BLOG DESIGN JOURNAL

If you are blogging for fun, then you can think of blogging about anything you want. But if you are serious about making money with your blog, them you should choose your blog niche very carefully.

When we chose a wrong niche for our blog, that will lead to a unsuccessful blog. Here is the list of mistakes we generally make when choosing a niche for our blog: Read the rest of this entry →

Image via Wikipedia

Ever wondered where travel bloggers get their money to sustain their travels?

They get the money from writing about and taking pictures of their travels. Basically, they get rich from traveling the world and enjoying their lives. They just document it so that others can read about and enjoy the adventure.

Travel bloggers have taken advantage of some of the most lucrative and easiest business models today, getting rich via Internet blogging.

You have to have at least basic Internet skills, decent writing skills, and a bit of marketing flair. Although, let me stress that all of these can be learned as you go along with your blogging. And the further you blog, the better you become and the more traffic your site will get. Read the rest of this entry →

My favorite new widget for 2009 is the PayDotCom product widget. I’ve been busy today putting it on all my blogs.

The PayDotCom product widget displays links to the top-selling products in up to three categories you choose. It comes on a variety of colors to match your blog. To view the one on this blog, look in the far right column. You may have to scroll down a bit. It has a dark blue frame.

And if anyone clicks on a product in the PayDotCom widget, and ends up buying it, even months later, you get paid a commission. 

You select the categories and the widget color. PayDotCom provides a snippet of code to paste into your site. It is just that easy.

You do need to join PayDotCom first. If you have a ClickBank ID, you can elect to have the top-selling products from ClickBank in your chosen categories also be displayed.

To use that feature, you will need to join ClickBank if you don’t already have an account. (PayDotCom and ClickBank accounts are free.)

Here are a couple of quick tips:

If you decide to change the widget color, you must double-click on the new widget for it to be selected. Otherwise, you will get the old one.

Instead of copying and pasting new code to change the widget color, you can simply change the number of the “theme” in the widget code. The colors are numbered starting at one in the upper left corner and moving from left to right. If you are not changing categories, it is easier and quicker to just change the code.

I just signed up at a new site for blog advertising, social networking and getting paid to post: SocialSpark. Register your blogs there and let advertisers find you.

Meanwhile you can make friends, who can vote your blog up or down in the rankings. You can also add applications to your profile page, just as you can on Facebook. (There are already hundreds.)

You also get a set of tools for tracking traffic and other stats on your blog. To install the tools, so you can view the stats on your SocialSpark dashboard, you paste a code snippet into the theme code of your blog (not into a widget). But you have to add code anyway to claim your blog.

The service is still in beta testing, according to the site. But registration is open now, and there are already over 1000 blogs listed.

To get ads from SocialSpark, your blog must be over 90 days old and have at least 20 posts. So what are you waiting for?

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Marakesh Art Print
Buy at AllPosters.com

Hah! Made you look!

Great images are attention grabbers. They not only add visual interest, but they can also help enhance—or stress—the point of your post. As the old saying goes, “One picture is worth a thousand words.”

But great photos and illustrations to use on line are not always easy to find.

Buy this photo at AllPosters.com

Images can also be expensive. If you use a stock photography, you may find a few sites with some photos that you can use for free, but the quality of free stock photos tends to be low and the selection is quite limited.

Also, the good photos are usually mixed in with a lot of really boring ones. It can take a lot of time to sort through them to find a photo that you want to use.

Good, free contemporary illustrations are even harder to find. Clip art can be bland, and usually it takes too much time to sort through and find free or cheap art you like.

Swifter, Art Print
Nieto, John
Buy at AllPosters.com

How about a collection of free images that are guaranteed attention grabbers for your blog? And what if you could actually get paid to use them, because if people click on them and buy them, you get 20 to 30 percent of the price as an affiliate?

What if you could recruit other bloggers and webmasters? And for each one you sign up, you get $5.00 for their first sale, $3.00 for their second sale, and 5 percent thereafter? Not bad payment for using free top-quality art and photography.

Your readers will love the look of your blog. You can choose from hundreds of categories, from comics to religion, from music and movies to wildlife, from sports to fine arts, and many more.

You can select either a thumbnail-size image like the one Marilyn Monroe below or a full-size image like the ones above. You control whether or not to display the title of the image, the artist or photographer’s name, and/or the dimensions. 

Warhol, Andy 

Buy at AllPosters.com

Now you can enhance the look of your blog and grab the attention of visitors. And you will enjoy making some affiliate cash when they buy pictures or sign up to be affiliates, too. 

To sign up for free, click the following button:

Webmasters Make $$$

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.

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!