Out of all of the methods of making a bit of cash through blogging, which are the three that I would keep above all others? Well, it’s an easy answer, but ask me again in a month and I could just have changed my mind!

Indeed, what I favour today for making cash could well be in my pile of wastes of time in a year, month or even a year. However, I still feel these are a good three to stick with.

Google’s Adsense – an easy and simple way to make some cash, if you have plenty of traffic to your blog and better still if your topic is highly profitable. Hobby blogs might not have lots of high paying keywords, whereas finance and a lot of other categories could have keywords that pay very well. If there is a lot of PPC adverts on suitable search terms, then there is probably a lot of value in the adverts.

But it is very simple to use – install the adverts in a block or two and as long as you have high traffic levels, there should be a little income. However, it is not quite as simple as this. If your high traffic is regular readers, then you might not earn that much, the best comes from one off readers!

PayPerPost – probably my favourite paid to post system. Add your blog and wait for advertisers to open opportunities to you. You set your prices and with each paid post that you create your account slowly accrues payments. As with all paid to post systems, you can end up writing a lot of off topic posts as if you turn down to high a percentage of opportunities, you will stop seeing any opportunities being open to you.

What I don’t like is that the advertisers individually set down the rules as to how many words they want and so on. They might have paid for 30 words, but if they insist of 250 then that is what you have to do. They can also unfairly reject posts, however that is very rare.

BlogDistributor – a new system and one that is growing and needs to grow! These are very strict on blog quality – both existing posts and what you write for them – so a lot of non native English speakers will not be approved. Posts are checked by their team, which should mean consistency, but not always!

However, they pay well and because the approvals is by the team, rather than the advertisers, you quickly learn more about what they expect and it is generally a lot fairer approval process.

BlogsVertise is another spin on the old paid to blog systems that sometimes you will either love or hate.

It is reasonably easy to set up within BlogsVertise. Just sign up and add your blogs. From experience, you really need to be adding blogs of PR3+, but PR2+ do also get some work.

Then they allocate your tasks and give you a week in which to complete the work. The instructions are a little vague, asking for 2 – 3 paragraphs, which seems rather small, although I did also find mention of a word count buried somewhere in the T&C one day.

They also ask for 3 links, unless otherwise specified. This is quite a high link to content ratio for 2 – 3 paragraphs!

Once completed, tell them your post’s URL and they then approve or decline it. Declined posts can be fixed, but most of my declines have been really stupid reasons, such as “The advertiser has changed their mind on keywords” and the best was “Your PageRank has dropped”. That excuse was given almost a month after submission and really annoyed me!

Payments are a little erratic. Each job comes with it’s own (random???) price. There’s no rhyme or reason to their pricing – this week I’ve had a PR2 post for 30% more than a PR3 post of the same size. Then a month after making the post it becomes eligible for payment. However, this is a manual process and can often be a week late and pretty random.

There is supposed to be a way of grabbing extra tasks by selecting one of the uncompleted (not enough bloggers took it up) tasks. When I first joined these appeared a couple of times per week and there was a good choice. However, I’ve just gone 2 months without any tasks from them at all, then 2 in 2 days.

Whether they themselves were struggling to find advertisers or whether the demographics required suddenly excluded my blogs I do not know. However, the posts that I did were completely off topic, but well paid.

Give it a try if you have a blog with a PageRank, but the offer price is supposed to increase as you prove your blogging quality, so you probably need to be fluent in English.

This is a system that I have grown to enjoy working with. Although, I must admit at first it annoyed me no end and seemed a waste of time. But hang in and it works!

It’s like many other paid to blog systems. Submit blog, wait for jobs, complete the work and then leave it live to await payment.

So, in what ways is it different to other blogs? Well, they control a lot more of what is going on than other systems. There are a lot of quality checks and they have higher quality standards than other sites.

It starts with the review of your website. If it is not written in perfect English with perfect spellings you will be asked to correct the blog and resubmit for consideration.

Then you get going. Prices are set within the system according to your PageRank. You are told there are jobs available and if any interest you, sign on and reserve a slot. This is a good way of working and I like it this way around.

It’s just not clear how long you reserve a job for. The T&C says you have 24 hours, but I’ve had reservations released in a lot less time than that.

That aside, you write a post around the given keywords, including the exact keyword in the title & post. But, you do not know the advertiser’s website. You only need to prepare for 1 keyword and typically you would be writing about 100+ words per post.

Then it is submission time again. Submit the post for review and if there is a slightest spelling or grammar mistake you are told to correct it. You have a maximum of 3 attempts to get it right, or the submission is scrapped.

Once they are happy with it you are then given the advertiser’s site to link to. This means going back and editing the post, which at first I found to be a pain. But, you get used to it quickly.

Payments are issued at the start of each month for all posts completed the previous month, if you have a minimum of $100 accrued.

It is a good system, however at the moment the system is new and the jobs are completely off topic and the same ones keep coming back day after day. I’ve written about metal roofs, Vancouver web design and a few other topics many times.

However, they do pay well and reasonably quickly! Take a look at blogdistributor.com and maybe they will soon get the publicity they need to expand and get more interesting work through!

I just happened to notice whilst going through my server logs that someone has been making an attempt to hack this blog today!

They did not get far, so it seems. On the first attempt they gave up, presumably as the weakness that they were trying to exploit did not work and hopefully that means that they have gone elsewhere.

But, why does this show a sense of humour? Well they targeted their work on an individual post and that post was one of the blogging security series of posts that I wrote back in August.

It does not come as any surprise at all that such a series should be of interest to hackers. I am sure that they would love it if they had got in and had been able to corrupt my series in some way or other. But, I’ve carefully checked my server logs and it does seem there was only the one attempt and all logins to the admin system correlate to when I know I myself logged on.

So this time I seem to have escaped their attentions. Hopefully next time, and I am sure there will be a next time, I am so lucky as well. You can never just cross your fingers with blog security, you must protect your assets!

A lot of bloggers earn money through paid to blog schemes, but these have a lot of problems involved with them. If you are thinking of starting out with these or are already involved, what must you know?

When you start out down the road of paid to blog (or paid to post) the most obvious problem can be hitting your readers with lots of adverts.

These schemes work in one of two ways. Either you are presented with lists of opportunities and have to select those you are interested in, or you are passed opportunities / jobs from the system without any prior input.

And this is the big problem that I find. If you pre-select the posts you will work with there is a lot of effort looking through what is available and bidding on the work and only a few ever turn into paid posts.

However, if you are just sent work straight away without you pre-selecting, then you get all sorts of junk. You might have chosen to categorise your blog correctly, but desperate advertisers wanting lots of posts will just select every category they see.

And systems that work this way usually punish you if you start turning down more than a few percent of the work offered to you. This leaves you with a stark choice. Either you do it and put up with perfume adverts on your business blog, or you forget the easier money systems and just use the labour intensive systems.

A related problem is the advertisers’ understanding of the way the system works. Some will give very detailed specifications as to how the post will look, telling you what it must contain, how it must be written and so on.

However, they are forgetting that you are writing an advert aimed at the readers of your blog, not an advert for national press. You, the blogger, know what attracts your readers to your blog and know your style of writing. Having a style that is totally different dictated to you can really throw the flow of your blog.

I have even had advertisers insist that the post be written in French, even though my blog and its audience are all English speakers!

Lastly, of course, is the fear of what punishment you might get from the search engines. My experience of guest posting, article directories and other times when we are publishing articles with external links suggests that as long as everything is in proportion, the search engines will probably overlook your deeds.

If you are writing 400 – 500 words and inserting 2 or 3 links, then the ratio of content to external links is quite good. However, many advertisers try to be greedy and I have seen paid posts demanding 3 external links within 30 a word write up. This is obviously the advertiser trying to pay for less, but the ratio of content to links is poor and the search engines will at best ignore the post, at worst punish your blog.

In short, if you are willing to put up with irrelevant adverts that are completely off topic and do not mind sometimes writing a lot more than the advertisers are paying for to keep your content to link ratio good, then paid posting can succeed.

However, if you are expecting a lot of offers themed around your blog’s content you could be very disappointed and quickly walking away!

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Simple!

After a little bit of research, I have removed Login Lockdown and instead installed Limit Login Attempts.

After trying them both out, Login Lockdown was too easy to beat. However, Limit Login Attempts gives a lot more options and I cannot beat it! Once I have made all of my failed attempts that was it. There was no way into the website.

Well, apart from using phpMyAdmin and clearing the value against limit_login_lockouts in the options table!

So I am quite pleased with this plugin, that is a lot harder to find. But it is well worth it. There are a lot more set-up options. For example you can lock out an IP address after a couple of failed attempts, but only lock them out for a short time. If there are then more failed attempts you can then lock that IP address out for a lot longer and you can also set it up so that the admin user gets an email whenever someone is locked out (but I haven’t seen that email arrive yet from my testing, maybe this machine isn’t set up to get the admin emails).

WordPress is generally a secure tool to use, but the biggest weakness is the login and people trying to guess at your admin username and password. So such plugins can help secure your blog.

It was, until recently, one of the plugins that I listed on by top 5 plugins. However, after some playing with the plugin I am afraid that I am removing from my list. It just doesn’t live up to the promises that it makes.

Not on my installations anyway. Feel free to let me know though if you have it working!

First, it did not create the table that it needed during the installation process. This was easily remedied even if the plugin never told me that it was not recording failed login attempts.

And, once the table was created it did indeed lockout the wp-login.php page. But, by simply submitting the login request to the wp-admin page instead, I could still login!

This is obviously a huge failing. I would simulate the three failed logins, be logged out, go to the wp-admin page and then login quite happily. I tried the process again and the same happend. I even checked the table in case I was given a new IP address during the attempts, but the same IP address was recorded all 6 times.

Whether it stops anyone getting on with a script I am doubtful. Without writing a bulk login script to test it out I do not know for certain. But I am very dubious.

Sadly, it looks like I might be back to the dreaded security plugin that I have just removed that validates every IP address. There has to be something better for me to use!

You might have noticed that there has not been a major PageRank update since the first weekend of April. This has broken the longest ever time that Google has gone before of not updating the PageRank toolbar by a couple of weeks and we’re still counting.

So, has Google given up updating PageRank and would it really matter to the internet if it had? Well, I think the answers are “No” and “Yes”.

No, Google has not updated for a long time, but there have been minor corrections. I redirected a site to a grey barred page only a couple of weeks ago and that page now shows the original page’s PageRank. So minor corrections are taking place, just not the major update that a lot of people are waiting for.

Would it matter? Well SEO experts will tell you that directly the answer is “No”. But then, how many of them are buying paid posts from PayPerPost, InPostLinks and so on? And you can bet they are willing to pay a lot more to a PR4 blog than a PR0 blog.

So to those buying & selling links, PageRank is a major factor. There are other factors we could use, such as the number of inbound links (from Google or Yahoo), the Alexa rating or general traffic stats, but these all report on the behaviour of the entire site.

It would be simple to create a quality website and then start to sell links on a blog that is a sub directory of the website and all measures apart from PageRank would reflect what is happening on the main area of the site. The blog could be virtually hidden from view or blocked in some way and the only measure of this is its PageRank.

So I do not think that Google has quite given up on PageRank, not just yet. There are too many small corrections. But I could foresee a future in which it might just happen and the world of sponsored blogs could be turned upside down for a short while.

I do not know quite what made me do it, but I went to the admin logon screen of one of my blogs that has login lockdown installed and purposely entered the wrong password.

After 10 attempts (with login lockdown set to block at 3), I tried the right password and it logged on. Not quite right!

So I started investigating what could be wrong with this great little plugin. In the end I was trawling through the code behind the plugin and I was looking through the installation function and there there is a routine to add a new table to the database. Yet, that table does not exist!

Quite a simple job then to manually create the table. But it is worth while testing the lockdown is working on your blog. But just do not test it just before you need to logon! Try it out at a time when you can leave it for a while, or reduce the logout time before you test it. Or just clear out your login_fails table to reset it.

Here’s the SQL you need to run to insert the table to your database. Just replace [prefix] with whatever prefix you have given in your config file when you installed WordPress. Once this table is added, it works. However, I am still testing to see if it works quite as well as it is supposed to…

CREATE TABLE [prefix]login_fails (
`login_attempt_ID` bigint(20) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`user_id` bigint(20) NOT NULL,
`login_attempt_date` datetime NOT NULL default ’0000-00-00 00:00:00′,
`login_attempt_IP` varchar(100) NOT NULL default ”,
PRIMARY KEY (`login_attempt_ID`) );