Easy Earning

As you no doubt noticed, I’ve starting adding videos to this blog in a big way. The effect on traffic has been quite positive. Video is where blogging is heading and you should consider adding a video element to your blog if you haven’t already done so.

Videos Boosts Blog Traffic

I have noticed traffic to the blog has gone up by 15% since adding more videos to my posts. In addition, RSS subscription is on the verge of breaking 26,000 for the first time. Readers seem to really like videos. It allows me to express myself in ways words on a blog can never do.

Something I haven’t paid attention to at all was YouTube subscribers. I didn’t know I had any until I checked it. There are nearly 100 people subscribed to my YouTube videos. YouTube could be a nice traffic source if you built up a big enough subscriber base. I found iJustine via YouTube and I’m sure many others found her the same way.

Google Can Spider Video Content

Here’s another reason why you want to start adding videos to your blog. Google now has the technology to spider video content. YouTube videos are showing up more often on Google search results. For example, the YouTube video for the Macbook Air commercial shows up on page 1 when you do a search for MacBook Air. The video has been viewed nearly 2 million times. Imagine how much traffic you would get if you had been the one to post that video with your blog URL watermarked on it.

Videos Are Inexpensive To Add

You don’t need an expensive film studio to add videos to your blog. All my videos are shot with an inexpensive Flip Video digital camcorder. Most digital cameras can take video so you don’t have to buy a separate video recorder.

Editing the videos can be done with the software that came with your computer OS. I used Windows Movie Maker when I had the PC. Now I use iMovie on the Macbook Pro. While neither program is as powerful as Adobe Premier, they’ll get the job done and they’re easier to use. Thanks to services like YouTube, hosting your video is easy and free.

Videos Can Make You Money

I haven’t tried to make money with my videos yet but I can this as a viable income stream down the road. We already have sponsors giving us free stuff for the weekly Dot Com Pho videos and I can see product placement fees in the future.

Another way to make money with the video is by becoming a YouTube partner to get a percentage of the advertising money. YouTube is not the only service to offer partnerships. There are tons of video sharing sites, like Revver, that will give you a cut of the advertising dollars.

Maximizing Your Video Traffic

To get the most out of their videos, many bloggers will upload their videos to a bunch of video sharing sites. However, this can be a long and boring process. To make thing easier, I recommend using a service like Tube Mogul, which distributes your videos to all the major video sharing sites with a single upload.

The service also offers video analytics so you can see how your videos are performing across all the video sharing sites. It’s no harder to use than uploading a single YouTube video so I highly recommend it.

Another thing I recommend to maximize your video traffic is to always embed your blog URL into your videos. If the viewer likes the video, chances are he’ll want to know who made it and see any other videos you may have made. Putting your URL at the beginning or end is also good for branding purposes.

This is part one in a three part piece around making money online and avoiding the scams that are out there.

You and I have common interests. We’re after the same goal: making money online. It sounds simple and John makes it look easy, but if you’ve dedicated any time to trying to turn a profit on the web, you know it’s a lot harder than it looks. Unfortunately for you, as part of those looking to make a living online, you’re one of the most victimized groups on the web today. Don’t believe me? Google ‘make money online’ and just look at the sponsored ads. Nearly every single ad is spam.

What we do at ivetriedthat.com and what we intend to do with these guests posts is to educate as many people as we can about various work at home and make money online scams. Most scams operate under the guise of ‘Look! Everyone is making hundreds of thousands of dollars online and you’re losing money by not acting RIGHT NOW!’ They then show Clickbank or bank accounts with thousands of dollars earned, people holding bags of money, and flashy expensive cars. All the while, you feel like a sucker for not finding out about this website earlier.

In desperation you pull out your wallet and make a purchase before the text-box counter hits 0 and the ’special 30-minute’ sale that’s happening right now ends. Before you know it, you’re out $7 or $27 or $47 or maybe even $197 and you’re left with a crappy outdated book on how to do affiliate marketing. Hell, just reading JohnChow.com is more educational and it’s free!

You were scammed. Swindled out of money that should be rightfully yours, but you were defrauded by a website that made you believe that you’d be given the secret formula to success. Unfortunately, there is no secret. The Internet operates just like real life. If you plan on making a living online, it’s going to take hard work and dedication. Nothing comes quick and easy in life. It sucks. I’m sure many readers can relate to the feeling of getting suckered out of money.

With the growing pressure of falling economies and rising gas prices, more and more people are looking to making money through alternative measures. A lot of people are turning to the Internet to make money, but sadly, Internet crime is on the rise. All hope is not lost however. The next piece will show you the common themes around these make money online scams and what you can look for to avoid future situations like these.

“Is it possible to earn a full-time salary as a part-time blogger? (eg, if you’re student)”

This question has been voted up quite high in my Q&A sidebar widget so I thought I’d attempt an answer today.

It’s one of those questions with two answers:

Yes…. and…. No

Let’s unpack both (and I’d encourage you to read both as they bring balance to the question).

Yes it is POSSIBLE to earn a full-time salary as a part-time blogger

Part of me wants to simply answer this question with a ‘no’ answer and give a long list of answers why it’s not possible (because to answer ‘yes’ will mean some will accuse me of painting an unrealistic picture of blogging for money). However I have met a number of bloggers who make a good living from blogging as part time bloggers (in writing this I don’t have permission to share their stories so I’ll keep this fairly general).

However in every case there are a few observations I’d make about these bloggers. They usually had all of the following characteristics (or at least a few of them):

1. They worked hard - they might not have put full time hours (40 or so hours a week) into their blogging but they certainly did work quite a few hours and worked hard in those hours. Many of them did work full time on their blogs at certain times (summer holidays etc).

2. They were very good at what they did - they had an exceptional knack of being able to write engaging content, build networks and build community on their blogs.

3. They had an element of ‘luck’ to their story - I am thinking of a couple of bloggers particularly who really found themselves in the right place at the right time when they started their blogs.

4. They were able to draw others in to help - one way to overcome an inability to work full time hours is to draw others into your blog to help shoulder some of the load.

5. They made money indirectly ‘because’ of their blog and not just directly ‘from’ their blog - interestingly a number of the bloggers I’m thinking of have developed products (e-books and courses) of their own that they sell from their blog (and other people’s blogs). This means they are not just building a revenue from advertising but have a secondary source of income.

6. They USED to work full time as a blogger - one blogger that I’m thinking about now works about 20 hours a week blogging and make a very good living from his blog - but only because he used to work full time. ie he built up his blog to a point where it really was earning good income which then enabled him to scale back a little and coast a bit (he also hired someone to help him - see point #4).

No it’s not LIKELY that you’ll make a full-time salary from blogging part time

It is possible to make a full time living from blogging part time - but the sad reality is that the bloggers I’m thinking of are not in the majority.

Most bloggers who do get to a level of earning a full time living from their blogs are working full time hours (or above) on their blogs. And even then many that are working full time hours are not able to make a full time living from blogging (time is just one element of many factors that build a successful blog).

When I’m talking to new bloggers wanting to explore blogging as a way of making money I generally encourage them to see it as something to supplement their existing income.

Yes it is possible to make a full time living from the medium but the reality is that most never get to this point. Sure - have it as a goal, but set yourself smaller goals in terms of your earnings and see it as something that progresses over time as you invest more time into blogging.

If you’d like to see a progression of how this unfolded for me I’d encourage you to read my story of becoming a Blogger. It it you’ll see that I gradually stepped up my time put into blogging - but only as the earnings I was receiving allowed me to.

PS: Are You a Part Time Blogger Earning Full Time Income?

If you’re one of those bloggers that I mention in this post that are able to pull in a full time income from blogging part time I’m sure my readers would love to hear from you and learn from some of your wisdom. Feel free to share your own experiences (either with your URL as an example or anonymously if you’re not wanting to go public) - looking forward to your own lessons.

As an update to this post I’ve more recently written one on How I make Money Blogging which highlights the most profitable ways that I use blogs to generate income. I’ve also written extensively on how bloggers make money in ProBlogger the Book.

How do bloggers make money from blogs?

I’ve been reflecting this week about the amazing diversity of opportunities that are opening up for bloggers to make money from blogging.

I’ve long advised that bloggers seeking to make money from blogging spread their interests across multiple revenue streams so as not to put all their eggs in one basket.

The wonderful thing is that this is becoming easier and easier to do 2005 has seen many options opening up. I thought I’d take a look at some of the methods that bloggers are currently using to make money through blogs.

Income Streams for Bloggers - How to Make Money Blogging

Advertising Programs - Perhaps the most obvious changes in the past few months have been with the addition of a variety of viable advertising options for bloggers looking to make money from their blogs. The most common way bloggers seem to earn money online is via the contextual ad program from Google - Adsense. A more recent addition that many are using successfully are Chitika’s eMiniMalls and WidgetBucks, Text Link Ads.

Azoogle Ads, Intelli Txt, DoubleClick, Tribal Fusion, Adbrite, Clicksor, AdHearUs, Kanoodle, Pheedo, TextAds, Bidvertiser, Fastclick and Value Click (to name just some of the options) and there is a smorgasbord of options. Of course there is more to come with MSN Adcenter and YPN both in beta testing and with a variety of other advertising system currently in development (YPN is only available to US publishers).

Lastly there’s BlogAds - one of the first blog specific ad networks.

RSS Advertising - The past 12 months have seen some advances in RSS Advertising also. I’m yet to hear of any bloggers making big money blogging through it to this point - but as improvements are made to the ad programs exploring this I’m sure we’ll start to see examples of it being profitable.

Sponsorship - In addition to the array of advertising programs that are available to join there is a growing awareness in the business of the value and opportunity that exists for them to advertise directly on blogs. I’m hearing more and more examples of this and have been fortunately to have a couple of ad campaigns of my own in the past month - one with Adobe a couple of weeks ago and another just completed with Ricoh for a new digicam over at my Digital Camera Blog. These are not isolated cases - as I say I know of many blogs exploring sponsorship with advertisers at present and suspect we’ll see more of it in the year ahead. Sponsorship is also happening on a post by post basis with some bloggers being paid to write on certain topics by companies - either in one off or a regular fashion - and they are able to make big money from their blogs doing so.

Affiliate Programs - There are larger affiliate programs like Amazon, Linkshare, Clickbank and Commission Junction but also literally thousands of others from the large to the very small.

Digital Assets - Increasing numbers of bloggers have been developing other digital assets to support and add revenue streams to their blogs. By this I mean that I’m increasingly seeing e-books, courses and tele-seminars being run by bloggers. My recent foray into this with the first series of the six figure blogging course that Andy and I ran a few weeks ago and have just released the study version of. This type of activity will only increase in future - in fact this week I’ve seen numerous examples of bloggers running courses.

Blog Network Opportunities - with the rise in popularity of Blog Networks - bloggers are also being presented with more places to earn an income from their blogging - by writing for and with others. While it might be difficult to get a writing gig with one of the bigger networks - there are plenty who are always asking for new bloggers to join and who are willing to pay bloggers using a variety of payment models. While there are distinct advantages of blogging for yourself - blogging for an established network who will handle a lot of the set up/promotion/admin/SEO etc has it’s advantages also. More and more bloggers are combining writing for themselves on their own blogs with taking on blog network blogs as additional income streams.

Business Blog Writing Opportunities - as blogging has risen in it’s profile as a medium more and more businesses are starting blogs. Many of these companies have internal staff take on blogging duties - but an increasing number of them are hiring specialist bloggers to come on and run their blogs. I know of a number of bloggers who in the past month or two have been approached for such paid work. Check out Bloggers for Hire if you’re looking for this type of work.

Non Blogging Writing Opportunities - Also becoming more common are bloggers being hired to write in non blogging mediums. Manolo’s recent coup of a column in the Washington Post is just one example of this as bloggers are increasingly being approached to write for newspapers, magazines and other non blog websites. Along side this is the rise of bloggers as published book authors - this is to the extent that one blogger I spoke with this week complained to me that they were one of the few bloggers than they knew who didn’t have a book deal!

Donations - Tip Jars and donation buttons have been a part of blogging for years now but this last year saw a number of bloggers go full time after fund raising drives. Perhaps the most high profile of these was Jason Kottke of kottke.org who through the generosity of his readership was able to quit his job and become a full time blogger.

Flipping Blogs - Also more common in 2005 was the practice of ‘Blog Flipping’ - or selling of blogs. This has happened both on an individual blog level (I can think of about 20 blogs that sold this year) but also on a network level (the most obvious of these being the 8 figure sale of Weblogs Inc to AOL).

Merchandising - My recent attempt to sell ProBlogger.net T-shirts wasn’t a raging success, but it is an example of how an increasing number of bloggers are attempting to make a few extra dollars from their blogs by selling branded products through programs like Cafepress. While I didn’t have a lot of success with merchandising - quite a few larger blogs are seeing significant sales - especially blogs with a cult following. I’m not at liberty to discuss details - but I know of one largish blog which will see sales over $20,000 in merchandise for the calendar year of 2005.

Consulting and Speaking - While it has been popular for established consultants to add blogs to their businesses we’re also starting to see bloggers with no consulting background able to make money by charging readers for their time in consulting scenarios BECAUSE of the profile that their blogs have built them. Blogging has the ability to establish people as experts on niche topics and we all know the value of being perceived as an expert. I spoke to one blogger last month who charges himself out at over $200 an hour for speaking and consulting work - his area of expertise was something that he knew little about 18 months ago - but through his blog he’s become a leader in his field and a minor celebrity in his industry.

As time rolls on there are more and more ways that bloggers make money from their blogs opening up. Feel free to suggest your own ideas and experiences in comments below.

When starting a Wordpress blog, it’s always important to have an idea in mind of how you’re going to piece it all together. Generally speaking, when I set up a new blog, I pretty much use the same plugins every time, as they seem to be “essential” to the overall operation of the blog.

I have a folder on my desktop called “essential plugins”, and now it’s just part of the process, but I thought I would share the plugins I use with you, just in case you haven’t heard of one of them or used one yet. Most of them have been around for a while, and are pretty popular, not to mention they currently work with Wordpress 2.5 (which is very important).

Here Are My 10 Essential Wordpress Plugins:

1. All-In-One SEO Pack - This plugin should be installed on every blog out there. It’s the first one I think of and the first one I upload to a new blog. Reason being? It allows you to quickly perform “on page” SEO for not only your individual wordpress pages, but also for each post, which in the search engines eyes is also a page. Sometimes I may want to come up with a creative title for the readers, but the all in one seo pack allows you to use search engine friendly titles and descriptions for the search engines. It’s good stuff!

2. Secure Contact Form - Every website/blog needs a contact form, and while many bloggers have their own personal choices, this one is the one I use for pretty much all of my blogs. It’s easy to install (just a few clicks), and even more easy to use. I like the security features of it, which are in place to prevent spam (which can be horrendous on blogs).

3. Wordpress Database Backup - I know this one isn’t as exciting as some of the others, but please believe me when I say you need this! Many times this plugin alone has literally saved me countless hours, and large amounts of money. You can set it to auto backup your blog daily, weekly, or whatever you prefer. At least do a weekly backup, so if all is lost, you’ll only be out a weeks worth of posts. I also use this to extract the database in a friendly Wordpress compatible version if I transfer to another person or host. Set it and forget it.

4. Brian’s Threaded Comments - This cool plugin allows you to have one of those nifty comment sections that allow a person (or me) to reply directly to a comment, instead of posting below it. You can have the comment replies nest as deep as you want, but I think the default is 3 replies, and that’s what I leave it on. Installing this plugin isn’t hard…it’s the typical upload–>activate. But you have to replace your themes comments.php form with one supplied with the plugin. That’s it!

5. Google XML Sitemaps - This is another one of those semi-boring plugins, but a necessity. This plugin (which just takes uploading and activating), is what I use to generate a clean and search engine friendly sitemap xml file, which I submit to my Google Webmaster Tools account. Hey, anytime I can make it easier on the Google spiders to crawl my site, I’m game.

6. Spam Karma 2 - Every blog needs a spam killer, and while a lot of bloggers use the default Akismet, I trash that one and upload Spam Karma 2. I love SK2, because it seriously catches everything. There are many options you can tweak to set different karma levels, but I usually never mess with it. I keep it default and it’s worked wonderfully every time.

7. Sociable - While I do not currently use sociable on this blog, it’s only because the theme kind of has some of the sociable functions built in to it, so it wouldn’t make much sense to have the same thing twice. What Sociable does is allow you to put little pretty social bookmarking icons beneath every post and/or page to make it easy for your readers to submit your article or post to the big social bookmarking sites (Digg, SU, Sphinn, Reddit, del.icio.us, etc…). It’s another one that you just upload, activate, and configure which icons you want it to show.

8. CommentLuv - This sweet plugin is a new favorite of mine, due to the fact that it encourages more commenting on your posts. Commenting fell by the wayside for a while, until this plugin came out, which, in a nutshell, pulls up the last post (if possible), of the blogger who leaves a comment. So for instance, if you have a blog, and you comment on mine, it will attempt to pull the link to your latest blog post under your comment. So that way, people may see it and you just might gain a few new readers just from commenting on someone else’s blog. Pretty cool, huh?

9. Adsense Deluxe - While not all bloggers show Adsense ads on their blogs, a lot do. Obviously on this one, I am, but on some others I leave it out depending on what the goals of the particular blog are. Regardless, if you want to easily implement Google Adsense into your blog without much hassle, check out Adsense Deluxe. It’s easy to work with, and you also have the option of showing Yahoo Publisher Network ads too.

10. UsersOnline - This plugin may be more material than others, but I’ve really grown to like the UserOnline plugin. It simply shows you how many people and/or bots are on your blog at any given time. It seems like more of an ornament, but I find it useful when I submit a post to a social bookmarking site, I can immediately see if people are on my site. It’s really fun when you get a big Stumble and have several hundred on your site at one time - it’s quite motivating! Anyway, installation is easy, and if you need to feed your ego, this plugin will help do that

Here’s the story of how I went from earning no affiliate sales to generating thousands of dollars in sales every month.

When I started Free Money Finance, I decided that I would only recommend products and services that I was familiar with and/or use myself. I established this policy because I didn’t want people to think I was saying I liked something just so they would buy it and I could make a few extra bucks. As the blog grew in popularity, this philosophy served me well as readers learned they could trust me and that I would never intentionally lead them astray – especially just in an effort to make money for myself.

However, as you might imagine, this philosophy severely limited my blog’s earning potential. For the longest time, I ran Adsense and nothing else. Then I wised-up a bit and realized that there was a way that I and my readers could both benefit from affiliate sales on my site. So I took the following steps that ultimately helped my income to skyrocket.

Step 1 - Make a list

As the writer of a money blog, I brainstormed and listed the various money-related products that I use and like. The list included Vanguard for investments, Quicken for financial tracking, various books that had made a difference in my personal money management, and a couple Credit Cards I was using to maximize my cash back rewards.

Step 2 - Supplement the list

I supplemented this list with products that my readers said they liked and recommended. Examples of these included budgeting solutions from Mvelopes and You Need a Budget.

Step 3 - Find matching affiliate programs

With the list in hand, I went on the hunt to find affiliate programs offered by these businesses. Ultimately, I was able to track down an affiliate program for each of my options except for Vanguard (I did find one for E*Trade and I use them, but I really can’t recommend them fully like I can Vanguard.)

I took a duel approach in offering the programs to my readers – I put ads on my site and I also talked about the products, how I used them, what others said about them, etc. in posts. I even took comments from readers who had their own successes with the products and posted them as endorsements of the products. Here are a few examples:

• How You Can Earn Over 2.6% Cash Back by Using a Combination of the American Express Blue Cash and Chase Freedom Cash Visa Credit Card
• Mvelopes Seems to be a Winner (At Least for Most People)
• Personal Finance Books that Can Change Your Life

The results? No contest – the post-related mentions performed much better. In many cases, the ads didn’t have any conversions at all while the in-post links generated hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars in sales per month.

What was the difference? I could honestly recommend the products, so my passion came through in the posts. Furthermore, I had tangible examples to share with readers – how to best use each item to get the most from them. In short, my enthusiasm, knowledge and personal recommendations helped to sell the products. Sales soared and hundreds, if not thousands, of readers got products that can help them to improve their personal finances. It was a win for us all!

So, what items/programs/services do you use and like? Make a list, search out affiliate programs for them, and get to writing. Your fortune could be waiting.

Commonly known in the Internet Marketing world as “article marketing”, or, “bum marketing” - it’s simply the act of submitting articles to popular article directories on any given subject, and then putting your URL in the “resource box” (the author credits) at the end of the article. The goal is to hopefully get a decent ranking in Google for your article, and when people read it, they are persuaded to click on the URL for the author that wrote the article, which leads them to your target URL (your website or whatever website you’re promoting).

Whew, that was hard to sum up in one little paragraph, and there’s still so much more to talk about, but I’m just going to cover the basics today, on the subject of using article marketing to drive traffic to your blog.

Article marketing is a wicked tool, which, if used right, can drive long term traffic to any blog. I’m serious when I say that all bloggers, even some of the “big dogs”, should actively participate in this method of traffic generation, because it works. And it works even better in numbers.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with this concept, bare with me, I’ll give you a quick tutorial below:

1. Write an article that deals with the subject of your blog. For instance, if you write about fitness, then get an article written that relates somewhat to fitness. Easy enough.

2. Pick a phenomenal title for your article. This is where you would want to do a little keyword research, but since this is meant for beginners, I won’t go into that at the moment. If you stick with titles like, “Top 10 Ways To Lose Weight Fast”, or, “21 Foods That Melt Belly Fat”, you should be just fine for now.

Note: If you are familiar with keyword research (using a tool such as the free Wordtracker keyword tool, then make sure you do a little check up to see what people are searching for in your niche, and make sure to include your chosen keyword in your title - make sense?)

3. Sign up and set up your free account over at a popular article directory such as EzineArticles.Com (the best, by far).

4. Proof read your article until you’re sure it’s perfect, and proper spelling and grammar is used.

5. Write a quick resource box (the resource box is what appears underneath your article when it goes live). I find that a quick and to the point one works best, with a call to action in it. Instead of saying something like, “Bob Jones is an expert at fitness, read his daily fitness tips here”, instead, I would say something along the lines of, “Learn 7 explosive ways to lose weight fast in our free newsletter”. I would make the word newsletter the actual link back to the site. By putting a “call to action” in the wording, your CTR (click through ratio) will be much higher. This is the whole goal of this, so a good resource box should be one of your number one priorities.

6. When all of the above is done, submit your article for approval.

7. Wait a few days until it gets approved.

8. Use an existing article in your blog, or some other website, to link to the live Ezine Article you just wrote, that way it gives it a little extra “link juice”.

9. Rinse and repeat as many times as you can stand it. Seriously, this is the way to make it happen. Writing 4 articles and expecting heaps of traffic isn’t going to happen. This is a numbers game, meaning, the more articles you get submitted, the more traffic you’re going to receive. Heck, I have articles from over a year ago still generating good traffic for an old blog of mine.

Numbers Are Your Friend

I can’t emphasize the fact enough that article marketing is purely a numbers game. The more articles you have submitted, the more traffic you’re going to receive in the long run.

You see, whenever you submit an article with a popular article directory such as EzineArticles, you stand a chance at getting a good ranking in the search engines because EA carries a lot of weight in the search engines (especially Google).

I want to present an truly awesome example of how article marketing can not only drive tons of traffic, but also put a lot of money in your pocket. There is a guy over at the WarriorForums that goes by the name, “TimG“, and he’s well known around there for his article marketing savvy. Long story short, he just posted some statistics yesterday - because he just hit the 1500 articles submitted milestone. That’s HUGE.

He obviously uses these articles to drive traffic to his websites, and here are his stats from having 1500 live articles (be ready to get jealous and cry):

Page Views: 2,231,423

URL Clicks: 141,030

Now, URL clicks were only recently started to be tracked by Ezinearticles, so one could assume that number is probably double, triple, or more. Folks, that’s a lot of traffic and clicks.

You may think that’s a lot of articles to write, but he freely admits that he outsourced a lot of it, due to the fact that even by outsourcing the articles, he still made plenty of profit from the traffic coming in to cover the costs. When you get to the point where you have 100+ articles submitted and they’re doing well, then outsourcing your article writing is probably the smartest thing you can do. Instead of using your time to write articles, you can be out there promoting and marketing your site.

Imagine, just imagine, how much money he’s pulled down from this. He’s a marketer at heart, so no doubt he used this traffic to direct it at affiliate offers, CPA offers, or whatever floats his boat. And this is just from the article submissions alone! With that many backlinks from the articles, and from people who have used his articles on their own websites (another huge factor in this), he probably has more traffic than he could ever dream of. Even if 1% of those converted to a sale, that’s a lot of dough.

One more thing, like I just mentioned a bit above - the whole point of an article directory is to provide a place for other webmasters to freely copy and paste the articles for use on their own websites, so long as they keep the author resource box in tact. Out of the 1500 articles that Tim submitted, it’s safe to say that there are quite a few webmasters out there using his articles, which of course leads to more incoming links, which in turn can help boost your search engine rankings. I’m quite sure he ranks well for a variety of keywords. Also, big E-Zines that have hundreds of thousands of readers often look at article directories for good articles to publish, so getting picked up by one of those types of sites is an article marketers dream, because if you get picked up by one of the big boys, you can expect a flood of traffic to your site, and fast.

Conclusion

So, as you can see, article marketing can be quite the worthwhile activity, especially if you get serious with it. I find it’s a great activity for when I have downtime, and I’ve recently started a quest called Bum 1000 - which is my attempt at submitting 1000 articles to EzineArticles to see how much traffic I can drive to various websites of mine.

According to the website howrichiwllbe.com, I will earned in next 10 years around about $7,449,989. Here is the proof from this website.

7,449,989
How much money will you be worth?

Have you ever thought about how rich you’ll be in the next 10 years? I know I have. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a simple scientific way to figure out how much you’ll make in the future? Well, there is!
A new site has been created that answers the question, “How rich will I be?” They’re using this review to help generate some buzz for the new venture. By taking a minute or two to answer 15 easy questions, How Rich Will I Be will be able tell you exactly how rich you will be. How does the site do this? The creator refused to reveal the top secret algorithm the site uses, but he claims it’s extremely accurate and can tell how much you’ll make in the next 10 year down to the nearest dollar.
What a great stress reliever this site is. No longer will you have to wonder about your financial future. Just by answering 15 questions, your monetary fate will be spelled out before you. After you find out how rich you’ll be, the site will produce a nice plaque to proudly display on your blog and make all your friends green with envy.
How Rich Will I Be?
At first I was reluctant to use this site because I may not like the answer. However, I overcame my initial fear and gave the questions a go.
Imagine how wide my eyes got when How Rich Will I Be told me I’ll be worth $21,520,951 in the next 10 years. What kind of crap is that? That number is way too low! The site needs to adjust its algorithm to add one or two more zeros to it.
How rich will you be? Take the test and find out. Post your results in the comments. If you end up richer than me, please tell me how you answered your questions so I can get richer.

There are literally thousands of blogs in this niche. The main reason is many people like me who start looking for ways to make money online are convinced by many that the best way to make money is to start a blog and place adsense on their blogs. Let me give you my example to explain it well. I starting blogging about a year back writing about things like law of attraction, love, meditation etc. I started with hubpages and continued with this blog. Then when I thought of making money online, I started looking for the ways and started reading many about this. As I already was writing for a blog, I joined adsense program and placed ads on this site and also hubpages. Then I started getting some money in cents every day. The logic was if I can make a cent a day, I can also make a dollar a day and if I can make 1 dollar every day, I can also make 100 dollars every day. So I started pursuing the idea of making money online seriously.

As I said there are thousands of blogs teaching you how to make money online and I started reading many of them regularly. I haven’t learned much with these blogs as they are good marketers than teachers. They make you buy things which are referred by them so that they can get the commission, nothing else. I understood one thing by their teaching, if I start a blog on a topic in which I have lot of knowledge and work hard on my blog, start getting readers who subscribe to me I can make a lot of money by selling things to them. I started thinking seriously and want do you think I will be an expert after reading hundreds of blogs for about a year about making money online. Yes I became an expert in the information on making money online. No I was not making any money but the only I subject which is fresh in my mind, the only subject I have access to easily, the only subject I have lot of information about is making money online. This is main reason why there are so many blogs on this subject.

No I haven’t started a blog on this subject. Continuing my research, I happened to visit a blog which was completely different from all the other blogs I have been reading so for. The blogger calls himself Grizzly. He just tell you how he is making money using adsense in very minute details. The best thing is he is a natural teacher. If you are interested in making money online the honest way and the hard working way, visit his blog. His blog is How to Make Money Online for Beginners at http://makemoneyforbeginners.blogspot.com/ . I still don’t know why he is interested in teaching us the his ways and creating more competition for himself. But sometimes we cannot stop ourselves from helping other however selfish we may think we are.

HomeTips.com nails down big revenue with Google AdSense.

Home advice website HomeTips.com started out in a backyard clubhouse. Seeking a quiet, woodsy spot for writing home improvement books, author Don Vandervort converted the bottom floor of his sons’ two-story treehouse into a small office. He launched HomeTips.com from that office in 1997, essentially as an online portfolio to promote his books.

In the decade since, HomeTips has grown into a large and popular site, thanks to the authority Vandervort has developed and the volume of content he has collected and posted from his more than two dozen books, scores of magazine articles, and many television appearances on ABC and HGTV.

Challenge

Until about three years ago, HomeTips’ main source of revenue came from writing, publishing, and licensing books and content to other companies, such as Sunset Books and Microsoft. This business expanded significantly after Vandervort moved to larger offices in Glendale, California, and assembled a team of editors, writers, and artists.

Though his book and content business was thriving, the website’s meager revenue came from online sales of guides and reports. When a visitor requested one of these, Vandervort would email it to them and trust them to send three dollars. “At that time, I couldn’t find a good system for these small transactions,” he recalls. “It was an interesting way for us to stay in touch with our visitors’ needs, but a money-losing proposition. We needed advertising for the web business to be viable.” But the small editorial team was far too busy working at their core business of creating content to develop an advertising program.

Results

In 2003, Vandervort heard about the Google AdSense program and thought it might be helpful for creating incremental revenue that could work for HomeTips. As he notes, “It took about 20 minutes to set it up - and that 20 minutes completely changed our business.”

He started by testing AdSense on a few pages. During the first week, he remembers that AdSense revenue paid for coffee; the second week, it paid for lunches. The model clearly worked, so he began expanding the program across the entire site. Now AdSense revenue pays for all salaries, overhead, and business development.

“Google’s ability to deliver targeted ads is remarkable,” says Vandervort. “In fact, because the ads are so relevant to the content on any given page, we believe that they are a very useful resource for our visitors. This is evidenced by the fact that, on many of our pages, more than 10 percent of our visitors click through to the advertisers for more information,” he adds.

HomeTips now sees more than 1 million online visitors each month. “Solid content is the secret to developing a following,” says Vandervort. “If you write expert content with your visitor’s needs in mind, the rest will follow.”

As the business has grown up, so have the sons whose backyard clubhouse Vandervort first commandeered for an office. Now they bring media experience to the business: Gabriel as a former writer/producer of shows for The History Channel and Christian as a cinematographer and film editor. HomeTips anticipates online video to be the next area of growth. “Nothing can show you how to do something as clearly and adeptly as a video,” says Vandervort. “As we see the migration of advertising dollars from television to the web, we expect video content and advertising to do very well.”

The HomeTips team constantly tests site design, navigation, and ad optimization to improve both the user experience and the success of advertising. Vandervort points out the fact that channel reporting and Google Analytics are a big help in this effort. “These analytics help us zero in on where we’re doing the best job and where we need to do more. As a result, our performance just keeps going up.”

About Google AdSense

Google AdSense is a program enabling online businesses to earn revenue from serving ads precisely targeted to specific web content and search pages. With service levels ranging from online sign-up to dedicated support management, a broad range of sites profit from AdSense. Thousands of Google advertisers also benefit from AdSense by gaining exposure on sites across the Google Network, which includes many of the Top 100 Media Metrix sites such as AOL, About.com, Amazon, Ask.com, and Lycos.