The best blog design in the world is nothing without lots of good content. We know that we need to post often, but sometimes it’s hard to keep up. We let things slide.

So Eric Giguere has posted a challenge on his blog: Write a page a day for every day in February. And he’ll give you a copy of his $97 best-selling book on how to make money with Google Adsense if you complete the challenge.

You can’t lose with this challenge. No matter what happens, you get a lot of work done that you need to do anyway. And if you complete the challenge, you get a very nice reward.

All you have to do is post a comment with the URL for each day’s post to Eric’s blog for that day. Doing that gives you a free backlink to your blog, which is great for search engine optimization (SEO).

[To clarify, you just make 29 posts in February. For each of your posts, you put a comment with a link to it in one of Eric’s posts. Your dates don’t have to match up exactly.]

By the end of February, you will have 29 free backlinks from a very popular blog, which helps your Google PageRank. (And his blog readers will see your links and maybe click on them, which could bring you more traffic and word of mouth.)

Plus, one lucky blogger will win a copy of Eric’s super-duper software, PLRSiteBuilder, which automates the creation of web sites built to make money with Adsense ads. How cool is that?

You can sign up till February 8, and you have till March 10 to post the comments with links to your daily pages. Why not give it a try? See Eric’s blog, MEMWG, The Unofficial AdSense Blog, to sign up.

If you don’t want to take the challenge, I recommend reading Eric’s blog anyway, because it’s an excellent blog on how to make money with your blog—and that’s a good thing, too.

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This is advance notice of a great new audio ad system that will go online February 1. The time to sign up is now. Because you also get paid for everyone who signs up through you!

Pay Per Play Net Audio pays you to put a snippet of javascript on a page of your blog (or website). A 5-second audio ad then plays whenever that page is displayed. And you get paid every time it does!

The ads are context-sensitive, so they match the content of the page. You can put them on as many pages as you want to (one per page). And you get paid for every visitor who views a page.

We are assured that the company has signed up the top broadcast advertisers, plus companies like Harley-Davidson. But your site is eligible no matter how small or how little traffic you get.

They promise that the ads will not violate the Google Adsense terms of service. They swear to have one of the top search engines as a partner, but they won’t announce which one till February 1. I think we can guess which one it is, though.

As much as I hate the idea of automatic audio commercials—even if they are only 5 seconds long—I have signed up. This is an easy way to monetize blogs and websites without compromising the design. This is going to be huge!

So go right now to the PayPerPlay site, try out the demo, and sign up. Then tell get your friends to sign up through you. Make your blog pay its own way!

Are you a serial blogger? Do you have more than one blog?

Do you create blogs and often find that there are not enough people interested in your topic to make it worthwhile to post? Traffic is light? Few people comment? Do you gradually lose enthusiasm for posting, and move on to create yet another blog?

If so, maybe your blogs are not well enough targeted to a niche, a group of readers who are intensely interested in your topic. If you are blogging just for personal expression, that may be OK with you, but it can also be discouraging. You feel you are alone in the wilderness, talking to the trees.

Thousands of blogs are abandoned every day, because bloggers become discouraged when they have no audience. Sadly many people start a blog in hopes of making a little income from it and then are bitterly disappointed. There seems on reason to carry on if no one is reading.

If you hope to make an income from your blog, the best design in the world (see, there is a tie-in with the topic of this blog, sort of) will not make up for not having an audience.

The best blog design begins before you ever build your blog, before you ever select a design, before you even buy a domain name. The first step is research. Yes, that dirty word: research.

You may be writing a great blog that is focused on the wrong group of people. Maybe a slightly different target niche would reward you with lots of readers.

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Blog design directly affects profitability. Choosing the right widgets when designing your blog can help you make money. A new widget from PayPerPost.com makes it easier to make deal directly with advertisers.

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