Relayblogger

As you probably have noticed by now I have no issues at all with writing articles that I get paid for, but I think it is important to tell the readers that the post is paid for. However, I am not sure about how to do with posts that are not paid for, but were created only to make space for affiliate links. In reality those post were written for the sole purpose to generate money by having readers click through.

In the future I think I will label posts that were made just as a means to publish affiliate link as Paid Posts, though I will not label it a Paid Post if I manage to incorporate an affiliate link, like that, when I write about something I care about.

I do not like bloggs written by celebrities just to create some marketing buzz. Especially when there is no disclosure at all. It is little like product placement i movies, even though that has come to be very common these days.

(Text Link Ads, by the way, have a really good affiliate program.)

In my search for ways other than Google Adsense to make money from this blog I found an ad network called Bidvertizer who’s ads looks a lot like Google Adsense. I’ve added it to the Swedish counterpart to this blog and to my other English blog to test it out. Neither of those blogs make much money from ads so I can’t say much about the click through rate in comparison with Google Adsense.

The range of ads that Bidvertizer offers is far from Google Adsense, but you get far more information about the advertisers. I guess it would be hard for Google Adsense to be equally transparent since they have so many advertisers.

Bidvertizer has referral programs going both for getting advertisers and publishers. Advertisers get free clicks for $20 when signing up.

One big thing I think is in favor for Bidvertizer is that their threshold for doing payments is as low as $10 compared to Google Adsense that waits until the month after you have earned $100.

Another cool thing in favor of Bidvertizer is that you can customize the ad units a bit more than in Google Adsense. That might make your click through better with Bidvertizer than Google Adsense.

Being a new blogger that wants to make some money is a lot about spreading the word. I could always spend a couple of hundred dollars on marketing, but since the blog is so new it will probably not lead to a sustainable reader base.

I’m not so sure a few Digg readers will become a pile of RSS subscribers but at least it creates some back links.

So, please use the Share-It widget at the bottom of my posts to submit one to a social network, or vote for it if it is already submitted.

clixGalore is an international affiliate network based in Australia and they have quite a large number of advertisers. Their home page targets readers from Great Britain, USA, India, Japan and New Zeeland, so I guess they target mainly sites in English.

Payments are done when you reach USD 50, a threshold I find quite low compared to other affiliate networks. You can get the money transfered to a PayPal account (which you should have if you’re serious about making money online) so you don’t have to pay any extra fees for checks or wire transfers to your domestic bank account.

The majority of the programs offers compensation for sales. I saw some that pays for leads, but I haven’t found any one that pays for click yet. It seems ‘pay per click’ is a model that is going away. I see less of those each time I check out the offers from my affiliate networks.

Once I had applied to become a publisher in the clixGalore network they replied shortly with a confirmation that I had passed and I have gotten very quick replies for the programs I have applied to.

I have read some comments on the Internet that clixGalore doesn’t pay their publishers properly, but the buzz doesn’t seem louder than for any other service bloggers can use to make money online.

Use the opportunity to write several posts when you’ve got inspiration. That way your, hopefully, steady stream of posts will make it through times when you lack inspiration or time to write posts that are good enough to publish on your blog.

Most blogging tools lets you set a publish date in the future so if you are going away for a couple of days you can keep the flow of your blog anyway.

This practice is even more important if you have decided to write a series of posts because it will be easier to make them stick together. If you are writing a series and have some research to do for the later parts, at least mash up as much as you can of the future posts to keep them in spirit of the first one.

Having some canned posts can actually make it easier to write since you are relieved of the stress that can come from feeling forced to write an article just to keep the flow going.

In Wordpress it is possible to save drafts for future editing and publication. Before I started using Google Documents for my future posts I used the drafts in Wordress a lot.

I got to know about Desi Baba when I read a paid review on johnchow.com that Desi ordered via ReviewMe.

Desi writes, amongst other things, about blogging.

At first glance I subscribed to his feed since he has some really good posts about blogging and making money, but after reading some articles and some headers from the archive I removed the subscription. The blog seemed a little bit unfocused to me. That would not have been a surprise if I would have read John Chows review a little more careful.

The blog has a wide range of topics, spanning from Cars and Entertainment to Technology, money and politics. It might draw some users, but since it is so easy to start a blog, readers are getting a bit spoiled with heavily niched blogs.

Desi also runs a link exchange program where you can review his site and get a link back by using ‘blogging‘ as the link back to his site. Since desinotes.com has a page rank of four it is a good deal for the newly started blog. Desi will surely gain from all the back links too, so that page rank of four will probably a page rank of five  very soon.

Figure out some things that an expert in your niche takes for granted. I like to go to forums and check out all the posts that are made by the people who has recently left the newbie state. I work with creating software and programmers tend to get in a state where they know to much to be careful and check everything twice, but way to little to anticipate the mess they are getting in to. As if that is not bad enough they tend to dislike being told they are doing things badly. Most programmers grow out of it though. However pointing them to a good article describing a scenario and a workable solution might make them think and get you one more subscriber.

Reason a bit around these matters of course and decorate your reasoning with a, preferably, self experienced anecdote or two. It makes the post more fun to read and it builds your reputation as an expert in your field. If you manage to write so much that you could talk about it for 45 minutes without repeating your self, you could enter yourself as a speaker in a niche conference and get even mote attention to your blog.

You have to be careful when writing these kinds of posts so that you don’t forget your audience. Problems that are huge for newbies needs a whole other language than problems faced by experts.

Get a domain name.

I’ve previously written about getting a domain name. The main two recommended patterns for domain names seems to be; get a name that describes your site, or a pronounceable word that means nothing at all.

Here is a Google search for domain name registrars.

Get a web host.

Choosing the right web host is almost like a lottery these days. There are tons of hosts to choose from and it is hard to find out the terms for most of the ones I’ve looked at. If you decide to let your web host manage your domain name registration make sure it is you who actually own the domain.

Here is a Google search for web hosts.

Update DNS servers.

Now that you have a domain name and a web host it is time to tell the world where your site is. DNS servers are a bit like the yellow pages for the web. When a user enters an address in the browser it uses DNS to look up a numeric address that the computer can understand. It can take up to 48 hours for the DNS change to propagate all over the Internet so when you have recently updated your DNS entries you might end up at different sites depending on where you are when you look for a domain. You manage DNS settings from your domain name registrar account.

Write for 48 hours.

The two days it takes for DNS to propagate are perfect to write your initial content. If you are going to blog about a specific subject I would recommend that you write ten posts that you can publish right a way. That way your index page will be fully populated since most blogs show ten posts up front. It is also a good practice to write a couple of extra posts that can be published when you don’t have the time or inspiration write.

Time to get the blog up and running

By using the Google tools for webmasters you can submit your site to the Google indexer so it will find it a little bit faster. You can also tell Google that content on http://yourdomain.com is the same as content on http://www.yourdomain.com, otherwise Google will classify all your content as duplicates and that is a bad thing according to all SEO experts online.

I use Wordpress as my blog tool so further on all my recommendations will be based on that. It is included in Fantastico, a web site configuration tool that exists on most LAMP based web hosts.

Go to your Fantastico control panel and install Wordpress. If you do this before the DNS information has propagated the site will look weird and some things will not work at all.

Get a good looking theme. There are lots of free themes at Wordpress. There is some debate of how important the look and fell of a site is for a steady user base. I think the most important thing is that you should feel comfortable with it. Time spent on content is usually better than time spent on your theme.

Since the spamming business seems to grow faster than anything else; activate the Aksimet plugin. You have to get a free API key from Wordpress.

Feed readers can check your site quite often so to save some bandwidth and get some nice statistics go to Feedburner and create an account. Feedburner has an excellent article on how to get the Feedburner plugin to work.

If you intend to make it on the social networks then theShare-this plugin will enable your readers, or your self, to easily submit your posts to a variety of them. I’m not sure if it is a good idea in the long run, but you will get some readers by self submitting articles to Digg.

If your content makes sense even after a couple of months it can be a good idea to configure your permalink structure. I use ‘/index.php/%category%/%postname%/’ on all my blogs. The default configuration just adds the post id number to the URL and if you use a predefined one with dates in it your posts might look old in a while.

Lets earn some money

, but there are other alternatives that looks and works almost the same. BidVertiser is one of them. The Adsense Delux plug-in makes it simpler to incorporate ads, not only adsense, into your posts.

You should set up a merchant account at PayPal since many offers to make money online offers payment to PayPal. That way you don’t have to pay for checks or wire transfer of money to your domestic bank.

There are several ways other than plain advertising to make money from your blog. Both Bloggerwave and PayPerPost offer payment for reviews. You can also sign up as a publisher for an affiliate network. Affiliate networks gathers advertisers and lets web site owners publish links and/or banner ads to the advertisers. The site owner can get paid depending on the readers actions, such as clicking a link, signing up for a newsletter or buying something from the advertisers store.

Bring on the readers

If you are curious about how many readers you have, what they read and where they are from, you can fulfill your curiosity with Google Analytics It is a free web site statistics package that keep track of more stuff than I could imagine before I saw it. Don’t fall in the trap and check your Google Adsense and Analytics statistics every 30 minutes. Make it a habit to check them once a day and leave it at that. You should put all your effort in producing high quality content.

Good luck!

This post has been submitted to the following blog carnivals:

• Your Potential. Our Passion. Blogging.
• Bootstrapper
• successpart2.com
• Blog Carnival Make Money Blogging 101

Bloggerwave is a new service offering bloggers to write reviews (such as this) for payment and advertisers to spread knowledge about their offerings through the blogsphere.

As a blogger I found the interface easy to navigate and my blog was accepted well within the stated 72 hours. Payment seems to be withheld for up to 30 days to check the availability of made reviews, but there is no lower limit for payments to be made as far as I can tell.

I haven’t signed up as an advertiser but the described workflow looks equally simple. I’m not sure about the stated SEO opportunities though, since the search engines might classify these reviews as paid links.

There is some buzz that Bloggerwave is a scam, but since it’s free all a blogger needs to do is remove the post after 30 days if the payment doesn’t show up.

Update: On june 24:th I got paid for my reviews on my other blogs, well within the stated 30 days.

RSS is a standard protocol to publish the content of a blog. By consuming RSS you can keep track of several blogs without having to visit their web pages frequently.

For consuming RSS feeds there are both applications to run locally on your computer and services that run in your browser.

The most known web based feed readers are:

• Bloglines
• Google Reader
• NewsGator

You can find a lot of programs on the Internet to download and read RSS feeds on your computer. Those I have tried are:

• RssBandit
• SharpReader
• Outlook

… but I got hooked on Bloglines since it allows me to read my feeds everywhere.

If you are a blogger RSS can help you retain your readers even if you post infrequently since they don’t have to visit your site to get your new content.

If you get many feed subscriber it can be a good idea to use Feedburner. It is a service, recently bought by Google, that publishes your feed from their servers. That way you don’t have to pay for the traffic. Feedburner also offers a way to monetize your feed and some statistics about your readers and their behavior.

If you are using Wordpress; here is an instruction about how to enable the Fedburner redirection.