Blog For Money - Make Money from Blogging

If you login your Adsense account is these few days, you must notice that there is a page showing the new Terms and Conditions (T&C) on the first page, and prompting you to read through and accept them. If you decide not to accept or forget to accept it by 5.3.2008, your account will then be terminated. That means if you want to continue to participate in this Adsense program like me, you have to accept it.

This time around, most of the changes to the Terms and Conditions fall into two broad categories: 1) future products and features and 2) privacy requirements. In addition to that, there are some specific requirements that make it necessary for publishers to post and abide by a transparent privacy policy that users see. According to this policy, publishers must notify their users of the use of cookies and/or web beacons to collect data in the ad serving process. This change relates to advertisers' use of innovative products and features like Gadget Ads and other offerings in the future.

Clear enough? You are required to show your visitors a "transparent privacy policy". Although there is no clear standard format of such privacy policy should look like, some publishers already put the policies in order to entertain Google. To me, I am planning to make a separate page to show it. Many publishers asked me how to make one in their sites. Luckily, I found one site that is useful to make the policy by filling the necessary information. If you cannot afford to lose your Adsense account, you may try to have your own privacy policy here.

But honestly, since this updated T&C is freshly released, Google should provide enough time for us to accommodate and fulfill it. No worry if you don't want to make such privacy policy at the moment, or you are out of town right now.

Since this is quite an important announcement by Google, I will post it to both Da Gsense Code and Blog For Money.

Further to my previous post on hiring someone else to write article for you, I would like to share more about article writing if you refuse to do it yourself. What can you do if you don't want to pay for an article, and yet want to keep up the posting frequency in your blog? Another solution is to ask your readers to write for you. OF course, it is only applicable to those big blogs with at least 100 RSS readers.

Have you ever considered that your readership can provide you a good source of articles? Since most likely your readers also know the topic of blog well (otherwise they would not subscribe your feed, and stay the top of your blog new posts), they can easily write a related post for you. However, the main problem of this method is quality, and most of the time, the articles are merely copied from other sites which make it no longer unique. Make sure that you need to obtain the ownership of the article, after receiving it from the readers.

Although you maybe very familiar with the topic of the blog you are writing, you may not have the idea to write a post every time, especially if you post everyday in your blog. It comes to a dilemma, it is good to have post everyday, but you do not know what to write for the coming days. Even do how much I try; my mind just never feed me with some thoughts to write about. But this is not the only reason why we can’t provide new entries to our blogs at times. I mean, let's be honest. We all are not free for our blogs all the time. But how do successful bloggers find solutions in similar situation like this?

Let the expert make new entries to your blog. What, are you kidding? No, I'm serious and yes, successful bloggers do invite other bloggers to post entries to their blogs. This will not mean they are out of topics to discuss with. They simply understand that they are not an expert to all the subjects their readers wanted to read about, of which their blog should provide. So, they invite others to post to their blogs.

Some bloggers hire people to make entries to their blog while others form some alliance with other bloggers to setup for cross-posting.

Hiring professional writers to make some entries to your blog means you have to pay certain amount of money. So, you have to weigh the expenses for hiring against the value these writers will add into your blog in terms of keeping the traffic coming and the returns that will be made from those traffic. The other thing you need to keep in mind is that most writers for hire are not experts on the subject you wanted them to write about. Only they do extensive research to make them sound an expert.

The good thing about hiring writers for your blog is that you will earn all the credits from your readers of providing the information they wanted as they may not know that you're paying somebody to make entries for you. They see you as a total expert.

Making alliance to other bloggers and inviting the same for cross-posting is another good way of keeping the traffic coming and in increasing blog traffic as well. The good thing about this is that invited bloggers are mostly experts on the subject you wanted them to talk about and they will do this all for free to gain more exposure, build and spread their credibility and to win more readers from other's blog. You will enjoy the same opportunity by also cross-posting to their blogs.

Whether you hire writers to write something about for your blog or you form alliance with other bloggers by cross-posting, the bottom line is, you need to satisfy your readers by give them the information they wanted. I am planning to have one too, if you are interested, please let me know by any means.

I have previously written a post on directory submission, and I want to discuss more on it today. Almost all bloggers should know that directory submission will increase blog traffic to a certain extent. I know, you knew it but how much have you done submitting your blog and RSS feed to blog directories? Blog directories is a bit different from the normal directory that it is specifically designed for blog submission only and the classification inside is far more detailed.

I suppose, this is a good opportunity to conduct a survey. Another follow-up question is this, how much directory submission will you think be enough to turn your blog into money making machine? When your target is blog for money, maybe or just maybe 100 directory submission will not be enough. For this blog, I aimed for 1000 directory submission done before the year ends. I will post here names and links of the directories to which this blog is submitted and keep this entry updated until I reach 1000 submission. Later, after some time, in my future post, I may be able to tell you which directories will bring good blog traffic. So keep visiting this blog.

To many bloggers, TrackBack may not be a popular thing. Many do not even know about it and among those who are knowledgeable about TrackBack, never used it on their blogs. But, I am going to share this little tools, since this tool can be a very effective one to bring good traffic to your site, if you know how to use it properly.

At the very beginning, you may want to know: "what is TrackBack?"

TrackBack is a system implemented by Movable Type and later adopted by many blogging tools, including TypePad, BoastMachine, WordPress, and Nucleus. Essentially, TrackBack is a mechanism or platform for communication between blogs and bloggers. If a blogger writes a new post commenting on or referring to the post found on another blog and if both the commenting blogger's blog and the other blog has TrackBack mechanism support, then the commenting blogger can notify the other blog with a "TrackBack ping" which means the other blog will automatically display a backlink and summaries of the commenting blogger's new post at the post which had been cited to.

How Do We Notify The Other Blog with a TrackBack Ping?

First, understand that not all blog has enable TrackBack functionality. When they do, you should see a TrackBack link at the bottom of the post. Once you find the link and you wish to talk about the post made by another blogger, click the TrackBack link of that post and copy the TrackBack URL.

Once you have that TrackBack URL, go to your own blog and create a new entry related to that post. Before posting your entry, paste the TrackBack URL in the space provided for TrackBacks. This will send the notification to the blog you referenced once you publish your entry. Therefore, there, you've sent a TrackBack. Just make sure when you're sending TrackBack URLs that your blog entry is relevant to the one you are referring to. Otherwise, you will be perceived as a TrackBack spammer.

How to use TrackBack Effectively Increase Blog Traffic?

Remember, sending TrackBack ping to other blog will automatically create a backlink and summaries of the commenting blogger's new post at the post which had been cited to. Unlike usual backlinks, backlinks made by TrackBack ping may not increase your search engine ranking but will still served as a doorway to your blog.

To increase blog traffic using TrackBack, send TrackBack ping to high traffic blogs and popular blog post. This will cause a portion of their traffic flowing to your blog. Also send TrackBack ping to blogs whose theme are closely related to your blog as their loyal blog traffic will certainly be interested in your post.

Again, just make sure when you're sending TrackBack ping that your blog entry is relevant to the one you are referring to.

Also, if you want to let people send TrackBack pings to your weblog, make sure that you have it enabled. Some blogging systems like Blogger need extra plugins or third party services to have TrackBack feature. To have this blog a Trackback feature I need to use a free third party services by HaloScan.

HaloScan Brings TrackBack Functionality to Blogger, Blogspot, and other Blogging tools w/o their own commenting and trackback features

According to the News from HaloScan.com, "HaloScan fills this need by providing you not only with the (free) commenting services we have provided for the last one and half years, but also easy, seamless integration of trackback services (both incoming and outgoing ping support) to all existing and future Haloscan members. All this at the unbeatable price of $0.00–FREE. Getting started requires minimal work–sign up, log in and follow the simple, two-step directions to install trackback and/or commenting into your weblog. We highly recommend that all existing and new users install both the commenting and trackback services but you can also install just one or the other as needed. If you have trouble with any part of this process, we'll be glad to help! Also, be sure to send a trackback ping to this post if you install the trackback system or write about us in your weblog."

The only difference when using HaloScan's TrackBack feature is that, sending TrackBack ping is no longer made from your blog’s new post but from your account in HaloScan site.

If you use TrackBack effectively, it can definitely help you get constant blog traffic round-the-clock.

As stated in my previous post, this blog implemented Technorati Tag to get some traffic. So, maybe you might ask, how was it? What's the traffic? Honestly, I still don't no. It's too early to track the traffic and this blog is just 3 days old. But I will start telling you about the traffic maybe after 10 posts.

Today, I visited high traffic blogs and try to list down their common features. There are a number of which but for now, I will just tackle one - RSS feed. Yes, most high traffic blogs publish RSS feed.

Every serious blogger publishes an RSS feed of his posts and readers aggregate all their favorites blogs feeds in an aggregator. When you publish your RSS feed, your viewers will thank you, and there will be more of them, because it allows them to see your site without going out of their way to visit.

While this seems bad at first glance, it actually improves your blog's visibility; by making it easier for your users to keep up with your site - allowing them to see it the way they want to - it's more likely that they'll know when something that interests them is available on your site.

For example, imagine your blog announces a new product or feature every week or two. Without a feed, your viewers have to remember to come to your blog and see if they find anything new - if they have time. If you provide a feed for them, they can point their aggregator or other software at it, and it will give them a link and a description of developments at your blog almost as soon as they happen.

By providing a feed, you are in front of them constantly, improving the chances that they'll click through to a post that catches their eye and visit your blog.

Here, this blog now provide a feed for which anybody can subscribe. There are various formats or protocols of feed available such as RSS and Atom. However, my feeds are readable to any format the subscriber is using because of SmartFeed service by FeedBurner. So what is FeedBurner?

FeedBurner

FeedBurner is a service that takes a normal, everyday RSS or Atom feed of any kind and turns (burns) it into a FeedBurner feed that you can then distribute to readers for use in any RSS reader. The company currently hosts more than 470,000 combined RSS and Atom feeds for over 280,000 content publishers and delivered feeds to 19 million subscribers.

One reason a blog owner would want to use this is because it simplifies the RSS feed. The Feed URL for this blog, for instance, is http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogformoney2, which is a much simpler format that standard RSS feeds. Also, most blogging software offers a variety of RSS feeds - Atom, RSS 1.0, 2.0, etc. Sometimes these feeds don’t work properly with some readers. And if a blog can get most of its readers to use the single Feedburner feed, they can take advantage of the great statistics and tools to see where readers are coming from and what they are clicking on.

Another big reason for using FeedBurner, however, is that it can automatically add Google Adsense ads to your feeds, allowing you to easily generate revenue if you have a large enough audience. For more information, come and visit Feedburner.

In order to turn your blog as well as this blog into money making machine it needs to have traffic. No traffic simple means no money. The higher the traffic you get, the higher the chances of you getting big money. So getting traffic is all important.

Many first time blogger automatically assume that once their blog is setup and they put a few posts on it, they will get some hits and regular readers. This is definitely a wrong impression. You won't get any traffic if no one knows about your blog. So at this early, it is good to focus on how to boost traffic for your blog.

I took a look around at what some of the successful blogs were doing and came up with a number of traffic strategies that help them increase their blog traffic. As we go along, I will discuss these strategies one by one. For now, let me talk about boosting your blog traffic with Technorati.

Technorati is one of the best traffic providers for bloggers. People find your blogs easily when people search by technorati tags. Technorati will rank your blog based on the number of links from other websites. The higher your rank the easier your blog is to find when people search for things.

Again, how will Technorati give you great traffic? Basically, you need to do three things: First, add tags that are specific to your blog. Next, add tags that people are likely to be searching for that also apply to the things that you are writing about. Lastly, actively recruit links from other blogs to your blog by asking other bloggers to link to you.

Great, how do I get started?

It's so simple to get started with Technorati. First you sign up, and get a username and password. Once you've signed up and logged, you'll see a box that says "Claim your blog." Technorati offers a few different ways to verify that the blog you're claiming is, in fact, yours. It just wouldn't do to have people claiming other people's blogs!