While this is not from this blog, it is from blogging. No screenshots will be posted of my other blogs for various reasons. It’s up to you whether or not you want to believe me, but I’m not one to lie just to get a few readers.

$3,016.13 from one site I advertised a referral link for. This site I advertised for a good six months, so an average of about $500 a month. Not bad for my first blogging income.

Recently I’ve switched to advertising a new site. I thought I had it good before at the site above; however it taught me a lesson you’ll read about soon.  $1,784 since September on this newest site. That’s two and a half months at about $713 a month.

This s with contributing about 5 minutes of my time every day to write one post. That’s it. The rest of the work is done by readers and I simply collect my money. I’d say I spend maybe 2 or 3 hours tops a month working on it. That’s almost $300 an hour.

Stick with me, I have many things I can teach you.

Did you know that you can get around that common misconception of your free wordpress.com blogs being able to make you money? Well that’s right, there is a way. Now before I get all of you honest wordpress.com users up in my case, I’d like to point out this blog is for people who want to make money blogging. How you make it is irrelevant.

In the terms of service it says you can’t create a blog specifically for referral advertising. Interesting. You can’t create it for the purpose of advertising, but if along the way you decide you want to publish a post with a referral link you can get away with it.

Now, with that being said, don’t get carried away. I don’t want to be the cause of your beloved 3 year old blog getting banned. I have 160 posts on mine, about 5 have referral links. These 5 are also the ones getting traffic. While my traffic shows my site is about referring, my post count and topics show otherwise.

I’m wondering how my blog will stack up with the other blogs out there once I get this blog approved for the payperpost site. I think I will receive quite a few offers for post if I go in at a low price. That’s where I’m unsure what to do. I don’t know how much I should charge, if I’m allowed to set a minimum price at all. We’ll have to see. I’ll report on this site once I find out how much I like it.

While I don’t want to spam my readers with paid plugs, it’s the only way for the blog to exist right now. I tried publishing content daily before but when I failed to make even a dollar after over a month I kind of lost interest considering one of my other blogs took off and starting booming.

I kind of avoided this blog for a while. I’ve finally decided that I want to give it another shot for a few reasons. I also have a few more options for making money with it as many sites won’t let you sign up until your site is x months old. At about 6 months old I’ll be able to use those paid plug sites which will make my time blogging closer to minimum wage than it was back when I first started this.

I was having issues getting my first dollar on here before. I’m going to rework some things and hopefully get this blog off the ground. If not, you can probably expect this site to fade into nothing again in a few weeks. Help encourage me with an RSS subscription.

Several months ago I was reading all about the make money blog niche and decided it would be something fun to enter, and probably the easiest niche to monetize. Three months in, I have realized it is probably not the niche I should have chosen. In fact, the free blog I set up on WordPress about gaming is the only blog I’ve monetized yet. Granted I am nearing the $2,000 mark from almost 6 months of blogging, I am still enjoying the niche.

While the biggest mistake I made was not getting it’s own domain soon enough, I still enjoy it. Had I moved that blog to it’s own domain, I would have been able to monetize it very well. I am getting 1,200 views a day on that blog! Almost all of it coming from Google too. If I were to have Google AdSense up on a domain getting that traffic I could have made another couple hundred. If I sold private ads, another couple thousand.

What I’m getting at is picking your niche is very important. If it weren’t for me trying to prove the Noob that I can succeed in this niche, I would have dropped it a long time ago. Pick a niche you enjoy writing in. There are so many ways to monetize any niche, it’s just a matter of finding out how. Make it easier on yourself and start off from the get go with a niche you enjoy writing in.

So for the last week or so I haven’t even had a post to put up. There are two reasons for this, and they are both pretty valid reasons. I don’t like to leave the blog unposted on as usually I notice a dip in subscribers. Oddly, the count has gone up over the time I’ve spent not posting.

The first reason was I was having some hosting problems. I accidently had some files deleted for one of my other sites, and when I restored them it wasn’t working right. I had my host restore everything back to the way it had been several days before so it would have taken away any new posts I’d have posted since.

The second reason is I didn’t want to risk logging in here. An email and affiliate account of mine were hacked. I lost $250, but I got the accounts back. I was fairly convinced that I’d been keylogged so I didn’t want to log into anything important, which means my blog. I’ve determined it was luck, but who knows. Hopefully my accounts are still mine this time next week though.

I’ll be sure to start posting strong again. Maybe to make a little twist on things I will start talking about how I make money online, as blogging isn’t exactly doing it right now, and I have several projects in the works. Thanks for sticking with me through those days of inactivity.

What if I could tell you make money bloggers out there that every post you make could make you money? What if I were to say, it would make you money for months and years to come? It wouldn’t even require more than a days planning ahead and the same amount of time put into writing them? There is a way, and I’m considering it.

Like some of you may know, I used to be one of the most successful writers at Triond. I was making several hundred a month there. After reading the noobs blog, and can’t get rich I decided that I could take my current knowledge over to the blogging business, and be even more successful. Well, after over three months of inactivity at Triond I realized that I had made a rather big mistake. Recently I’ve been considering dropping this blog because I’m making nothing off of it, yet the time I spend doing these posts could be spent writing for Triond.

That’s when it hit me. Triond’s terms of service allow you to publish your content elsewhere after you publish it on thier site. So the content, essentially, will just be published in two places. The majority of my readers on this blog will probably never notice it. This is a make money blog though, so I will include the posts earnings from Triond in my monthly reports.

Now that I’ve got that out of the way, on to telling you why you should consider doing this with your gaming blog, niche site, or even some sort of poem blog. On Triond you get paid per view on your content. Simple enough, but obviously the payout rate isn’t amazing. It averages about $0.03 per 10 views. Combine this with Digg and StumbleUpon, a little SEO, and some great friendships, you can easily make $5.00 per post (about 2.5k views on average).

They take about a day to publish your content though, so you wouldn’t be able to do this with current event sort of posts, but anything else that can wait a day would give you enough time to get it up on Triond first. I have been paid before so I know they are legit.

Yesterday when I tried to log in I realized that my hosting was down for a few hours. All my sites were down, and since this is the first time this has happened to me I was a bit worried. I’ve heard of people losing entire weeks of their posts for various reasons.

Hosts will automatically backup your sites every once in a while. If your host has an option where you can make backups upon request, I’d suggest doing it every few days to prevent any great loss. I know the cpanel I use lets me do this.

Don’t learn your lesson the hard way. Make backups of all your posts to prevent lost content.

I ran my first contest a short while ago and it was my most commented on post yet. Granted there were only 6 entrants. Since there were only six entries I just decided to pull names out of a hat. Also, I went with three prizes simply because there was little interest.

Geoff won the first place prize. He will receive a free sponsored post, a 125×125 ad, and a backlink in my blog roll.

Bloggernoob won second earning him a free 125×125 ad and a blog roll link.

Neil won third earning him a free backlink and I’ll throw in another 125×125 to even it out with my Entrecard ad.

These bloggers must simply comment to receive their prizes.

There are many benefits of commenting on blogs. Like for example, the free mentioning in my blog that was given away to all commentors of a previous post.

Rory of Online Money

Craig of Gamer Reviews

and Blake of Illiterate Poet all saw the benefits of commenting.

I really have no idea what effect comments have on a page. I’m just assuming that, other than showing your pages popularity to others, it also has to have some sort of effect on your keyword density for the page. That, in turn, partially effects your keyword rankings for that page.

I’m sure you’ve all had posts where people get angry with you for one thing or another. While you may not want to keep these posts, you really have to differentiate between comments that disagree and comments that flame. There are also a few things to keep in mind when editing comments.

WordPress blogs hosted at WordPress (I haven’t tried it on a self-hosted blog) make it so that you can edit comments. Not only can you edit the name, URL, and email, but you can also edit the comment itself. Now you can take out that second link people try to include in their comments, or you can edit out personal notes from friends that you don’t want others to see.

When editing a comment you should check for three things. First, the name. If you’ve seen the name around your blog before, you may just want to delete the comment. If you edit a repeat commenters comment, you might end up with a not so friendly response and lose a reader. After you’ve looked at the name, go to the URL. Change this to one of your other blogs. Free backlink for you. Third, if the email address appears fake, chances are the person doesn’t want to be known. You can edit these comments as well because chances are they won’t be back.

I have a rather good post on my best WordPress hosted blogs. It’s ranked first page for a very nice keyword. It’s regaurding the announcement of a highly anticipated product. The product has yet to be announced, and so on April 1st I put on an April fools post about the announcement. Well when they get to the end and read that it was an April fools joke they aren’t too happy. I get tons of comments. Some I leave just for laughs, but some are just to inappropriate so I edit them to include some keywords that I would like for that post.

Remember, there are comments that are okay to edit, and there are comments you should think twice about. Only edit if you are sure it won’t be checked up on for a response from you. If you have any doubt about it simply delete it to save you from any future troubles.