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I was reading a blog post the other day from a fellow Entrecarder who disbelieves that you can make money online. Unfortunately, many people like this blogger has come across numerous “make money online” scams and have drawn the conclusion that affiliate marketing as a whole is a scam. Nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve made my living online for about 10 years now and many others do as well. Here’s a monthly payout for one income stream to show you the kind of money that can be made. How do I do it? I don’t sell scammy little ebooks that tell you how to make thousands in your sleep. I use numerous legitimate income streams and many niche blogs and sites to promote products and get a commission from the sales. In addition, I use other monetizing methods such as Kontera, Chitika, and reviews on my blogs and websites.

There are many ways to make money online and work at home, but it takes a whole lot of hard work, knowledge, patience, and some ‘being in the right place at the right time’ luck. If you’re unwilling to put in the same kind of time and effort in your online career as you would working for someone else, then you probably won’t be successful and definitely should not quit your day job.

Career blogging is one of the ways to make money online. What does it take to turn blogging into a full-time living? Career bloggers are in high demand. Businesses realize the many benefits of a company blog. These companies are willing to pay you to blog, usually on a contract basis. In addition, there are numerous sites that pay you to host links and ads on your own blog or to provide a review of the site on your blog.

Getting Started as a Career Blogger

First you will need to create your own blog. This will serve as your portfolio or blogging resume. Two popular blog sites are blogger.com and wordpress.com.

Next, decide what you wan to blog about. Since you will be blogging for businesses, you could show off your business-sense in your blog. If you are a marketer, you could blog about sales and marketing. Blog about a topic you are very familiar with or an expert in. If there’s a particular niche that you want to blog about for hire, show your expertise on the subject in your own blog. Keep your blog updated with fresh content and build your traffic and readership.

Getting Your First Blogging Jobs

Now that you have your blog, you need to get hired. Use your About or Profile on your blog to advertise your availability as a career blogger. You can also Google blogger job or blogging jobs and browse the search results. You’ll likely find dozens of search results for blogging jobs. Other resources for finding blogging jobs are Monster.com, Careerbuilder.com and HotJobs.com. Just submit your resume and contact info to be contacted by companies looking for professional bloggers. In addition, there are many contract blogging jobs posted on freelance boards. I’ve listed many of the most popular below. Read the rest of this entry »

I found these two shops for blogs … PrestoGifto and PopShops. PrestoGifto integrates CafePress products in your blog and PopShops integrates products from Commission Junction, Linkshare, ShareASale, LinkConnector, Performics and Red Galoshes, so you will need to be a member of these networks to utilize these shops.

If you look at the links in my nav bar, you’ll see Blogger’s Shop. That is a PrestoGifto shop. The one that says Books and Stuff is the PopShop. So far, I’m getting a lot more clicks on the PrestoGifto (CafePress) products, but I just installed these yesterday so it’s too soon to tell how either of these will work out.

Both shops are easy to install and integrate. PopShops takes a bit longer to set up since you can choose up to 100 products. Both of these shops are still in Beta but seem to function beautifully. PopShops has a feature you can install that will put a little pop button in your “write post” bar and you can pop a product in the post. I’ll pop one in here to show you … lol. They do have a much larger selection of products to choose from so if you aren’t pushing “blogging thongs” not to worry. You can choose your products by keywords. Very simple to add an ad to your post with PopShops. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m always looking for ways to make this blog more informative to readers. While reading one of my favorite blogs, Cash Tactics, I ran across a blog post about 9 Sure-Fire Tips to Continually Improve Your Blog and one of the nine ideas was to add a Best of the Week post. I read a lot of blogs so that should be easy enough to keep a list of my favorite posts from other blogs each week. Sounds like a good weekend thing to do, so I’ll begin a Best of the Week today with the following being my favorites from last week:

1. 9 Sure-Fire Tips to Continually Improve Your Blog

2. Using Images to Take Your Posts to a New Level

3. 18 Tips For Writing Better Pay-Per-Click Ads

4. This free plugin is a moneymaker

5. Long tail vs fat head optimization strategies – Part 1

6. Long tail vs fat head optimization strategies – Part 2

7. Long tail vs fat head optimization strategies – Part 3

8. All Marketers are Spammers

In addition to monetizing your own blog with advertising spots, paid reviews, affiliate marketing, etc., there are many opportunities on the Net for getting paid to blog.

ProBlogger has a list of blogging opportunities on it’s site.

Sign up at Helium. “Where publishers and freelancers meet.” At Helium’s Marketplace, publishers post the titles they need articles for right now. Publishers are paying from $20 to $200 for each selected article.

B5 Media. They normally post their job openings for bloggers at ProBlogger.

Blogger Jobs.biz. Career blogging listings. Read the rest of this entry »

A friend in a forum that I’m a member of ran across This article by DotSauce with at least 55 active RSS directories that accept your RSS Feed link. I spent a relatively small amount of time submitting this blog to all of them and have noted a big increase in traffic pretty much immediately. If you’re into domaining, DotSauce is a great online resource in addition to the very useful RSS Feed list that he posted.

Here’s another list I found of directories to submit your blog to and in some cases, your RSS Feed. Some of them are redundant, but some are new.

My Top Five Recommended Blog Directories:

1. Best of the Web Blogs

2. Blog Catalog

3. Blog Hub

4. Blog Flux

5. Blog Wise

Other Blog Directories To Consider:

Blogarama

Globe of Blogs

Blogbib (paid or reciprocal required)

Blog Dex

Blog Directory Submit (reciprocal required)

Blog Intro (no PageRank)

Blog Search

Blogtastic (paid)

Blog Universe

Bulletize

EatonWeb

FeedCat

FeedDirectory

Feeds4All

Finding Blog (redirects links)

AddUrlBlog- (closed for submission until years end)

RSS Mad

Miscellaneous Topical Blog Directories:

Blog Burst (adds your blog post to major media website)

Blogdir - (Spanish blog community)

Blog Street (India Directory)

BritBlog (British Directory)

Boing Boing (submit blog posts for review)

iBlogBusiness (adds business blogs only)

Blog Search Engines That You Can Submit Your RSS Feed

Blog Hop

Blo.gs

Bloogz

Blog Lines

Blog Digger

Blogz

Blog Pulse

Feed Map

Read A Blog

IceRocket

RSS Network

Syndic8

DayPop

Technorati

Postami

2RSS

News Mob

More Over

Ping-O-Matic (submits to multiple rss feed submissions websites at once)

FeedFarm

RSSFeeds

Search4RSS

Feed Directory

FeedPlex

Feeds4All

Plazoo

Feed24

Feeds 2 Read

JordoMedia

Feed Bomb

nFeeds

Feedooyoo

Feed Age

Golden Feed

RSS Micro

Octora RSS Feeds

Feed Fury

FindRSS

Day Time News

Miscellaneous Topical Blog Search Engines:

Edu RSS (educational only)

Educational Feeds

Feeds.com.br (Brasil only)

Finance Investing Feeds

Realty Feeds

Medical Feeds

Science Port

Sports Feeds

Political Feeds

Government Feeds

RSS Verzeichnis