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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 such as Elance and Guru and others.

Get Paid To Blog

Indeed

Blogging job list from a job search site. You can enter the same search term in any job search site for additional career blogging jobs.

About.com

There are also blogging/writing opportunities at About.com. They are seeking experienced writers/bloggers to write articles and email newsletters, host discussions, and provide personally-reviewed links on a certain topic or subject. There are numerous topics to apply for. They offer a base salary but some About Guides make in excess of $100,000 annually depending largely on page views of your section.

In addition to contract or full time blogging positions, the following sites pay you to write about their companies on your blog. The best one I’ve used thus far is Sponsored Reviews. It has the highest quality and highest paying advertisers of the ones that I’ve used. . Read the rest of this entry »

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Most know the huge potential for traffic that social networks offer and that they also have other benefits such as building back links, brand or name recognition and increasing your blog or websites’ popularity. While many know of the potential of social networking, many also utilize them the wrong way.

A common strategy among social network spammers marketers is to join a network, build a minimal profile (or a fake profile), acquire as many “friends” as possible and then proceed to Twitter, poke, spam the bulletins and walls, and give gifts until they have alienated nearly all of the members and branded themselves as a nuisance, or gotten banned from the network. It’s just social media spam and it’s rampant. Using social networks to intentionally manipulate and misrepresent might yield some short-term gain, but will do long-term damage to your brand. Any gains soon disappear as members or the network administrators catch on to your game.

It’s rare that I get a message from Netscape, StumbleUpon, MyBlogLog, Entrecard and other networks that isn’t a pitch for something without so much as an introduction. This isn’t a very effective way to use social networking sites for the long term benefit of your company or brand. While there are no well defined social networking rules, using common sense will go a long way in using social media to your benefit. Read the rest of this entry »

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One of the top ways of monetizing websites is lead generation. Here’s how it works. Becoming a CPA affiliate is fairly simple. You sign up with numerous CPA Networks, drive traffic to the custom landing pages they provide or make your own landing pages, and get paid whenever a site visitor fills out and submits a form. One of the best ways to drive traffic to your CPA Offers is through PPC program like Adwords or Yahoo.CPA networks are clearinghouses bringing advertisers and publishers together. The advertisers provide custom landing pages and forms, pays the network commission for making it available to affiliates, and affiliates are paid for driving traffic and generating signups.

CPA stands for “cost per action.” The action is the site visitor filling out the form. Compared to traditional affiliate marketing, it is often a much easier and more lucrative way to monetize a website.

Traditional affiliates have a tougher job. They have to get the traffic, presell the product, and send visitors to the vendor through an affiliate link, hoping to generate something like 1% to 5% sales. Conversions are highly dependent on the vendor’s sales letter and product. If the vendor does a poor job of selling, or has an overpriced or poorly received product, the affiliate has spent a lot of time, and perhaps money, for very little return. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Nuts and Bolts of Launching a Career in Freelancing or Consulting

“I’m going to work for myself.” For many people, the dream of independence can be turned into a reality. Freelancing and/or consulting is the most straightforward path toward working for a great boss — you. Because it is a tremendous commitment, however, it’s important to think logically and take steps toward this career move seriously.The most important thing to consider is the purpose of freelancing/consulting. Are you looking to fill some free time? Do you want to earn extra money? Are you looking to work for yourself? Want to test the waters in a new career? These are all questions central to the issue of income expectation. Decide whether you will freelance/consult on the side, as a part-time position, or as a full-time move. It’s wise not to quit your full-time position until you’ve been consulting on the side for a few years and have a good sense of the flow of your intended business.Another thing to consider is pricing. If you browse around the freelance boards you can see that there is stiff competition for US freelancers from offshore providers. Obviously, they can offer much lower prices than US providers. There are some things you can do to give you a competitive edge and compete at higher prices. Read the rest of this entry »

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I thought I would do something different. In 2003, Problogger did something very similar to this in another blog he had. He recently gave some tips on doing some fun, interactive things on your blog and I loved this idea and thought it was time for an Underblog reincarnation.

The Search for the Underblogs

This is not a contest. There are a lot of quality blogs out there that get little recognition, so I thought I’d start a campaign to uncover some of these ‘Underblogs’. Tell me what your favorite blogs are … particularly if it’s a little known blog that you’ve discovered and love to read. Please don’t include blogs that are considered A-list, Technorati 100 or other popular blogs. Leave your nominations in the comments (obvious spam will be deleted). To enter a blog, please follow the instructions below

- Mention up to 5 blogs that you want to tell people about in the comments section below. Please include the name and its url. Tell us why you love this blog.

- You can leave a link to your own blog if you think it fits the category of ‘underblog’.

After all the submissions are in (by March 8 - 3 weeks from now), I will do an Underblog Update post with a poll and everyone can vote their favorites. Pass the word around so we can get a lot of participation and give some air time to the well-deserved Underblogs.

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I recently ran across a new ad service very similar to Entrecard. The main difference is that you earn credits by page views rather than by dropping or visiting other sites. You can add the code to as many qualifying pages as you have to receive credits for page views. When you sign up, they give you 1,000 credits to start you off. 1,000 credits - 1,000 page views. Entrecard actually increases traffic to your sites and improves your Alexa rating, blog comments, rss readers, and Technorati stats. AdsFlip won’t do any of this except for the traffic generated by actual click-throughs of your ad on other people’s site in the network. I see Entrecard and AdsFlip as a good partnership.

Entrecard’s traffic will increase the page views that you earn in AdsFlip, thereby giving you a lot more ad exposure if you use both networks. I just signed up for AdsFlip about an hour ago and have already generated 59 credits in addition to the 1,000 that I got from signing up, the bulk of that being Entrecard traffic. It’s in beta right now, brand new, but is functioning fully and taking signups.

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With more than 64 million active users and around 250,000 new users joining every day, you can tap into the social networking revolution with a free page on Facebook for your blog or business … yes, I said free.

Previously you had to be BIG business with a BIG marketing budget to create a corporate or company Facebook account. Blockbuster Inc., CBS Corp., The Coca-Cola Co., Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc., are examples of well known companies that have a corporate presence on Facebook. Facebook members could then become “fans” by adding your company as a friend.

Now, this option is open to any business. Businesses can add any content they want, including photos, videos and music. Facebook users can share information about a business directly with the company by adding reviews or other information to that business’ page. Small businesses now have the advantage that only Fortune 500 companies could afford previously. It’s simple: here’s how you do it:

Creating A Facebook Business Page

1. Visit this URL

2. Choose the best category for your business.

3. Just enter your business name and then click “Create Page”.

4. Now you can add a description of your business and a website address. You can also add a photo or logo. There are sections to add more photos, video

5. Then click on your hyperlinked business name in the top left corner and click “publish this page.”

6. Finally, from your new profile page, become a fan of your business. This is important as all of your “friends” will now be able to see your page when they visit your profile and it will be shown in the news feed that “Suzanne is a fan of Dot Com Mogul”. With some social networking, some of your Facebook friends will also add your business as a friend and then their friends will see a message… and on and on.

To the left is a screenshot of your admin panel. You can send updates to fans of the business and there’s a link to Promote Page with an Ad. You can also use the pages’ discussion board to start topics, list events, or write on “the wall”. I’ve just added a page for my blog, Dot Com Mogul. You can see it here. (While you’re there, add it as a friend I plan to add more interesting info and a video to it, but this is the beginning page with minimal information. If you’re wondering why you should do this, just check out the Facebook statistics below, and did I mention …. it’s free.
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For me one of the more time consuming tasks to doing business online is finding profitable niches. Basically you need to find a problem that people have and provide a solution and then get that message to them. This post will actually be quite short, because a friend of mine just posted an absolutely brilliant article on this.

Read it for yourself.

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I’ve put together an Affiliate/CPA Directory for you to help you choose ad networks and products to promote. Another consideration when choosing your networks is the problem of affiliate cookies being intercepted by popular spyware detection programs. The problem of cookie deletion has long been a problem of the online ad industry. A report from independent spyware researcher Ben Edelman highlights the degree to which spyware detection software gobbles up your commissions by intercepting affiliate cookies.

Edelman studied 11 spyware detection programs to determine which ones devoured cookies from a range of 50 ad systems, including ad networks, affiliate networks and Yahoo’s and Google’s pay-per-click ad systems. These spyware detection programs included McAfee Internet Security Suite, Symantec’s Norton Internet Security and Microsoft Windows Defender, LavaSoft’s Ad-Aware, PC Tools’s Spybot Search and Destroy, Webroot’s Spy Sweeper, and ZoneAlarm Internet Security Suite. Read the rest of this entry »

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