I read a lot of sites around the net every day. Many about SEO, marketing, and monetizing blogs. I notice something that seems to be a constant in most of them. Everyone seems to have a different slant on what it means to create income with your blog/site. There are quite a few sites that talk about nothing but sales. There’s nothing wrong with straight sales, if you have a good product and a good supply. Some talk about straight search engine marketing and then using a service like google adsense. And some are affiliate cheerleaders. There is nothing wrong with any one of these methods, the problem starts when relying on only one of them as an income source.

If you look over some of the bigger bloggers in the blogosphere, they have multiple income streams on their site. Adsense is really not the BIGGEST moneymaker for most sites, this one included. However adsense doesnt need to be updated, or babysat. So its sort of the tortoise of the income stream race for most sites. It may not have the big numbers, but it is consistent. Most of the ppc (pay per click) or content oriented text sites are the same way, and generate even less than adsense ads. Affilliate traffic is a nice little income stream generator as well. Most of the affiliate networks out there offer targeted products/websites and usually give multi-tier income for referrals. Without the traffic, these systems have no ‘umph’. Multiple income streams are what you want with your blog, but not just multiple income streams that run on ‘auto-pilot’. People arent reading, or going to read your blog because of affiliate links or banners, they are reading it because they like your input, or you have interesting content, and as the saying goes, ‘content is king’. You can make your content work for you by generating traffic, and you can even get paid just for your content itself.

So what are the main sources of multiple streams of income for a blog?

Affiliate link - Probably the easiest and most versatile. Usually if the site is selling something, they have an affilliate network in place and you will get a percentage of sales that come through you.

Review Posts - If you have a good solid audience and good traffic, a positive review from your site can boost sales for another site. Many of the big name sites like Shoemoney, DoshDosh, and of course John Chow have such a great amount of traffic (I believe JohnChow gets around 10k views per day), so a postive review from one of these sites can have a pretty impressive effect. When doing reviews, be honest and unbiased. When people are spending money, they want the hard truth about their purchase, warts and all. Did it work for you? Have you heard of any bad reviews, what is your overall opinion of the product or service? Think of what you would want to know if you were asking someone before spending your money on the product

Selling ad space - Why not sell the open spaces on your page? A decent sized ad in a strategic spot on a popular blog or site can be a great traffic magnet. Don’t fall into the trap that many do and try to sell every square inch of open space. That will make your blog too ‘busy’ on the eyes, and will be counterproductive because nobody will want to read your blog for all the ad clutter. Plus think of it as supply and demand. If you only have one or two coveted spots, you can have a little more flexibility with pricing.

Donations - Not a big favorite of mine, and quite honestly if you have a blog that is already monetized, most people will see asking for donations as ‘begging’. If you’re starting out, give donations a try. A service like paypal would easily handle this task. If you’re a bit more established, you might want to hold off on that option.

Selling Content - If you have a couple months or even years of good content, why not package it up into .pdf format and sell it. If not sell it, make it available to those that sign up on your site, or for your newsletter. The content may not make a profit initially, but it will help build a mailing list and an audience. Consider video as well. Windows Movie maker is actually a pretty handy little windows feature that will let you assemble a pretty decent video that you can upload onto your site for your members. If you have the equipment, like a decent vid came or even a decent camera, making a quick video presentation of your content. I’m planning on creating a .pdf document with information from previous posts in the near future. Check back for its availability.

Having even a semi-popular blog doesn’t guarantee instant income streams, and putting all your eggs into one basket is really not a solid way to keep that flow going when it does start. Diversify your campaigns, create quality content and make it easy for people to get to your content. But most importantly, be creative.

Good Luck!

     Video has been the workhorse of marketing pratically since it’s inception. The saying I hear most often is ‘If a picture is worth a thousand words, how much is a video worth?’ There is probably not a better statement to describe the impact that video can have on your marketing efforts. Sites like youtube.com shows that there is a voracious interest in videos in general on the Internet, especially amateur shot.

Leads by Video is a fairly new site that will let you upload your video ad spots to their site to be viewed by others for free. Step by step instructions are provided about how to make your ad spot with Windows Movie Maker, which comes with Windows. You litterally can have a video spot up and running in about 20 minutes. If you don’t feel that you know enough about it or just don’t have the time to make a video, Affordable Video Marketing offers professional video production services for $1999.

By viewing other videos, in the LBV network, you accumulate credits for yourself to have your video viewed by others. This is a good (and cheap) way to not only brand your blog/product, but use a time tested medium to get your information to the masses.

So you have an audience, you get decent traffic, everything is running like a finely tuned machine. Now you need to increase your traffic, to do that you need fresh content, and If you can put a little money in your pocket, thats a good thing too. Most bloggers that are just getting started usually find out that bringing together fresh content to get the traffic to get the revenue can be a tall order

PayPerPost.com is a site that will pay you for your blog reviews. When you first log into PPP, you must insert a little bit of code in your blog to register it with the PPP service and then a list is presented to you for opportunities that are available to you. These sites are submitted by various sites and interests, usually to create a buzz for a new product, or to get information out there. The opportunities offered have different criteria for availability. Some are made available due to your content, some require a certain Google pagerank, some a certain Alexa score. Usually the more stringent the requirements, the higher the payout for a good quality blog. For the most part, these opportunities will be in line with your site’s theme. Some may just be ‘in line’ with your traffic.

So the big question….how much? Well, the lowest amount is $5.00 for a blog opportunity. If you have the traffic, or are high up in google or alexa, there are opportunities advertised that go up to $250. So if you have the traffic, they have the dough. There is also referral money to be had! If someone signs up through your referral badge, takes an opportunity and gets their post approved and paid for, you get $15.00. You even get paid $7.50 everytime someone reviews your post through PPP’s ‘Review My Post’ program.

The PPP site is overall pretty cool and very easy to navigate. There is also a handy PPP firefox add-on that will let you surf PPP sites for available opportunities and suggest sites that you would want to blog about. PayPerPost provides banners and widgets to help you not only promote them through their affiliate network

PPP is highly regarded on sites like JohnChow.com, and has a pretty positive buzz about it all over the blogosphere for those that are trying to create income with thier blogs. If you want to make your blog traffic work even harder for you, PayPerPost is where you want to start.

The last couple of weeks have been witness to huge changes in the blogging world. The Internet in general (for those that are paying attention to the online community) has had a couple startups that took flight within a relatively short amount of time that have the possibility of untold and explosive growth. Here are the ones that have caught my attention lately.

Blog Rush- Blog Rush is a widget for blogs that was just thrown out onto the Internet last week. On November 10th, Blog Rush’s buzz began to churn and the chaos started. It went from unknown to blogosphere superstar in about 4 days and then exploded on the 14th. Once John Chow and Shoemoney threw their very positive 2 cents in on the product, it was pretty much all over with at that point and the rocket took off. The idea behind Blog Rush is a pretty good one. It’s a widget that you can put on your website that will give you 1:1 ratio of impressions per pageviews on your own site. To say that it sent shockwaves through the blogosphere would be putting it mildly. Blog Rush is the amazing product of Mr. John Reese at Income.com. If you want to check out his blog, you can read through his pre-release notes and general thoughts of a man that is pretty damn sure he’s about to light a fuse on a big bomb, and he was right. It will be interesting to see what happens next for Mr. Reese.

Yuwie.com - This might be the Myspace killer. Visually, its pretty much the same thing as myspace. Yuwie is a social site, where you can upload pictures, interact with other, join clubs, all the same stuff you could do on Myspace when it started. The only notable exception that I see is that there is no way to upload videos. But Rome wasn’t built in a day. Here’s the bonus. You can get paid to use this. This is a social networking site that not only plays you residuals, but let’s you create a downline. Getting paid to flirt..can you beat that one? I already see people using myspace backgrounds, I haven’t seen the music in the pages just yet, but I’m sure that’s only a matter of time. I could see this getting to be pretty big pretty quick.

Dealdotcom.com - Dealdotcom will actually launch within 30 minutes of the time of this post. The buzz around it is very heavy at this time so to see what happens when they actually lift the gate will be interesting. This is going to be something like Woot but for marketing oriented programs, software, books, etc. If you have something you want to get out to the marketing circles of the internet, this is the place to go.

Milliondollarwiki.com - This is one of my favorites. Beautiful in it’s simplicity. The Million Dollar Wiki is an ingenius site created by Graham Langdon, a 21 year old senior from the University of Connecticut. For $100 you can buy a page on the milliondollarwiki and have full control over its content. add what you want. This very well could be something that, if it catches, could be a major driving force for many sites. I expect to see wiki’s everywhere in this capacity soon. As of this writing MDW has sold 902 pages for $100

Each one of these sites, in their own way are inovative, clever and in some ways groundbreaking. It will be interesting to see how they grow, and what overall effect these sites have on internet marketing.

Leorita Seneres-Velasquez presents Monetize your Blog posted at My first-born.

blogging

Taylor presents Plan When You Post Before You Publish posted at Super Blogging, saying, “Succeeding in making money online is all about timing. What day of the week does your blog get its most visitors? What time do they wake up, so you can have your post published beforehand? Knowing these things will get you the most exposure and you WILL succeed.”

Matt presents What Kind of Web Publisher Are You? posted at EverydayChange.com.

Raj Dash presents Better Websites: 10 Article Research Sources posted at Logo Design Blog, saying, “Improve your blog articles with a better set of idea sources. Here are 10 sources I use almost daily.”

Sutocu presents Organized Blogging posted at Your Website Profit, saying, “To make your blog’s income steady, you need to organize your blogging, and find a regular schedule.”

John Hill presents Attracting People to Your Website posted at Attracting People.com.

John Hill presents Traffic Geyser erupting on your website or blog. posted at Universe Of Success.

Vandelay Website Design presents 9 Essential Tools for Bloggers posted at Vandelay Website Design, saying, “A list of some must-use tools to increase your productivity.”

Sandra presents Get paid to blog with Blogging Ads posted at Free Cash Quest.

Samir Bharadwaj presents How to assemble a Feedburner alternative using Wordpress plugins posted at SamirBharadwaj.com, saying, “Beginners at blogging are often not very familiar with the technology of RSS feeds. While Feedburner is a popular choice for serving feeds, here is an explanation of some alternatives to using Feedburner. Choice is always good.”

Paul Piotrowski presents Microaction as a Success Tool posted at Self Help Wisdom . com.

Income

Phil B. presents Blog Carnivals « Phil for Humanity posted at Phil for Humanity, saying, “Do you want to drive more traffic to your blog? Well, I have a really.. REALLY easy way. And no, this is not a gimmick.”

edithyeung presents 53 Ways to Make Money on the Internet posted at Edith Yeung.Com: Dream. Think. Act..

Bragoo presents Weekly earnings update posted at How To Build A Website Blog, saying, “Making money online isn’t everything, but increasing your earnings slowly will make your day, if you only learn how to take your time. I have lost much online, but I make money daily. Want to learn how, visit my blog.”

Thorsten Ott presents Sourcebench - freelancer sites reviews posted at Sourcebench - building a better web.

Dianne M. Buxton presents Work From Home Shopping posted at manifestingsuccess, saying, “This is an incredible idea for recovering some of all of the money that you spend. Spending on your business, household, and internet marketing ventures. Free to use and refer.”

monetizing

Ramil Alcibar presents Making Money In Your Blog - Contextual Advertising posted at EarnersClub Making Money Online.

Vandelay Website Design presents 101 Ways to Monetize Your Website or Blog posted at Vandelay Website Design, saying, “Here’s a great list of programs to use to make money with your blog.”

Edward Dowd presents Case Study: Making Your Site Better & Make More Money posted at The Blog Beat.

What if you were to be able to get paid to hit a social site like Myspace? Think of how much time you probably spend on there now, whether it be for networking, checking out the users, or just generally surfing the profiles. If you could get paid for that, that could very well be the perfect job for some people. Well their prayers may have been answered.

Yuwie is a social networking site/blogging site that actually pays you to do the exact same thing that you do right now on Myspace or Facebook, but you get paid for it. And it comes with a referral service that will allow you to create a ‘downline’ of people you refer to the site, and those referrals will create an income for you as well.

I signed up on the site, and looked around. Right now, social networking/dating sites are pretty hot, and they grow pretty fast. As of the time of this posting, there are 76k users, with 811 new today. I have no doubt that this site will probably take off once it hit’s it’s stride. Getting in on this right could prove to be a very useful income stream producing site. The site in general looks raw. It has all the basic pieces for a social site similar to MySpace or Facebook. Though I don’t see a feature to upload videos yet. But you can put in your information, there is a built in blog, pictures can be uploaded in a format similar to Myspace. If this takes off similar to myspace, expect to see a bunch of ‘PimpmyYuwie sites pop up which may be something to look into soon.

Now, the focal point of this is going to see if it takes off, and if it pays out. If it does take off, I would say there will be a bit of refining to go on with the interface within a short period of time. I could also see this as a site/concept that get’s snatched up by a bigger google/yahoo type of Internet entity if/when its concept takes flight. This will be interesting to watch.

What If Myspace Paid You?

In today’s day and age, our computers, and the data that they hold are very important to us. Hardware crashes, natural disasters, theft are just a few of the things that threaten to make that very important data non-accessible to us at any given time and protecting that data, ideally at a secure, remote location is practically mandatory.
Backup software has been available for quite some time to the average computer user in the form of programs such as Ghost by symantec. The only problem is, if the reason that you are backing up is to prepare for a natural disaster, well your data is still in the area of that natural disaster. Florida is a perfect example. Backing up your software to a disk that you will carry with you in the case of a serious disaster, such as a hurricane (which happens often down here) is obviously better than not doing it at all, but then that means that your prized data is on a disk, in an area that is about to get swept away by wind and water, and lots of it. It’s still a very real possibility that your data could be lost.
This is where the super-security of remote backup shines. Until recently, remote backup has only been something that was employed by large corporations for their most prized data, largely due to the costs involved. But that is starting to change.

Anytime@Anywhere online backup is a cost effective way to use remote backup software to help you keep your data, pictures, and important information safe and secure.

The Anytime@Anywhere online backup services are pretty affordable as well. The services comes in 2 levels Express and Pro . Both are priced very reasonably.

_______________________________________________________________
Express:
Express Monthly (5 gigs) $9.95
Express Monthly (10 gigs) $19.95
Express Monthly ( 15 gigs) $29.95
Express Monthly (25 gigs) $39.95

Pro:
Pro Monthly (10 gigs) $29.95
Pro Monthly (20 gigs) $39.95
Pro Monthly (30 gigs) $49.95
Pro Monthly (40 gigs) $59.95
Pro Monthly (50 gigs) $59.95
_______________________________________________________________

The difference between the two plans is that the Express plans are more oriented toward the average home user. The Express plan is for backing up individual files, images, folders, the kind of stuff you probably have on your PC at the house. The Pro plan is more server/database oriented version of the remote backup plan. The Pro plan will take care of a business’s backup need for databases like Microsoft Outlook, Exchange, and MySql Server, as well as Oracle and Lotus Notes. The Pro version is compatible with all the more popular O.S. environments such as Linux, Unix, Windows, Mac, and Netware.

Anytime@Anywhere’s service boasts military level 128 bit encryption for security and has support for 21 languages.

So I was surfing through my favorites, and I end up at Mr John Chow’s site and I see a story he has on his front page about BlogRush. After checking it out, it looks very interesting. This looks like a free version of adwords….:). I’ve integrated it with the site when I was tuning everything up this weekend just to check it out. If you watch the movies on the site you’ll see that in theory, it sounds pretty easy and like it would work very well. It will be interesting to see if the mighty Google takes notice of what appears to be a possibly cut into the market dominated by their adwords product at this point.

In case you are just too lazy to click the link, or can’t find it, BlogRush is supposed to drive traffic to your site much the same way that adwords does. And as anyone who has a site they are trying to get to generate income knows, traffic is the name of the game. Nothing happens without it. Google Adwords has pretty much had the lion’s share of the traffic market. The difference being that you have to pay for adwords, Blog Rush is free…at least for the moment.

I have google analytics online for the site so I will be able to see if there is any significant change in traffic.

Check it out for yourself.

I did a little poking, and tweaking, and came up with a new look. I also updated all my affilliate links and all the links to generate traffic. It just so happens that the free business cards that I got from the printers matches that header pretty good.

FREE. Is there a better word?

Back in June, I did a post about taking your marketing offline. One of the things I didn’t touch on at that time was business cards. Business cards are a quick, easy way to get your name out and in people’s minds. You can put them anywhere, on cars, on billboards, on message boards at the super market, or even the billboards at work. They are a very cost effective way to get your name out there. Now you can print out these cards on your own. Many programs are available that will let you design and print your own business cards. However, first you’ll probably need a piece of software to design the card. Just good ole’ Microsoft Word has the capability to print out things like business cards, and well everyone has that. Now you need a printer, the right paper, a cutter and of course talent.

The point is, the cards can be made by you for cheap. But what is even better than ‘cheap’?..free.

I came across a deal from a company called VistaPrint for 250 FREE Business Cards.

Being an old hand at the ‘free’ Internet offers, I was skeptical but figured I would give it a try. But before I made a post on this blog about it, essentially putting my ‘ok’ on it, I wanted to try it myself. I can honestly say yes, you get exactly what is advertised. 250 free business cards.

There are 47 backgrounds for business cards. You can add your own text, and they are indeed completely free. I recieved them in about a week and they are a good solid card, worth every cent I didn’t pay for them.
As a bonus, if you sign up on Vista Print’s site they have other free offers as well for things like rubber stamps, stickey notes, checks..etc. but you do have to pay the shipping. I also actually paid for some stuff through them (some post cards, which are pretty damn cool) just because I like to actually kick some business to the little guys on the net who throw freebies out there…I would highly suggest you do the same if you can.

BUT! when you are signing up for the vista print offer, you will be directed to a couple other offers that you can decline. Just be careful and don’t agree to anything but the free business cards

For all of you that may be reading this from cashcrate, I plan on using these cards with my cashcrate referral ID and posting these at various places such as bulletin boards at work, in my local supermarkets, and in the various laundrymats around the area. When I run out of places like that, its a very good possibility that I may make a run at my local strip that has all the clubs in it and put them on windshields….maybe.