Blog For Money - Make Money from Blogging

I was reading a post over on the A4U Forum today about when the best time to launch a new site is. Perhaps the immediate answer that comes to mind is "when it's ready" but I don't think it's that simple.

Obviously, you want the search engines to index your site as quickly as possible but you also don't want people visiting and being put off by incomplete content before it's ready. Plus you don't want to upload a site with a load of dead end links.

This is why I always try an adopt a "stages stratergy" when I'm uploading new sites. What I mean by this is that I'll always split parts of the site up so that they can be published independantly of other sections, as this way you can get some inbound links and keep adding more content gradually.

I came across Blogarate the other day, which is a cool widget that lets readers give your blog posts a star rating out of 5. It isn’t just a rating system though, it also sends blog posts back to the Blogarate website, along with the post star rating, and displays it Digg style.

Obivously, it's advantage over sites like Digg is that you're actually giving a post or article a rating, which could be good or bad, as opposed to just voting for decent posts, which is much more useful for the author.

Although this is a pretty good widget, I think it's more suited to business or news type blogs than personal blogs. I reckon it would be especially good for content or article sites/blogs that are using wordpress as a cms, as it's a good way to get feedback on your content from your users and probably get some extra traffic from the Blogarate site too.

After having a online business idea in your head, the next step you gonna do is to make a new blog or website. At present, you can either make your own website from your HTML knowledge or using softwares like Dreamweaver or Frontpage. On the other hand, there are many free or paid websites that provide you with thousands of professionally-designed templates. Bu before doing so, you need to make a self-assessment and think about the following questions:

1. Would you like to make money with PPC programs like Adsense, Bidvertiser or TLA? If yes, you'll need to plan for on-site advertising space in the website design.

2. Do your website design need to have forums or message boards so that you can interact with your readers?

3. Do you want to reserve some space to display articles or posts?

4. Are you going to use a content management system (CMS) to run your website?

5. Is there a need to add audio or video player on your website?

Once you have answered these questions, it is time to start designing a website for your online business. You have a few general options to consider when deciding how to design a website:

1. Search for a ready-made professional web template from free website template sites, or buy one from a web template provider. Personally, I prefer to search the free templates since their qualities are already up-to-my-standard, and most importantly, they are FREE! After downloading the template, you should, if you have basic HTML knowledge, customize the template to fit your needs.

2. Pay a web design company or professional Web designer to design and create a custom website according to your requests and needs.

3. Design a website yourself if you already possess web design skills and experience or you can take a course to learn about web design and HTML code.

No matter which methods you are going to choose, get a groovy website for you because only those websites with professional appearance will attract visitors. Last but not least, you may wish to show the website to your friends to have review. In order to thank my readers, I am always glad and available to review websites for them.

I have to say I miss you all. Can someone tell me how many days there are for my disappearance? I guess there should be more than 5 months!! I am so sorry that I haven't posted any Adsense tips and tricks in the blog for so long. I was busying with my stuff in my workplace. In September and October, I was working in a project for a development in Kygyzstan (hope my spelling is correct though I worked as a planner for over two months with this lovely country), a nation in Central Asia. Originally, I would like to share the CGI images showing such development for nearly 2,000 hectares, but unluckily I still kept them in my ex-working company.

And then in November and December, I worked in the government and handle all the planning application (there is a completed and well-structured planning system in Hong Kong here). So I am quite busy from time to time over this three months.

While I stopped to post for a week, I found that I was getting lazier and lazier to post a new post. After a month, I even lost my insentive too, and even did not logged in my blogger account to take care of the comments. Until recently, I came across a book explaining in Adsense (it is written in Cantonese), I can easily figure out those mistakes and errors from the book. That initiates and encourages me to jump back into my Adsense business.

Coincidentally, the moderator of the Adsense Help Group has announced a new policy to halt the fighting in the forum. This is such a good news to all the publishers and active participants there since this forum had been ruinned by one or two sabotage publishers (namely JDSense). All these are encouraging me to jump back, and share more Adsense tips with all my readers.