New How-To Videos

I just posted a link to some how to make money blogging videos that are currently airing on YouTube. Some of these videos are good, others leave something to be desired. And they are to be used as a supplement tool to whatever other knowledge you are acquiring.

One of the ways I stay informed is by subscribing to feeds of other bloggers that appear to have tried various methods and are making money from those methods.

Something that is hot right now is creating contests for readers and subscribers.

I’m not good at that, so it is taking me a little longer to come up with a good contest.

In the meantime, if you are looking for any particular type of software to improve productivity, copy dvd’s and more, check out the software search box at the end of this post. It will help.

EntreCard And It’s Benefits

EntreCard is more than a traffic gaining, highly targeted back-link building machine. It is also a great resource. The information I am obtaining from just being a member of Entrecard is awesome.

You see, while I am dropping my electronic business card off at some other blogger’s site, I am also checking out what they blog about.

Some bloggers blog about humorous things and nothing else. But, there are some who are professional bloggers, the creme de la creme of the blogosphere. The ones that win the Webby awards and receive high accolades from their readers. These bloggers give valuable tips everyday about monetizing your blog. Entrecard has introduced me to these bloggers.

For instance, I am receiving a free 25 Step tutorial free, on how to monetize my Facebook account. This will be something many will pay for soon. Believe me, if you can get it now, I would. The information coming from Lara Saad is going to change the way things are done on my Facebook Profile.

Something else I’m learning as well is that bloggers who have relevant blogs and reap the traffic from it, are allowing other bloggers who don’t get as much traffic to advertise for free on their sites and link back from them using Entrecard.

Entrecard has many benefits, this is just one of them.

I’ve read other opinions regarding Entrecard and its value to the blogosphere, and the thing that I have to make time for is to drop off my business card to other blog owners. Sometimes that can be a deterrent.

Otherwise, I just imagine I’m visiting a shop and leaving my calling card for the business owner. As is said in sales, it’s a numbers game, and eventually someone will sign the contract.

Survey Savvy Get Paid For Your Opinions!

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Blogging for a Living - Top Money Making Methods for Bloggers by Sheila Baker

Making money from blogging has become easier over the past two years. Advertisements, sponsorships, fundraising and even blogging jobs are only some of the ways a blogger can earn money these days. So, if up until now you weren’t financially rewarded for sharing your world view with the blogosphere, continue reading to find out how to make your blogging efforts more profitable.

Advertisements Google’s Adsense is one of the easiest and most popular ways to earn money by putting advertisements in your blog. Anyone who owns a blog (or a website) can open an Adsense account, place ads in his blog (or website) and earn money depending on the number of clicks on the Adsense links from the blog. Adsense advertisements fit themselves to the target audience of the blog. For example, if you write a blog on the popular board game backgammon, the ads would probably lead to online gaming sites. Therefore, the size of the revenue from your blog is subject to the appeal of the ads among your readers.

Sponsorships

If your blog gets a lot of traffic, you can try to approach a certain company or a business and offer them to run an advertisement campaign at your blog. Many of today’s companies appreciate the widespread potential hidden in popular blogs so you might even receive a positive answer.

However, it would be easier to get sponsorship for your blog if you are willing to settle for your original content ideas and include a preordered review on a specific product chosen by the company that will pay your hosting bills. Services such as Pay Per Post (PPP) or Review Me, specialize in connecting between advertisers and bloggers. Of course that if you write a beauty blog, you will not be paid to post a review on a set of golf woods and vice versa.

This money making method has its pros and cons. Looking at the bright side, you get free products, content idea at no cost, plus you get paid to post. On the other hand, you can never be the same independent and free of commercial considerations blogger you used to be.

Fundraising

If blogging takes over most of your spare time and your community of readers still can’t get enough of you, why don’t you ask them to lay a few pennies at your donation box? Fundraising buttons, also known as tip jars, ask the readers to take part in the blog maintaining expenses or to help the blog owner to spare part or all of his day job to become a full time blogger, have been in use for a long time. Over the past few years, rumors on the effectiveness of this monetizing method supported the growth in its popularity among successful bloggers.

More Ways to Make Money from Your Blog

Additional ways to make money from blogging include joining an affiliate program (such as Amazon Associates) in which by linking your readers to the business you receive an agreed share of their revenues; developing blogging related career which can range from a ghost blogger to newspaper columnist through business blogging counselor and merchandizing, whether by offering t-shirts with your blog logo for sale or by selling an e-book on your field of expertise.

About the Author

Sheila Baker is a professional writer and a web 2.0 expert. Sheila is responsible for several business blogs such as www.play65blog.com

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In What Ways Might I…

Part of marketing your blog is finding out new things and new ways to promote your blog that are cost efficient.

Basically marketing and promotion that is free.

The flip side to free marketing and promotion is to make sure that it works. If it doesn’t work then you are back to the drawing board to start all over again. Unfortunately, that’s how it’s done in the world of attracting visitors, keeping visitors and then turning those visitors into customers.

Some bloggers do this quite well, ProBlogger, Sam Freedom’s Internet Marketing Controversy, and more. I read their blogs and try to pick up tips and trips on a constant basis.

This is where the free part of blog marketing and promotion comes in. The key is not to try to reinvent the wheel, but to figure out how the wheel makers make the wheel roll. When you find that out, then you get on the wheel, and don’t reinvent it, but repeat it.

Repeat their success.

Do what they do. When I visit other blogs, not only do I read the posts and comment on them. I also look at their design, how they have advertising laid out and whether they have a lot of advertising.

These are important factors to look for on a blog.

Think of your blog as a magazine. Unless you’re Vogue or something, no one is coming to your blog to read the ads.

People visit blogs to pick up information. To find out how-to.

So, the next time you get ready to post an entry, think in these terms:

IWWMI–In What Ways Might I…help more people, make more people laugh, inform more people how to make more money.

When you choose an unselfish perspective the traffic will come.

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Boost your traffic with Entrecard

There are a lot of articles that talk about Entrecard. These articles tell you what is Entrecard, how it can be used to increase your traffic, and some of them even discuss about the quality of Entrecard traffic. But, some of my readers still not very clear about it, so i decide to write an article which mainly focus on new bloggers.

Before you continue, you must believe that Entrecard can really bring traffic for you. I assume that you already have an Entrecard account and you had read the Entrecard’s “Help”. If you don’t have an account, you can click here to register.

I had signup Entrecard about 1 week ago and i had read a lot of articles about it and try my best to gain as many as credits. I believe a lot of new Entrecard users do not know how to utilize it to boost up the traffic. So, i decide to summarize a few methods that i had used:

1. Visit websites that required low credits to advertise and try to leave comments to them:
   Let say you join the Computers and Internet categories. There are around 83 websites under that categories. As you can see, there are a lot websites which require not more than 30 credits to advertise. Now, try to visit those websites and drop your card. Ok, why i ask you to visit these websites? The reason is pretty simple if you pay attention to your Inbox( which is at your right hand side under Dashboard).
   Popular websites receive a lot of cards everyday, so they won’t notice your card, unless they view the statistics. But, small/new websites will keep notice any new cards drop and visit them. At least this is what i had done when i join Entrecard. So, pay attention to the “low cost” websites first.
2. Visit every single websites in Entrecard community everyday and drop your cards:
   Maybe you will think that this method conflicts with the first method. No, they are not conflict but focus on different things. The first method will put more effort on building relationships with other bloggers which is quite important if you really want to grow your website. While the second method focus on gaining as much credits as possible so that you have enough credits to advertise on other websites. You can use this method to gain more than 300 credits per day! But i personally not agree with this method, as many people claim that they have non-quality traffic from Entrecard. I hope that at least you spend around 2-3 minutes on a website before you switch to another.
3. Choose new but potential websites to advertise:
   After you gain enough credits, you may start consider to advertise on other websites. You may try to find some “low cost” website first. “Low cost” doesn’t means “low quality”. This is because some of the Entrecard members are quite new so they require lower credits to advertise. Try to find them out and advertise at their websites.
4. Create an Entrecard community and invite your readers to join:
   As you can see, i had create n Entrecard community for my readers. Why? Because this method can encourage you and your readers to visit each others more frequent and then increase your advertising cost. I had create this community few days ago and my advertising cost increase more than 20!
5. Create a post about Entrecard so that your readers know about it. When your readers join them, they will join your community also. This method will then increase your advertising cost.
6. Create Entrecard contest for your readers:
   You can give Entre credits as rewards for your commentators, RSS subscribers, or even for readers who blog about your contest! This can be done after you gain enough credits. You can see sample contest on my blog.
7. Make sure you have a very SEXY logo:
   A lot of users don’t really create a logo for Entrecard, they simply use the default style provide by Entrecard. If you are one of these users, i think you probably need to read William Montanaro’s article about How having a sexy Entrecard increases popularity. The reason behind this is pretty simple, SEXY logo can attract more readers, right?

As you can see, i focus on how to increase our advertising cost. This is because the higher the cost, the higher ranking you will get. As you can see, TechSnack.net has a 7th rank in Computers and Internet category. This will definitely attract more readers.

Last but not least, i hope you can take part in my Entrecard contest or join my Entrecard community. All the best for you!

Article courtesy TechSnack.net.

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A Beginners Guide To Blogging: How To Start A Blog By Peter Nisbet (c) 2007

It is logical for a beginners guide to blogging to begin with information on how to start a blog. However, first a brief introduction to what a blog actually is. A blog is nothing more than your online diary or journal, in which you can express your feelings, thoughts, and opinions or even advertise your products. There are few rules apart from keeping it clean. For that reason they come in all sorts of shapes, sizes and designs, and your blog page is literally yours to anything you want with.

You can include pictures, hyperlinks to your websites, MP3s and videos. Much depends on the type of blog you have and who is the provider, but Wordpress allows more than Blogger or Blogspot, especially if you have downloaded it to your own website. However, it is also more complicated and you might prefer to start off easy and then work your way up as you become more familiar with what you are doing. Many cPanel web hosts offer Wordpress facilities.

The basic components of a blog are:

Title: You can use the title to label your posting.
Category: You can add a category to keep blogs on similar topics together.
Body: This is the main content of the blog.
Trackback: This allows other sites to link back to your blog.
Permalink: This is the URL that goes with every blog that you write.
Comments: This allows readers to make comments on your blog – some good, and some bad.

By means of just one or two templates you can easily create new pages. It’s a bit like having a website and copying your home page as a template for all the rest of the pages, only the blog template is blank with spaces for the title, category and all the other aspects of your blog. The blogging websites that you sign up with offer a number of templates and you can choose one and literally start blogging immediately.

Blogging can be more that just your own personal thing, and you can join groups that blog about specific topics, such as football, movies, music, blogging, etc, etc. You can all share your expertise and knowledge and some are literally operating as forums. You can also use your blog to advertise a product, and to drive traffic to your website, while others have no website and use their blog as their sole communications window on the internet.

I could go on all day about what you can do and, sometimes, cannot do with a blog, but the best way is to get started and then find what you are capable of. The best way is to log onto the blog provider of your choice and sign up for a blog. Most newcomers to blogging find it easiest to start blogging from a provider’s website, and then graduating to installing blogging software on their own website

This is a bit trickier, but it allows you use all the plugins that allow total personalization of your blog so that it is completely unlike that of anybody else. You cannot use plugins when you run your blog from the provider’s site, whether it is Wordpress or any other blog. You cannot beat having your own blog software and being able to design any page that you want.

However, although this sounds great to be able to do, on the whole you are likely best to start blogging from the blog hosting site, and then graduate to your own website once you are comfortable with blogging. You will have enough to take in and learn when you upload to your own web space without having to worry about how blogging works.

Blogging is fantastic fun, and it can also be very profitable. However, there are specific techniques involved in making money using blogs, and it is very easy to get your fingers burnt if you are unaware of the pitfalls and the right way to do it. Nevertheless, blogging can be very rewarding, both personally and financially, so best of luck, and get blogging now. Don’t leave it a minute longer because you might have a lot to learn yet.

Once you have learned how to start a blog, then you can think of running your own from your own website.

For more information on the main blog sites, and how to start blogging yourself, visit Pete’s website Create A Blog where you will be provided with some useful information and links, and also some great offers to help you make money while enjoying blogging.

Copyright © 2007 Jayde Online, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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Online Blog Marketing by Sandeep

About the Author

Sandeep kumar
SEO Executive
sandeep.mobilex@yahoo.com

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The 5 Immutable Laws of Persuasive Blogging by Brian Clark

Blogging is a great way to grow a business, promote a cause, or spread new ideas, because when you take an educational approach to marketing, you gain the attention and trust of people who might otherwise simply ignore old-fashioned advertising. Not only can those people become your customers or converts, they can also become your advocates.

While there are as many ways to approach blogging as there are blogs, some things remain steadfast when it comes to gaining influence and prompting action. Here are the 5 bedrock elements to keep in mind when you blog to persuade:

1. The Law of Value

Your blog must provide value to the reader by addressing a problem, concern, desire, or need that the reader already has. Fresh, original content is critical.

2. The Law of Headlines and Hooks

Your post titles must stand out in a crowded, noisy blogosphere, and you must quickly communicate the value of reading further with your opening.

3. The Law of “How To”

People don’t want to know “what” you can do, they want to know “how” it’s done. If you think you’re giving away too much information, you’re on the right track.

4. The Law of the List

Love them or hate them, informational posts presented in list format are easily digestible, and allow for an efficient transfer of your value proposition to the reader.

5. The Law of the Story

Stories are the most persuasive blogging element of all, as they allow you to present a problem, the solution, and the results, all while the connotation of the story allows readers to sell themselves on what you have to offer.

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How to Create a Blog That People Really Digg by Jonathan Morrow

(This article is being reprinted because it is so very needed for success with social media. Copyblogger is one of the most knowledgeable bloggers around. And successful! Read on.)

Have you ever noticed that some blogs seem to rise to the top of Digg over and over again?

You might think that they’ve discovered some magic formula for getting attention, built a “Digg culture” on their blog, or they just get all of their friends to Digg their posts.

And they might.

Though, many of them took the most important step before they even started their blog. They chose a niche that the social media crowd already loves.

The Secret: Give Them What They Want

The most successful blogs don’t try to manipulate readers into voting for their posts. They just give them what they want.

It’s all about focusing on your audience. If you want to be on the front page of Digg, write about topics that Diggers love, such as Ron Paul, Apple, or blogging.

What if your blog doesn’t cover these types of subjects? What if you’re passionate about a “mundane” subject like gardening?

The traditional advice is to slant some posts to get attention. For example:

• Prince Charles Is Growing Marijuana in His Garden (scandal: 950 diggs)
• An Introduction to Square Foot Gardening (frugality: 734 diggs)
• Eating You Alive? Try Eco-Friendly Garden Plants That Repel Mosquitoes (surprising: 796 diggs)

It works. The only question is, do you really want to slant all of your posts just to attract attention? Doesn’t that kind of take away the point of blogging about gardening?

Sure. You could end up writing about something that doesn’t really interest you and quit.

The Secret to Long-Term Social Media Success

The best solution isn’t to slant your posts. It’s to find the overlap between your passions and the topics social media users already love.

Let’s get back to the gardening example.

If you’re a fanatic, you might be tempted to ruminate about the history of different types of plants, but unless it involves sex, murder, or politics, you won’t get much attention from social media. Instead, look to your passions.

For instance, you might believe that gardening makes the world a better place. It just so happens that Digg loves stories about helping the environment and saving the world.

So, you decide to start a blog called “GreenThumbing.org: Changing the World, One Green Thumb at a Time.” You write posts like:

• Warning: You’re Consuming 2 Gallons of Pesticides per Year
• How Do We End World Hunger? The Answer Is in Your Own Backyard
• 21 Ways That Gardening Makes You a Happier Person

I don’t know for sure that all of those titles would make the front page of Digg, but I think they would have a shot. More importantly though, you’d be writing about something both you and people around the world adore.

The result? A blog that’s successful for a long, long time.

If you hate get rich quick schemes, penny pinching, and advice without substance, you might just love Jon’s blog, On Moneymaking. Subscribe here.

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12 Simple Steps to Explode Your Site Traffic Using Online Social Media

By Dave Foster (c) 2007

Last year saw the arrival of online social media. If you operate a website or blog, you would be well advised to realign your site to exploit the popular social media sites for increased traffic.You should also introduce social media components to your site because web users are experiencing these new forms of interaction on more and more sites and they will have an expectation of the same from your site too.

If you want to attract repeat visitors and want them to stay longer, your focus for the next few months should be on the social aspects of your site.Social media uses technologies like RSS, blogging, podcasting, tagging, etc. and offers social networking (MySpace, Facebook), social video and picture sharing (YouTube, Flickr), and community-based content ranking (Digg, MiniClip) features.The central theme of these sites is user generated content used for sharing amongst other users. The social aspects of these sites allow users to setup social communities, invite friends and share common interests.

You don’t have to change your site immediately to take advantage of these new technologies. Introduce small changes incrementally and you will be well on your way to measure up to your visitors’ new expectations.

Step 1. Declare who you are to the online community. People should be able to relate to you. Unless they know more about you, you will be just an unknown identity and most people don’t like to deal with people they don’t know. Create an About Me page to líst your achievements, skills and aspirations.

Step 2. Create a MySpace page and link your biography in the Profile of your MySpace page. Also provide a link back from the MySpace page to your website. Spend an hour every week to develop your online social network in MySpace. Invite a few of your new friends to write blog articles at your site about your products or services.

Step 3. Install a free blog and start publishing at least one article in your blog every week. Provide an easy bookmarking feature to social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us. This is done by providing an action button for each article in your site. The action button takes users to the submission page of the bookmarking site.

Step 4. Provide an action button for direct posting of blog articles to Digg. Digg is a popular news ranking site. A well dugg article will bring thousands of visitors to you.

Step 5. Provide a forum at your site for users to discuss your products and services. Don’t delete negative comments because they provide insights into the improvements needed to serve your visitors better. However, censor hate speeches and meaningless bantering. Register your forum at BoardTracker. BoardTracker is a forum search engine.

Step 6. If you are offering products, allow users to review and rate your products. This will help you in inventory management because you may want to discontinue low rated products.

Step 7. Provide RSS feeds for your new products, blogs, forum postings, etc. An RSS feed provides teasers of your content. Users will use RSS readers to scan your teasers and visit your site for more information if the teasers interest them.

Step 8. Publish all your feeds at Feedburner. Feedburner provides media distribution and audience engagement services for RSS feeds. They also provide an advertising network for your feeds. If you have quality content, you will be able to monetize your content using their services.

Step 9. Create short how-to or new product videos and post these videos in social video sharing sites like YouTube and Google video. Provide a few start and end frames in these videos to introduce your site with your site URL. Post these videos using catchy titles, teaser descriptions, and appropriate tags to make them easy to discover.

Step 10. Provide embedded links to your remotely hosted videos on your site. This will save your bandwidth and storage space because the videos reside on the video sharing sites rather than on your site’s server.

Step 11. As well as videos, use social photo sharing sites like Flickr and SmugMug to share pictures related to content on your site. Use the same title, description and tag techniques discussed earlier for social video sites.

Step 12. Provide a “Send to Fríend” feature for all the products and services you provide. This feature is a link that sends the article, product description, etc. to a recipient via e-mail.Social media is not a fad. It is here to stay and brings a profound change to web surfers’ experiences. Now is the right time to implement features that will make your site Social-Media-Friendly. Also, using marketing techniques that utilize popular social media sites, you will see a massive íncrease in traffíc to your site.

About The AuthorDave Foster owns and operates the “Solo Profíts” blog and podcast, guiding individual entrepreneurs and home-based business owners to online success using audio, video and multimedia techniques. Dave also explores the virgin territory of multimedia psychology and how to present your message effectively through these new communications channels. Want to discover more? Go To ==> SoloProfits.com