Sometimes when you are blogging for an income you do not want to be working with international companies, who insist that you use American English instead of English and so on.

Not much of a problem for American readers, but for UK bloggers, and companies wanting to employ UK bloggers, there is an option.

It has been around for a while, but Ebuzzing serves just the European bloggers. If you are looking for search engine improvements through link building, it isn’t the system for you. However, if you are after mentions in relevant blogs with traffic then it could be what you need. And it has been shown that sites that get more traffic do move up the search engine rankings.

So, what is this magic system? It is ebuzzing.com. If you are an advertiser or a blogger, then go to the website and sign up. And if you don’t mind, mention this blog when you sign up so they know where you came from. It won’t affect your account, but it could just get me a referral fee and that keeps this blog up and running!

Too much advertising on your blog can look spammy and tacky. It can scare off visitors and lose you credibility. But not advertising can mean no income. What is the answer?

It is quite reasonable to expect there to be some form of advertising on blogs. After all, the bloggers are paying for domain names, hosting and possibly other bills to provide a service for free. So if there is a chance of a small income, why not?

However, filling a blog full of advertising can look dreadful and gives the impression that it is the value of your readers that matter to the blogger, not the readers themselves. There is a fine balance between sufficient and too much.

If you read Google’s Adsense guide they recommend displaying three adsense units per page as the optimal way to earn money from them. And with their range of small to huge advert banners, you can certainly fill your site with advertising.

But, where do you place the adverts for best effect? In the content, in the navigation, above and below the post or one or more of a lot more options open to you?

As a rule, ignore Google’s insistence that 3 advert blocks (plus their search and other advertising units) makes the most money. Yes, it gives plenty of chance to build revenue, but even three blocks is too much. Instead, just two advert blocks around the page.

This does not always need to translate to two Google blocks (or two affiliate links). It just means keep to two advertising positions on the page that look subtle, but are visible to visitors. You can put a couple of similar sized Google blocks and affiliate links together to form an advertising block if you want to, just make sure that they look good together and look as though they are meant to go together.

So, where to put them? Well you have to balance places on the website that people will look with not being too ‘in your face’. Add some advertising to your main navigation in a similar style to your navigation and it will blend in well. Maybe put a wide block across the top of the screen, or a second block further down the navigation, whichever works best for your blog.

Some people worry that this means that there is no advertising at the end of the post, but this is what you want.

Those people most likely to click on adverts are those that have just arrived. Therefore, put the adverts where they can be seen when the page is opened. However, those that have read your post in full and reached the bottom of the post are liable to be able to be encouraged into becoming regular readers, so give them more to read, not adverts.

I’ve used quite a few different paid to post systems over this year in the hope of earning a good income. Yet, out of all of the systems that I have tried, only two have really fulfilled the promise. Why?

PayPerPost
I have to say that although it has gone quiet for me the last few months (I was earning $600 – $700 per month at peak, now down to $250 – $300) this is one of the two that I still check daily. Easy to use, a good support forum and generally fair prices. Well worth it.

BlogDistributor
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I didn’t like this system when I first tried it, but it grew on me. Well worth having a go, but your blog has to be perfectly written else you won’t be accepted! Write your post and submit it for approval. Once approved you then link to the advertiser. No approval = no free link, which is great and they pay well. The problem is lack of variation in tasks, but that should grow as they build. This is the second site that I still like to use.

SponsoredReviews
This is the first system that I “dumped”. First I got fed up of bidding on tasks that I hardly ever got to do. Then I got fed up of the tasks that came through the marketplace. You see, a 100 word and a 300 word article are paid the same amount, which is crazy, and the amount was next to nothing. No communication from them when they had a problem with a post and when I asked for help, no emails either. I just had to logon and see if there was a support reply.

InPostLinks
I do, sort of, keep running with this one but only because I don’t like to let things go! The problem here is that you have to keep logging and and looking for work. Then, when you find it, to get $2 for a 200 word post is a good payment on a PR3 blog. Maybe if the blog is a lot higher ranking and US based (I’m UK based) then some of those tempting better paying offers become available. But, one for the future, maybe.

SocialSpark
I’ve not really given up here, just I don’t see how to get a good volume of work through and I have no idea what their ‘points’ payment system equates to. A good idea in that you submit the post to them for review, but I’ve been waiting now for my last post to be reviewed for 12 days. Again, maybe shelved for the future for when my blog traffic has increased even more, although the ops I have had from them have not been aimed at my highest traffic blog.

BlogsVertise
I think this could be a good system, but as with BlogDistributor there just isn’t the work. At first there were plenty of jobs coming through, but with a range of PR2 & PR3 blogs there is almost nothing about. Prices vary widely, without any reason. I think if they spelled out what they were looking for in blogs it would help, but I have no idea. I thought at first maybe they were too new, but there is less work now than months ago.

Ebuzzing
This is a site that I want to use a lot, but as with others, there just is not the work available. There are plenty of video campaigns and especially recently I’ve been asked to take part in a lot of these, but given they are paid per view and completely off the topic of my blog, where would be the point? Shame. When there is an article it pays well, there just needs to be more opportunities to write articles for them!

ReviewMe
I have done maybe one or two posts for this site and never heard from them since, although they did pay out. Again, it is not clear what you need to do to get plenty of work. It seems that most of the work goes to the bloggers with the best reviews on their posts. But, as a newbie to the system, how do you get good reviews?

Sponzai
Another that I’ve not given up on, rather it has given up with me! Although there is a balance that I can withdraw. This is all about being paid to include guest posts. However, it is a sister site to PayPerPost and some of the interface is well behind the development there, so it looks like it is not being maintained (also their Twitter account has not been updated for 10 months). Good idea, in a way, but just not the demand maybe?

Disclaimer!
Obviously all of the above are just my opinions, based on my experiences with these systems. My blogging started a year ago and my venture into paid blogging started earlier this year. That means that most of my blogs have ‘low’ PageRanks™ (PR2 / PR3) because Google hasn’t updated the information in 8 months and they are all experiments in blogging so traffic across them can be low.

Maybe if your blog is higher ranking and higher traffic you know the secrets of working these systems. If so, do let me know by leaving a comment!

It might at first seem an impossible task, but if you are blogging about your favourite sport you can still get paid to blog. How though?

Blogging about your favourite sports and pastimes might be easy at first. You can post about your favourite team, your own training and competitions, views on the league and so on. There can be an endless supply of content, but then like about a quarter of all bloggers you decide it is time to turn this past time into a small income. At this point it seems an impossible trick.

Paid to blog income
The simplest way would be to sign up to a paid to blog scheme and just post about anything. And with most schemes you would be doing just that. You could be being offered anything at all to post about, from funeral homes to metal roofing to cell culture (my genuine recent examples!).

These are fine if you do not mind upsetting readers and probably losing readers by blogging about totally off-topic subject, but paid to post is probably out of the question if you want to keep your blog totally on topic.

So, what is the way forward?

Pay Per Click Options
Well the simplest and easiest answer would be to sign up to Google Adsense and to drop 2 Paid Per Click advert blocks on to your blog (the maximum allowed is three, but many people, including myself, advocate just keeping to 2 blocks of adverts to prevent overloading with adverts). This puts relevant adverts onto your blog, but without huge traffic volumes there is probably not going to be a great income.

Along the same lines, if your blog has a half decent Page Rank there are various websites through which you can sell links from your blog. You can also sell links through SEO experts, but tracking them down can be a difficult task.

Affiliate Income
Probably the easiest way to earn an income is to promote affiliate schemes. However, this very much depends on whether your readers are from the same country as you as to whether it works well.

If there is a relevant major sporting event and a lot of your readers might be interested in attending, you can promote tickets through the affiliate scheme for the events. Or, sign up to an affiliate scheme that is offering ebooks to download (for example ClickBank) and push readers towards downloading and buying these ebooks, in return for a commission.

Donations
Of course, the last way and most simplest is that if you run a really useful blog is just to include a ‘donations’ button. Maybe offer to link back to people making donations. But if your readers find your site of value then they might be willing to make a donation via PayPal to help you fund your blog.

Therefore, the ideas we have for getting paid blogging about sports are general paid to post, PPC, affiliate schemes and just a kind hearted donations scheme.

Good luck!

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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?