You’ve decided to start a free blog, over hosting your own. While I’m not supporting this decision at all, there are some instances when this is the only option for you. When choosing your free blogs domain name there are many things you need to keep in mind. It can help or hurt you in the long run depending upon the name you choose.

First you have to discover the point of your blog. Is it an extremely tight niche blog purely focusing every post on one word such as make money blog? If the majority of your posts are going to focus on one main term such as that, or you would like to receive traffic primarily from one group of people then it’s rather easy to pick a name. Your search engine results will be much better for the term ‘make money blog’ if your domain name was, makemoneyblog.com. That’s just the way it is with the search engines. Obviously, at this stage of the domain game, these domains cost an arm and a leg to get, if they even are for sale. Try to incorporate as many useful keywords into your domain as you can. I chose to use only the keyword ‘blog’ in mine. So step one, identify keywords you may want to use.

Second, the free domains domains available on your blogging platform, and actual domains available for self hosting are different. You may find one that is available on Blogger or WordPress, but you may not be able to ever register it by yourself because somebody else has snatched the domain for self hosting. You want to have the option to be able to move it to your own domain, yet retaining your sites original name. So after you find one you like, check godaddy.com to see if it is available. This will prevent you from having somebody pick it up and launch of your hard earned success. Kind of like johnchow and johncow.

After you’ve found your keywords, and incorporated them into your domain name that is available both on your free blogging platform and godaddy you are ready to create your free blog. There are many things that you will need to do to start being able to take advantage of your keywords in your domain name, but you are off to a great start.

I guess my blog isn’t starting as successful as I thought. I take the blame due to the fact I’m posting these posts too late for readers, and get removed from their feed. You may have read a recent post of mine about a theory of getting some popular bloggers to comment on your blog by linking to their posts. This is the test. Obviously, they may feel a bit obligated to comment due to the fact that this is a test to see if they view your blog. While they may not comment on your site, this will prove if they do view your site at a good turnover rate. These are all blogs in my feed. Clicking on their links will provide them more interest in seeing what this post is about that’s getting them views, so that’s what you need to do.

If you are into advertising on facebook you may like this affiliate marketing guide written on can’t get rich. It tells you how he slipped a few high paying, usually turned down offers, past the radars of facebook. It’s not a for sure thing every time, but it only takes one successful night to make a nice sum of change to start testing some potentially good offers.

Have you ever wondered about the affects of social media on your RSS feed? Caroline Middlebrook brings this excellent post to us describing the affects it has on your RSS feed.  It’s a great post from an ever popular blogger who has a huge fan base for a reason.

The University Kid is a younger blogger like me, and he continues to share his knowledge of making money online with this great posts about making websites sell. Flipping websites isn’t easy, and this guide is a pretty good start to learning how to flip sites for a $100 profit on one hours work.

There we go. I’ve posted three quality articles from three blogs in my niche that are in my feed. If they do happen to check this out, a comment to let us know would be wonderful. As for my readers, clicking on their websites will not only help the experiment by showing them that a decent sized amount of traffic has come from this post, but will also help you as these bloggers have a lot to share with us.

Is it just me or does everybody else notice how blogs at WordPress seem to get Page Rank rather easily? Being a member of StumbleUpon I have opted to search through WordPress sites only. Anything WordPress would be showed to me as a result of clicking Stumble.

As I was going through the sites it seemed as though almost every single WordPress blog has a page rank. I’m not talking about Page Rank of 1 or 2, but I saw the majority of them having 3’s, 4’s, and even 5’s. How can this be, most of them showed in my SEOQuake Fire Fox ad-on that there were very few, and in some cases no backlinks to these blogs however they had a Page Rank most bloggers would pay for.

Now there are the obvious benefits of obtaining a page rank, but we won’t go through that here. This post is simply to encourage you to sign up on WordPress, not Blogger. Why WordPress? I mean on WordPress you cannot advertise, how can this be advisable? In the future you plan to purchase your own domain right? Well having a Page Rank blog of your own that you can give unlimited backlinks to will be way more effective than the $50 or less you’ll make on Blogger with AdSense.

Just throw up a WordPress blog and a few posts. Then, come the next Page Rank update see what you’ve received. You may get lucky and hit something. I too shall consider taking part in this. Throwing up some diary blog and seeing how many posts it will take me to get a Page Rank one or greater at the next update.

That’s one of the good parts about making an income from blogging. You get to make it on your schedule. Nobody out there is forcing you to do anything. In fact if you wanted you could leave your blog for a few days, weeks, or months if you wanted. At a normal day job, you have to work when you are told to work, and do what you are told to do.

While this freedom does result in a high percentage of failed blogs, it can also be a positive thing to those of us who do succeed. Like today, I decided not to write a post so I’m making up for it with a post at 1:30am. I decided on fathers day, I had more important things to do than to get my daily post up. If I had planned ahead a little farther it would have been auto-published.

Blogging lets you work on your own schedule. If you have enough ambition and set goals for yourself this can be one of the best aspects of blogging, but if you like to procrastinate then working whenever you choose to without being told what to do may not be very easy for you resulting in failure.

This is a simple theory on how to get a very well known blogger, or any blogger for that matter to view your blog. It involves absolutely no contact between you and the individual, yet you may be surprised by what you might get out of it. This is by no means a sure thing; however I believe it to be very likely that you will succeed.

Ok so most of you people reading my blog, actually have a blog. I could be wrong, but that’s not of any importance. If you don’t have a blog all you need to know is that all WordpPess blogs that use the default stats system will show sites that linked to you and were clicked on. Many other stats programs like Google Analytics do this as well. So let’s say I linked to my favorite blog the making money blog of bloggernoob.com. If you were to click that link it would show up in his stats that you got to his blog from this exact post. He would then click on that link in his stats and be brought to my post that includes his link.

I know some bloggers are interested in stats, and are more likely to come visit sites linking to them. Keep in mind that the more people clicking on the link to the other blog, the better your chances of attracting the blogger you wish to have view your blog. Ways to increase the clicks on the link would be to not link directly to the home page rather to a post. The post should be something your readers would like.

This is theory of mine, but I believe it will be a blogging tip in the near future. With further experimentation I hope to get a few well read bloggers to frequent my site, and hopefully get a free review out of at least one of them sometime in the future. To test this out I’ll need the names of some of your favorite bloggers. So give me a link to their blog and we will test it out in a post later this week.

I was reading over my RSS Feed when I came across an interesting post from the make money blog of bloggernoob.com. It was rather simple to enter, as all you need to do is post a comment with a valid email he can contact you with and you have a chance at winning! How easy is that?

The prizes are a 4gb Ipod Nano that plays videos and music, a 2gb USB pen, a Flip video camera, and a $50 American Express Card. These sound like some pretty expensive gifts that are worth a shot. With a RSS subscriber count of only 306 readers you have a pretty good shot at getting your hands on one of these.

Another way to enter is by posting a link to the contest post, on your blog. This gets into a lesson I started getting into  awhile ago. What makes a contest worth entering, and what makes one worth leaving alone for some other lucky winner?

The blogger almost always gets the better end of the deal. Obviously you are giving them a free advertising post on your blog if you do what I’m doing. Depending upon your blog, that could potentially be a $40 or more investment into a contest. For me it’s probably valued at about $10.00-$20.00, which the potential outcome being valued at around $350 worth of prizes. Which brings me to the prizes. Half of the time the prizes are donated in the first place. So the blogger only has to give away the prizes. The company that donated the prizes gains minimal exposure, even less if the company is unrelated to the blog niche. So the blogger gains money by receiving free backlinks, RSS Subscribers, advertisement posts, and all around excitement on their blog.

Who really wins? The blogger wins the biggest prize. That prize being exactly what I stated above. Then of course there are the winners who receive the prizes. What contests should you avoid? The ones that are requiring a big effort into signing up. If you are required to make a post on your blog about it, depending upon the prizes, you may not want to irritate your readers with another post for your contest entry.

In the end it all comes down to. What are you required to do to sign up and is the prize of the contest even worth what you are getting. If selling a post on your blog earns you $40, then why enter a contest where the best prize you could get is $40. You probably see the logic here.

This is a good, easy contest to enter. Check it out.

As you know, my blog isn’t very old. I don’t have a high subscriber count either. It’s all part of the blogging game. Getting subscribers is no easy task. In fact, for new blogs, it is very common to see blogs staying under 20 subscribers for the longest time. In this post I will outline a few things you could do with your new blog, to try to boost your subscriber count a little bit.

Are you a member of a writing group such as Triond, Hubpages, or Gather? Chances are, over time you have established yourself in the community. You have made some friends who are interested in your work, and would actually enjoy your blog. If you let them know that you have started a blog, who knows, maybe they will come subscribe to it. I’m not saying go into the community and spam members you’ve never talked to before. I’m talking about the members you send messages to, comment on each others work, and basically like each other. They will do doubt check your blog out, and they may even subscribe.

Have you used bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, or Reddit? Some of these, more Digg and StumbleUpon have some pretty advanced social aspects to their sites that let you get to know other members a little bit better. Things that let you communicate with one another and get to know each other. This is another group of people you should give you link to. They are probably interested in what you submit, so why wouldn’t they be interested in your blog? A double bonus here is that they actively use social bookmarking sites and may end up submitting some of your posts to these sites. If you don’t have any friends on these sites, try searching for articles posted where you would post your articles. These posts will be of similar content and you can get to know these people. After you have become friends, they will join your feed because it’s the kind of content they like to read.

Are you active on any sort of forum out there? Depending upon the forums main theme you may be able to get some members from there to at least look at your blog. Who knows if they will sign up. If there is no rule against it, give yourself some niche anchoring text to link to your blog in your signature. It will give you some nice backlinks, and of course some traffic. If your view count is high enough, and it’s a tight enough community where you know the admin and they will allow you to post a thread about it, go ahead and do that. Explain to them why they would want to subscribe to your feed while they are there.

That’s what I have so far. It’s not going to get you hundreds, because as many bloggers put it ‘content is king’. You need to have good content to get people to sign up for your feed. These are just a few ways I’ve found that a new blogger can use to convert previous online ventures into readers on your new blog. I’m always open to other ideas that work, and will write some new articles as I discover new working ways.

That is one of the biggest questions for bloggers on their blogs when they are just getting started. Do you add your own content to sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, and Reddit to receive some instant, artificial traffic, or do you avoid submitting your own work for various reasons? There is reasoning to either side of the story.

There are quite a few negatives. The first being, your accounts on these sites may get tagged for spamming, as well as get your blog automatically banned from being submitted on these sites. You content appears better to those very strict Stumblers who carefully examine posts, submitters, and votes given to determine if you are abusing the site. A possible outcome for abusing this is the permanent banning from the site.

Your content also will do better. If you aren’t the one submitting it, that means somebody with pure intentions liked it enough to submit it. It’s obviously of some quality. It’s more likely to be popular and you haven’t even given your +1 vote to it yet. It’s of great benefit to let others submit articles.

Then there are the positives you can get out of submitting your own, select, content. Obviously, if your site needs RSS Subscribers if you submit your own content, you will have free, somewhat targeted traffic coming to your site (depending upon social bookmarking site). Having 300+ visitors to your site increases the chances of having somebody subscribe to your RSS feed. While it is a long shot, using the right tags, over time you may manage to snag a few. I’ve signed up for virtually all 20-30 blogs in my RSS feed through StumbleUpon or Google searches.

Adding content to certain sites, also puts your link in the users feed giving you a backlink. I’ve found backlinks from www.username.stumbleupon.com before. It’s not much, but it’s a free, easy backlink even if it is of next to no significance to Google. I’m not even sure if these are permanent or if they leave their front page they disappear. It’s just something I noticed a while ago.

Last but not least, there is the traffic factor. To some, it may just be the needed encouragement. Nobody wants to blog to a blank audience. If there is nobody to read your content then you may get discouraged. Adding content to these social bookmarking sites gets you some traffic, and maybe some feedback whether it be positive or negative. It can help show you what you are doing well and should continue to do, and what you may want to change. The users of the bookmarking sites can get very constructive so make sure you are willing to receive this kind of criticism.

To bookmark, or not, that’s for you to decide.

This is a unique little application I discovered when going over a friends blog a few months ago. I really like this tool because it will show me which of my StumbleUpon friends are giving my articles thumbs up votes. It’s a good thing to know because I can’t realistically keep track of who I see giving articles thumbs up and who I don’t. An article or more a day added to StumbleUpon and that would get challenging. It is not fair to expect every single one of my articles to be given a thumbs up by everyone on my friends list, but when your friend count nears 200 it may determine who stays and who goes (unless of course you’re a long time friend).

StumbleUpon limiting it’s users to having 200 friends is a rather pointless but understandable limitation. With this tool I will be able to weed out the users no longer active on StumbleUpon, or the ones who simply have no interest in my articles. This will leave room to add new friends to StumbleUpon that actually like my content and are able to help me out with thumbs up votes.

Anyways this is a 100% safe application that I recommend to anybody using Social Bookmarking to drive traffic to their site.

It shows which friends have viewed the article, and how many times. It also lists all the reviews for the page. This is a very handy little tool that I plan to make use of greatly over the next few months. As a new blog owner it is crucial to receive large amounts of traffic from StumbleUpon and this tool will be indirectly related to me achieving the mass amounts of views.

Ok to download this go to Adament’s site and download it. Post comments with your thoughts on this application. Happy Stumbling.

The recent craze of bloggers adding these 125×125 ads on their sites is something you shouldn’t expect to see end anytime soon. Whether you have 100 RSS subscribers or 2000 you can easily make some quick money to partially justify the time you are putting into your blog. These in no way are going to pay off the hours you put into a blog, but they are a starting point.

The average blog getting decent amounts of traffic can easily sell these spaces for around $5 a week, or $20 a month. Generally the blog sells eight to six spots, in two columns. That would earn your blog up to $160 a months 12 months a year if you were to sell out each month. That isn’t going to make you rich, but I’m not expecting you to be jobless at this point in the game. If you’re blog is just getting started $2,000 a year from these banners will be an accepted reward.

How do you go about selling these banners? Unless your blog is one with extremely high traffic, enough that your viewers would recognize these spots are for sale, and then think highly enough of your site to want to advertise there, you may need to go out and find these advertisers. A good place to start would be to find blogs in the same niche as you with these ads. Click on the ads and find the “contact us” or another means of contacting them located on the advertisers site. Email them a link to your site, your rates such as $5 a week or $20 a month, and a brief message about why they should advertise on your blog.

In the message you should include that you are the owner of the blog, that you saw they advertised on (insert blog name here) and thought they may be interested in advertising on your blog as well. Depending upon how spectacular your traffic stats are you may wish to include this. Anything over 100 RSS subscribers, 100+ uniques a day, or simply 1,000 page views a week. These will show them your blog is actually receiving traffic that would show them there is an audience for their ad.

Once you have the eight ads up, change the price on your advertising page. Inform all previous advertisers that their rate will NOT be raised. They can continue to advertise there for the same price for as long as they want, pending they keep renewing. Once your blog takes off, you may start seeing a few emails coming in from people interested in buying one of these spots, for your new, higher price.

You’re out of ad space, yet you’ve got these new offers. What do you do? Inform the interested parties of the next open slot. Whether it be somebody no longer wishing to advertise there, or when somebody from the original lower price has run out of time for their current contract. Never remove anybody until their time has expired, this will give your site bad rep.

Basically, once you have the spots filled, you will no longer need to go out looking for people to take these spots for the time being. You won’t have to go out looking for new advertisers for a few weeks, and in that time you may hook one or two advertisers sending you an email because they saw your advertising page.

To make sure you are not the one getting the sore end of the deal, all payments must be made upfront. Any time when payments have not been made is subject to removal and replacement without warning. This is one of many ways to start to monetize your blog. I do however suggest informing advertisers a few days in advance so they have time to renew if they want. It saves you work.

This is the most popular and simple way to monetize your blog. It also increases as your blog gets more traffic and popularity. Making sure that you keep your prices high, yet fair is the key to consistently selling these spots and making money off of them.