Kick It on DotNetKicks.com
Shout it
Share on LinkedIn
Bookmark this on Technorati
Post on Twitter
Google Buzz (aka. Google Reader)