InPostLinks (IPL) is part of the Izea family (along with PayPerPost, Sponsored Tweets, Sponzai, Social Spark etc). Some people make good money with it, others struggle. What’s the difference?
Well advertisers create opportunities and segment them, if they wish, For example by blog category, PageRank & country. They also set a price and a maximum number of completed opportunities.
Bloggers then pick up those opportunities that are of interest to them. You can do each opportunity only once (no matter how many blogs you have listed) and four opportunities per day per blog. And frequently, when you complete an opportunity, you are benched across all of your blogs for that advertiser for a short time (you are not allowed to use your blog to complete any more of their related opportunities). For each opportunity you do, you have to write around 200 words about the given link.
This means there are two ‘problem’ areas. First, you need to be in the group selected to be eligible. Second, you need to sign on quick and see the opportunity.
Simply by hanging around on the site all day long every day you will get more opportunities. The most popular (those with a half decent pay rate) can come and go within minutes.
After that, it is all down to falling into the chosen segment. You cannot do much about the country that you blog from, but choosing your blog category correctly can help (although most opportunities seem to go to all categories).
The only measure that you can really work on is your PageRank (which doesn’t update that often, if at all, these days). A higher PageRank will make you eligible for more opportunities.
And that is about it. Most opportunities on the system seem to want US bloggers with a high PageRank, who are willing to post 200 words for next to nothing.
If you are lucky though (good PageRank), you should be able to fight with the best and get plenty of work. But that seems to be the secret of success with IPL.
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]]>Many bloggers choose PayPerPost as their source of an income. But, many newcomers are struggling to earn and asking how to earn more. Well, read on!
The reason why so many people use PayPerPost (PPP) first and before other paid to blog schemes is also the major problem with the scheme. And that is that any blogger can join. Some bloggers will also sign up to PPP before they create their first blog.
Daft as this might seem, it happens, and then they ask why are they not earning. Well although it is a free marketplace, advertisers want something in return and you have to make sure that you are giving them exactly what they want. What’s more, give them what they want and you make your blog more attractive to the other paid to post systems that will vet you before setting you free on their system.
So, what’s needed? Well first of all a Google PageRank is the main driving factor in the system. With a grey bar or PR0 blog then you earn next to nothing per post. PR1 blogs earn more and PR2 even more and so on.
However, we have not (at the time of writing) seen a major PageRank update for over 7 months, so it looks like this measure has been retired, even though most paid blogging schemes use it as a basis for how much to pay per post written.
This lack of an update also means that you have very little control over what is going on with your blog, but there are other elements you can work on.
Hidden from bloggers is the Yahoo Back Links count (YBL). The more backlinks you have showing on Yahoo the higher you rank within your PageRank list. A relatively new blog will therefore be bottom of the PR0s. However, get plenty of backlinks and you go to the top of your group and there are advertisers that appreciate that a good YBL count counts for a lot.
The next thing to work on is a little contentious. Some agree that it is required, others say it is not needed. But, it does appear that themed blogs without too many paid posts do get a lot more opportunities than those that don’t look so good, are poorly written and full of paid content.
I know from my own collection of blogs that I get more opportunities (everything else being roughly equal) on those blogs that I write to often, but these slow down if I am too busy to write for long and too many paid posts appear.
And that is basically it, apart from set your prices realistically and make sure that your blog description reads well, in good English.
To summarise, work on the backlinks your blog has and add plenty of quality content along with the the paid content. Quite simple really, it just takes time and effort.
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]]>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.
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]]>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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]]>If you want to make some money online, then one of the easiest ways is through Adsense. And the easiest way to setup a website is your own blog. So, what is needed?
Setting up your blog is quite simple. There are free tools and free or paid hosting options. But, the main thing to consider is the subject of your blog.
There are advantages and disadvantages all around. Some topics are earning a lot more per click and have readers that are more prone to clicking on the adverts than other subjects. However, if your specialism is in one of these lower value blogs, you might be able to produce a lot more writing than if you aimed for a higher value blog.
This means that your first decision is what will you blog about? Find something that you can write about a lot – you will be posting a couple of times per week – but out of the list of choices you come up with, work out which is likely to be worth the most.
Now, create your blog. Choose a good looking theme and sign up to Adsense and drop in a few adverts. A lot of people recommend only using 2 advert positions, which prevents the blog looking too much like a commercial. But put the adverts in places where your readers will notice them. Within the block of the main text and main navigation links are good targets, over at the side and the very bottom are bad ideas. You want the adverts to be clear and tempting to encourage readers to see them and click.
Next, start writing and promoting your blog. Write 3 or 4 new posts per week to build a good amount of content and then start to share some of your writing with other sources, such as article directories. This will build the search engine ranking of your site and will be the main source of traffic for your blog.
It is then just a matter of repeating the writing of new posts and link building time and time again. But, a word of warning. Do not make the mistake of making the blog solely built for Adsense. Make sure that it is readable and encourages readers to browse the site.
Whilst this goes against the improving the click rate, because loyal visitors are less likely to click on adverts, it should help to increase general traffic levels. It looks like Google is using traffic statistics in its search engine ranking algorithm so that it sends traffic to only those sites that humans are interested in. So, if you follow the traditional built for Adsense route of get the person onto your site and then straight away clicking on a PPC advert, it is likely that Google will notice and then stop sending you so many visitors.
It seems back to front, but unless your search terms are very weak you need a good amount of traffic viewing a couple of pages each before Google sends you much traffic. So your articles have to be interesting and meaningful. No longer is the basic built for Adsense format working.
But write an interesting blog with plenty of unique content and you can make money with your blog and Adsense!
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]]>Does blogging make money? Can you really set up a blog and expect to make an income? We have a look at what you can expect.
A lot of people start blogging with the expectation that very quickly they will be earning a lot of money. Sadly, that is certainly not usually the case.
Take, for example, a newly set up blog on a free blog system that is full of private label rights content. What does this offer for any advertisers? It is not going to have a loyal following of readers and it is too new to have any search engine ranking benefits whilst the duplicate content that many others are sharing will probably prevent the search engines ranking the site.
So, if you are offering the advertisers nothing, why would they want to pay you?
Therefore, we need to look at what you can offer to advertisers that will make them want to part with their cash in your direction.
In short, they want more visitors to their websites and that is either through exposure to your visitors or through optimising their website through getting a search engine benefit from your blog.
To get an increase in traffic to their website by exposure to your visitors, you need to have plenty of visitors on your blog that will read adverts that you are displaying and then click on them and visit the advertiser’s website. This can be direct adverts, affiliate links or even pay per click adverts. There are plenty of different ways of turning traffic into cash through adverts.
Getting your blog to this point of a good readership takes time and effort. You need to do your groundwork in establishing plenty of interesting content and then encouraging visitors to your blog. Easy enough if you know how and are experienced, not so easy for the beginner.
So, what about the search engine benefits of being listed on your blog? Again this takes time and effort to build in to your site plenty of incoming links. A lot of the value of your blog will be based on its PageRank. Build a good PageRank and the value goes up.
This means that a lot of the value of your blog is based on how much work you do on your own optimisation and how soon Google updates its PageRank information. If you have a high PageRank, you can demand good amounts per link. But with no PageRank there will be few advertisers and these will not be happy to spend a lot advertising on your blog.
So, for a brand new blog then blogging will probably not make much money. But if you can establish a quality blog with a lot of well written and interesting original content, build your own traffic levels and your blog’s own search engine rankings then there is indeed the opportunity to make a lot of money from that blog.
And, once you have done it once, you know what to do to do it again and again. It becomes a matter of how many blogs can you handle?
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I’ve not looked for a little while at the different systems that you can use to earn an income from your blog, so time to take a quick look at the next one on the list, and that is SponsoredReviews.
I have to say that I am very much in two minds about this system. When it works, it works well. But, it can take a lot of effort and then totally annoys you!
First, you register and set a base price for your blog. You can then see relevant opportunities, which you can bid on up to your base price. Given that some can be up to 300 words and quite involved, I would like to bid higher. But I can’t, because the base price is the upper limit.
If you are lucky the advertiser will review your bid and might extend an offer to you, but I find the success rate even lower than leads in PayPerPost, by quite a lot!
The other way of getting work is by sitting there and doing nothing and then some advertisers might see your blog and extend an offer at the base price, hence the reason for not setting that stupidly high!
You get the details of the opportunity and then write it up, usually 1 to 3 links in 200 – 300+ words. The T&C of the system state that in a month your whole blog must run at a rate of no more than 1 paid post for 3 content posts, so you need to make sure that you are maintaining that and not just with their work. But, from accepting the offer, you do have 7 days to write the post.
The plus side is the speed of payment. They pay out by PayPal once every fortnight, regardless of whether you have earned $2.50 or $250. The prices aren’t too bad, although you have to remember that you are seeing the whole price, before they have taken their 50% cut. So an offer for $5 is actually only going to earn you $2.50.
What I don’t like about the system is the amount of time you spend putting in bids for opportunities, only to never hear again from the advertiser. I’m sure that could be better worked!
The system measures you on various factors, including inbound links, Technorati Rating and Alexa Rating. Your Page Rank is also displayed to advertisers. I suppose this does make it a bit different from other systems.
Work with SponsoredReviews seems to come and go in waves, but that might be more because I have only added 2 blogs and they are only PR2. There can be nothing for weeks then suddenly a few come together.
What I definitely do not like is their heavy handed approach. 2 opportunities that I have recently completed were, without any warning (I only found out because I was looking around the pages), removed from future payments and the entire account suspended for a rolling week.
Why did I lose payments for work I had done and lost the ability to bid for more work? Well, quite simply I had a banner in my side bar which contained a link and I no followed that. It seems that was enough to effectively get me kicked out of their club, even though the banner is nothing to do with them (it’s a link to my ezine articles page). Using rel=nofollow within pages is perfectly normal and what it is there for. So I am a bit upset that I’ve lost 2 payments for 300 word articles for that reason.
In summary, if you have a blog with a good page rank, plenty of Yahoo links, a Technorati listing and a good Alexa rating (mine is 500,000 and that is not good enough) then you should rank well and might get plenty of the work that you bid for. They pay well and quickly, but the system is not that flexible.
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]]>Finally, we have looked through many aspects of starting a new blog. In summary, we have seen:
Introduction
What is a blog – what can you use a blog for? What exactly is a blog?
Starting A Blog
The free way to start a blog – how can you start a blog totally for free? What is needed and how can it be done?
The best blog tool to use – what tool should you be using to start your blog? The answer depends on your intentions!
Installing WordPress for a new blog – It’s my favourite blogging tool to use, so how do you install it?
Essential pluggins for your blog – what plugin are vital to the success of your blog, that you really cannot do without?
Customising the look of your new blog – make it look and feel your own. You do not want it the smae as every other blog out their.
Essential security changes – making your blog secure is vital to keep it safe. What can you be doing to protect it so that it runs happily for years to come?
Essential pages – what pages are needed in a blog? There are more than you might realise, or use. So check out this list.
Making Money Blogging
Earn money blogging – how can you earn money through your blog? There are loads of ways, here is just a taster! We’ll look at making money from a blog in more detail next month!
Getting More Blog Traffic
How to promote a blog – how can you get more traffic to a blog painlessly? Just building isn’t enough, you need to take actions.
RSS Feeds – What is RSS and why is it useful. Can it really help you to gain more visitors?
Mailing Lists – If you have RSS, why have mailing lists? They both work well together and both are needed. So, how do you run a mailing list for free?
Article Writing – Promoting your new blog through article writing for search engine optimisation and direct traffic.
Analyse Your Stats – by spending some time looking through your blog statistics you can increase the number of visitors to your site and the number of pages each is viewing.
Commenting For Traffic – the best ways to leave comments on other blogs to generate traffic.
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Since my review of InPostLinks.com, some people have been asking how do you get opportunities at InPostLinks and why all of the opportunities they see are in red.
In short, the answer is PageRank. If all that you see is red opportunities, then you are not eligible for anything currently on offer. This can be because:
1) Your page rank is insufficient.
2) You have been excluded geographically (a lot of advertisers want North American blogs only).
3) You blog category doesn’t match, e.g. they want technical blogs only and you aren’t.
4) You are using an excluded free blog tool, such as myspace.com, xanga.com, livejournal.com, vox.com, bravejournal.com and blogsome.com
The advertiser creating the particular opp can set all of these as they want. They might choose North America only, or English speaking countries or the entire world. They might want a close subject match or not be at all bothered.
So if all that you see is red opportunities on InPostLinks, then have a look at the criteria (click on the opportunity’s name) and see why you are excluded.
However, InPostLinks opportunities in grey mean that you are eligible, but you are too late. The advertiser has agreed a certain number of posts and made that budget available and sufficient bloggers have reserved the opportunity. Keep trying, some slots might open up.
If you see green or white opps then these are open to you and if you are quick, you might be able to reserve a slot. Not always easy when good opportunities are on the scene as many other people get there first!
To succeed most opps require at least a PR2, although some do accept 1 or even 0. But as your PageRank increases there will be more InPostLinks opportunities available to you. So you know what to work on!
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]]>Is it time that you converted your blog into a money making machine, or do you want to set up your own, simple, online business to generate a bit of extra cash? If so, then read on with this series about blogging to earn money!
Earning money through blogging is quite easy and very rewarding. You just need a bit of patience and a little know how in order to set up the blog ready to earn money. But remember that every advertiser you are working for is not just giving away money, they want something in return for paying you. This is either a share of your traffic or a share of your Page Rank.
Getting Started
So, how do you get started? Well read our series on setting up a blog if you need any help at all, or get in contact and we can set you a blog up for just £20 / $35 per year. Once your blog is live you need to work on it to make sure that it is producing what advertisers will want to buy from you.
Selling Optimisation
For those interested in optimising their own website, they will be looking for blogs with plenty of backlinks and a good Page Rank. Article writing, guest posting, commenting and other tricks are all useful here. Again, read our starting a blog series if you need more help.
Selling Traffic
For advertisers wanting to spread the word of their site, or to create a buzz as it is often referred to, then they want blogs with plenty of traffic. The same tricks work as for Page Rank, but more targeted work is needed. Then commenting on forums and various other tricks, maybe even paid advertising, work well. Again, our series tells you more.
Earning Money
After that you need to find ways to earn money with your blog. Sponsored Posting, Pay Per Click advertising, banner advertising, affiliate work and a lot more tricks are possible. Certain methods work best for high Page Rank blogs whilst others work best with high traffic blogs. All will work well if you manage to get both traffic and Page Rank and Sponsored Posting works well on either, you just need to know which systems to sign up for.
The last way to earn money through blogging is simply by selling it, or by blog flipping. It seems extreme to sell your work, but that is what some people enjoy and if you are made a fantastic offer, then why not!
Anyway, if you are looking for any help on any of these aspects do browse around this blog carefully and read through the series on starting blogging. Sign up for our RSS Feed or join the newsletter and keep up to date with the latest posts. Happy blogging!
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