Tag Archive for 'Blog'

The Easiest Money-Earning Sites

Published
by
darcy
on July 8, 2008
in Other and Web Design
. 0 Comments

As you probably know, to earn money with most sites (or blogs) you have to put in quite a lot of work (or money) to get anything substantial back. But! It doesn’t have to be like that. There are a few types of sites that involve nearly no effort at all on your part and can rake in a tonne of money at the same time. The two types of sites i’m talking about a proxy sites and what i like to call “piggy back” sites.

Most of you will probably know what a proxy site is, but for those that don’t I’ll explain. A proxy site is a site that people go to to get to sites that are blocked or they otherwise can’t access. For example, if you’re school blocks myspace.com, then you could go to a proxy site and use that proxy site to visit myspace.com without any hassels! Great stuff, isn’t it? Now this means that the owner of that proxy site will get quite a lot of hits when the kids at school start catching on and using it to visit their favourite sites that they can’t otherwise. The problem is that when it starts getting really popular, the proxy site its self is going to get blocked and your user-base will drop substantially.

If you want to set up a proxy site, we advise that you have a Private or Dedicated Server, because proxies can use up a LOT of bandwidth and resources (especially if you get really popular). You should be able to find a proxy script by searching google. After that, it usually only takes ten minutes or so to install, and then you’re up and running! But you’ll still need to get people to use it. Start by telling all your school- or college-aged friends about it, then try marketing through myspace. Set up a myspace account and start adding every single person you can. After a few days (once you’ve added lots of people and they’ve had time to accept) send a few bulletins, or even private messeges (but don’t spam) telling them about your site and how it will let them go to myspace at school.

Now, “piggy back” sites, as i like to call them, are something completely different. The only real similarity is that you don’t need to write any of your own content, you just piggy back off other people’s content :D There are a few ways to go about this. The easiest way is simply to set up an “autoblog”. This means you set up a blog that automatically posts content from other blogs from their RSS feed. Whilst it is theoretically possible to earn money this way, it generally isn’t very successful (and annoys the shiz out of me when people start posting my content).

The best way to set up a “piggy back” site involves a bit of work. If you know php, mysql and html (and maybe javascript and css) then you can use an API from another site to create your own. For example, you can use twitter’s API to find a unique, interesting or convenient way of posting or reading tweets. For example, you could create a twitter (web) application for the iPhone. Or you could use Flickr’s API to help users find photos that were taken near to their current location (with help from flickr’s geotagging and maybe some GPS magic from the iPhone, etc).

Now for most of you, those two last paragraphs may not have made much sense, but that doesn’t matter. The point is, it doesn’t take a lot of hard work to make a few bucks online.Nor do you need to write all of your own content. Piggy back off someone else’s content!

This Is Why I Read Your Blog

Published
by
darcy
on June 6, 2008
in Blogging
. 2 Comments

(or What Makes A Good Blog?)

There are a number of reasons that can contribute to the success of any blog, and reasons why people read said blog. You should try to analyze the blogs you read, and why you read them, and then try to emulate those things in your own blog. For example, these are the main reasons I read the blogs that I read:

  • They have the latest news and information (so I can keep up to date)
  • They have good designs
  • They get exclusive articles/reviews/information
  • There’s something new to read all the time (every time I visit)
  • It’s written by people I’m interested in (famous people, people who do amazing/interesting things, etc)
  • It’s written well
  • It’s written with edge, sarcasm or wit
  • It doesn’t have too many ads
  • The ads it does have aren’t intrusive
  • It has contests (especially if I win one)
  • It is confronting, interesting and/or engaging
  • Doesn’t take too long to load
  • Etc.

Let’s take a look at a few major examples. Big blogs such as Engadget, Destructoid and Maddox (The Best Page In The Universe). Engadget has always had a great, good looking theme, but their latest is so much more clean, simple and sophisticated. Very nice. On top of that, they always have all the gadget news to occupy me for at least 20 minutes a day (which is 20 minutes I’m exposed to their advertisements) and their writing is often witty and engaging. Perfect combination! (It also has competitions, is informative, has the latest gadget news, doesn’t have too many ads, etc.)

Destructoid takes this to a whole new level. They are down-to-earth, confrontational, amusing, engaging and more, whilst also being up-to-date and informative. To top this off they have a great theme (if a bit slow to load), host contests every now-and-then, and write with wit and style. Great site. Maddox takes the wit and humor to a whole new level. His opinion is rude, funny and never wrong, but usually politically incorrect. His very subjective and opinionated writing coupled with his sense of humor (and very simple, quick-loading website) make this site a winner.

So everyone, take a minute, two minutes, five, ten, whatever you can spare, and take a look at what the sites you visit have, that your own site doesn’t. How are they so popular? What makes you visit them? Don’t just enjoy their content, learn from what they do.

How To Come Up With Post Ideas

Published
by
darcy
on May 19, 2008
in Blogging and writing
. 1 Comment

One of the hardest things, for some bloggers, is coming up with new things to post about. Sometimes you find yourself with writers block, or sometimes you think you’ve run out of topics you could possibly talk about, but that isn’t the case! Read on to discover how to come up with more post ideas than you can keep up with…

First thing to do is look at what your blog is about. For this example, we’ll pretend we’re blogging about “places to travel in Asia”, but it doesn’t matter whatever you’re writing about, the first thing you should do is google it. But don’t just google “Places to travel in Asia”, try other similar phrases as well. For this example, we tried:

  1. “Places to travel in Asia”
  2. “Top destinations in Asia”
  3. “Asia Destinations”
  4. “Travel Asia”
  5. “Travel In Asia”
  6. “Sights and Activities in Asia”
  7. “Asia Holiday”

The list could go on, but you get the picture. Now, if we take a look at a page of google search results for “Travel Asia” we get this:


As you can see from this image, I’ve highlighted just a few of the sponsored results. You’ll notice some keywords in their like GAP Adventures, Tours, Flights and Malaysia (as well as “Travel Asia”). This means that people are paying google to show ads whenever people search for the keywords “Travel” and “Asia” or both together, so if you can write about these subjects, you’ll hopefully get those same ads on your site, which can earn you some money (if you’re using AdSense). Now, we can use these keywords to come up with a list of possible things to write about:

  1. GAP Year Adventures in Asia
  2. Tours in Asia
  3. Tours in (Asian Country/City)
  4. Holidays To Malaysia
  5. Cheapest Flights To Asia (Maybe a weekly/monthly feature)

As you can see I’ve already come up with 5 different ideas. I could even do separate articles for different tours of Asia, and do separate articles for tours in each country or city, and I could even turn “Cheapest Flights To Asia” into a weekly or monthly series. On top of that, I could write about the cheapest flights from the UK, UK and Australia, as these are the countries people are most likely to be flying from, OR i could analyze my traffic and write about the cheapest flights to Asia from the countries that most of my visitors come from.

The next thing I’ll want to do is have a look at my incoming searches. This means having a look at the terms people were searching for when they ended up at my site. If you are running Wordpress, which chances are you are, I suggest you install the stat-monitoring plugin called Statpress. It will automatically track all your statistics for you, including the latest Search Terms used to find your site.

Now, take a look at the top results on all of the search results you’ve looked at. Look at the content of these pages. What are they doing that you aren’t? What content do they have that you don’t? You can write about anything that is even slightly related to your site.

Another place to find articles ideas is from the news. Look at, for example, your local news site, or even cnn or the bbc. Look for any news about the subject your blogging about. For example, I could blog about the recent Earth quakes in China or the Tsunami in Myanmar (Burma) because they would effect travel in Asia. Remember to credit any sources of information though. Finally, you can also try looking at similar blogs. If your blog’s “niche” is quite a crowded niche, why not try doing a best-of-the-week type post? Summarize all the best posts of the week in your niche, so then visitors can go to your blog not only for your own original content, but also to have the best related posts served up once a week with no effort at all.

So through just a few easy methods, you can come up with dozens, or potentially hundreds, of new posting ideas.

Done.

30 Great Simple Blog Layouts

Published
by
darcy
on May 6, 2008
in Graphic Design and Web Design
. 8 Comments

Here is a selection of my favorite simple blog designs. To qualify for this list, the blogs had to have clean, effective layouts with little clutter, a good choice of colour, shape and design, and not rely too much on images. Loading quickly, having good content and quality writing skills also helped.

  1. Engadget
  2. PatDryburgh.com
  3. Wilsonminer.com
  4. Smashing Magazine
  5. Flickr Blog

    Continue reading ‘30 Great Simple Blog Layouts’

Get Paid For A Post On Your Blog

Published
by
darcy
on April 27, 2008
in Reviews
. 0 Comments

Hello all.

I just recently signed up for payperpost which, as you may or not know, provides a service where you can sign up, submit your blog and then start getting paid to blog. The things you blog about are products, services and websites of the advertisers on payperpost. They are the real people paying you, but payperpost are the ones who set it all up.

Once you sign up, you will need to submit your blog. This takes about five minutes, but soon comes the wait. Once your blog is submitted, it has to be approved. This process took (in my case) about two weeks. When submitting your blog it says to provide a link to your archives or a link to your oldest post. I provided a link to my oldest post, but then got an email informing me that my submission was declined because I didn’t have a link to my archives page…Oh well.

After quickly re-submitting my blog (with a link to an archives page), I then got an email a week or so later, confirming that my blog had been approved and that I could begin to get paid to blog about things. Awesome!

So once you’ve been approved, you can head over to your dashboard and go to the Open Opportunities page. This is the page were all the available opportunities to post about are listed. Take a look at the opportunities available to you (which change depending on certain details about your blog such as page rank, etc.), complete the opportunity and then (most importantly) get paid! Whoo!

So overall, so far the blog-submitting process took a little while, but the interface is slick, and payperpost even list a specific opportunity to post about payperpost - which I’m doing right now - which can grab you $20! Easy as that.

So everyone hop on over to payperpost, and start “posting about things your love” (affiliate link below):