My marketing budget generally isn’t that big, yet. The money I make goes into living, bills, etc. However I have purchased reviews, banners and links in the past.

Where Should You Invest Your Money?

This is a classic chicken and the egg theory that many bloggers have debated about. Some argue that with the right content, readers will come. Some argue that without marketing you can’t get readers. Some argue both are equally important.

Many bloggers have started selling articles for easy revenue. The more people selling, the cheaper you can buy articles for. You don’t even need to be a writer, to be a blogger, you can get someone to do that for you.

With that dilemma, which should you purchase?

Articles

In the Bloggeries Forum, Bobby is selling his articles for $3-$5 dollars. By choosing the right topic and SEO, you can not only hope and expect your post will get social media traffic, it will also get traffic from search engines.

I get paid to write articles for different blogs and it’s a nice gig. The best thing you can do is get it to be steady. For a particular blog I make over $100 a month, so I can see why this is appealing to bloggers.

Advertising

Buying advertising and links can be cheap fill, unless you renew. The traffic you get sometimes only lasts so long. However, you can also convert that traffic into readers if you advertise on the right blog. We just (finally) added an advertising page with many great options.

Given that argument, I am interested to test out purchasing articles. This not only will save me time for other things, its another fresh perspective.

What would you rather buy, an article or advertising?

Today we have only the big blog contests. Below a collection of the hugest on line competitions you have ever seen, there’s no reasons to hesitate.

Etienne Teo

Prizes for $5641 from Etienne! Cash, blog reviews, advertising space, Wordpress themes, entrecard credits, take a look at the site for full list. To enter you have to write about it, linking to the contest post and to all the sponsors.
Ends on April 13th.

Winning the Web

Gyutae is offering a total of $14,575 in cash and prizes, not only cash but also internet marketing-related products and services. That’s incredible! There will be at least 100 winners and to participate you have to perform some simple actions: sign up for the free Winning the Web mailing list, subscribe to the Winning the Web RSS feed and collect entries by doing other tasks (explained in random post during the contest period). Remember: you have to sign-up to certain sponsors to be eligible to win some prizes. Even BAYB is a sponsor!
Ends on April 2nd.

The University Kid

Jason has more than $2000 worth of stuff for you. From hard cash to blog consulting and much more. Gain your points to enter: leave comments, subscribe through RSS, blog about the contest. Simple and easy.
Ends on April 5th.

If you’re looking for blog contests, if you want to promote your own competition, don’t forget to visit About Blog Contests!

I just got back from a game of mini-golf. On the ride I realized I had to write up Comment Friday! I’ve got a big to-do list around here so let’s get started.

If this is your first Comment Friday we give one lucky person a free weekly blogroll spot as our “blog of the week“. Along with that we are also giving that winner 200 entrecard credits.

With our recent social media articles, I thought it would be an excellent Comment Friday topic. I want to know, what is your best experience with social media? Whether it is a meaningful comment, a bunch of participation, votes, or loads of traffic. I want to know! Happy Friday.

I stress to any new blogger and any blogger in general, that social media and networking is important. If your post can be popular on certain social media websites it can be very beneficial. We’ve just giving you the basic rules for social media and three new social media sites for bloggers. Now, to publicize!

What is a FeedFlare?

Along with using social media I believe it is important to burn your feed through Feedburner. This allows you to track and monitor your rss feed subscribers. One of the best features of Feedburner is adding FeedFlares to your blog and it’s feed.

A FeedFlare gives your subscribers easy ways to email, tag, share, and act on the content you publish by including social media sites. FeedFlares place a simple footer at the bottom of each article that helps you distribute, inform and create a community around your content.

This basically allows your blog posts to be easily submitted to different social media sites. We use our feed flares for stumbleupon, sphinn, and delicious.

Choose Your FeedFlares

Under the optimize tab in your Feedburner feed account you can select and add different social media sites as your FeedFlares.

I would of course recommend Stumbleupon, Sphinn, Digg, Delicious, and Mixx. However, you can add whichever sites that appeal to you and your blog.

How To Add FeedFlares

After you choose which FeedFlares to use, its easy after that. Simply select which place you want your FeedFlare to appear. If you select feed, Feedburner will automatically put it at the footer of your feed for you.

If you select “site” then you must install a code on your blog for your FeedFlares to be shown. The code is easy to install, we’ve chosen to put it at the end of every post.

Do you use FeedFlares? If so, which ones? If you don’t use them, why not?

LinkShare is another good affiliate network that I frequently use. Linkshare reminds me of Commission Junction, they have similar affiliates to promote. It’s surprising that I haven’t seen many bloggers use and promote Linkshare.

Using Linkshare

LinkShare is a pretty basic affiliate network with tons of different affiliates to promote. The reason I joined was that there was so many big companies you can promote, like Target, Toys R Us, Walmart, Office Depot and more.

A huge plus for me using Linkshare has been the “private offers” I’ve received. Several of the affiliate programs offer incentive to those who are promoting their product or service. Netflix has opted me into special programs where I make more per lead. SpySweeper has a contest going on for affiliates who increase their sales by a certain amount.

Some of the affiliates have been very hands on with those promoting them and it’s definitely a huge plus for me.

Linkshare Tips

Another great attraction is there is no minimum you need to get paid. However, this means some checks may be a little small. They don’t offer paypal.

For new Linkshare users I recommend starting at the Consumer and Affiliate promotions in your dashboard. There are a list of all the affiliates that are doing special promotions. Start there and make your rounds!

There are over 500 “online retailers” available to you on Linkshare, so don’t be shy. Start applying to any affiliate that looks interesting to you.

Apply to lots of affiliates in your niche. I’ve been declined by several affiliates that I definitely could of promoted and made money with. However they won’t always approve you. Have a back-up plan!

LinkShare. does have an affiliate program that pays $1.50 per person that you refer. It’s not much, however as I’ve mention I haven’t seen many bloggers promote it, so you could make a little on referrals.

Click here to become a LinkShare Affiliate!

Some social media websites, like Digg, are becoming increasingly difficult for bloggers to have their articles go popular. I have been using alternatives which have worked fine for us. Now that you know the basic rules for social media sites you can be successful on any social media website. Here are three that you may not know about, that are perfect for bloggers.

Post On Fire

Post on Fire is a new one that I have started using. At first it’s always difficult to start using new sites like this, because essentially you need people to vote for you. The plus however is that you don’t need an account to vote, so you can have your visitors vote for you. It only takes 5 votes for your story to go popular.They have the basic categories, business, blogging, health and technology. There is something for everyone.

Blog Engage

Blog Engage is a social media website that I found on the bloggeries forum. However, this one needs a little work. The owner is pretty hands on with the website, but it needs some adjustments. The last post to go popular was 4 days ago. It takes 7 votes to go popular and obviously not many are getting that many votes.However this social media site is a little more complete. It has a blog as well as a forum. With some small adjustments this website can be a great place to promote your blog posts.

Blogging Zoom

Blogging Zoom is the most popular of the three. I’ve actually already written about Blogging Zoom: BloggingZoom Burning Bloggers. Yes, it was a bit negative. A while after this post, Vic actually apologized, unbanned us, reinstated my account, and asked me to come back. So everyone deserves a second chance, right? I’ve actually just installed the Blogging Zoom Wordpress Plugin that adds a Blogging Zoom button to your post (that you can get here).

Blogging Zoom is a little harder to have your post go popular. It looks like it takes 15 zooms to go popular. It’s a little confusing as there are posts from 30 days ago on the front page. However, it’s a plus that you don’t need an account to vote on the post.

Have you used any of these social media websites? If so, how was your experience?

Don’t forget to vote for this article at PostonFire, Blog Engage, and Blogging Zoom!

With Delores’ recent trouble with Sphinn, I thought I’d write a quick guideline to follow for social media and social bookmarking sites. Here are six basic rules and tips for a successful social media user account.

Always Read Their Rules

Each social media website will have a different set of rules. This is a given, but sometimes I am guilty of not following this one. However, the most important rules you’ll generally find in more than one place.Pay special attention to the “rules” on the post submit page. These are most important.

Have a Profile Picture

A common thought on user profiles without pictures is that they are “spammers”. I like to keep the same picture on all of my profiles. This not only helps users recognize me, but hopefully also vote for my articles. If they liked what I submitted before, they should again.

Make “Friends”

After uploading my profile picture and updating other information, I start adding friends. Usually it’s people that I recognize. Sometimes I just add people who are voting on and submitting similar content.

Stay On-Topic

Don’t submit your posts in the wrong categories. If it’s being submitted in a certain category, make sure it’s that category.

By not following this rule it will only force moderators to adjust or remove your post. This can lead to getting banned.

Don’t Create Multiple Accounts

Many social media websites don’t allow you to have more than one account. So don’t do it. If you do, don’t link them together with the same homepage. And don’t name them similar, example, profile1, profile2, profile3, etc.

Don’t “Spam” / Submit Good Content

Social media users want quality articles to read, especially on the main page. Even some of my posts that have hit the front page haven’t received the best responses. It’s all up to opinion however. Digg users are by far the hardest and most likely to “bash” your article.

I strongly recommend NOT submitting each of your posts to the same site. It can do more harm than good.

All in all, it’s pretty easy to have a good user account standing on any social media site. Let’s recap. Read the rules, put a picture on your profile, add friends, stay on topic, create only one account, and don’t spam!

One thing you cannot ignore about your blog is backing up the data. You don’t want to wake up to find your hosting mess up the backups and you have lost all your data.

Relax. I know just the thought of that would make a hard working blogger like you shudder.

I had written a detailed post here on different ways of backing up your blog. See if you find it something you can use or at least get you thinking in the right direction.

One such way is using an online blog backup service such as BlogBackupOnline.com. At the time of writing that post, it was a beta service and they stayed in beta for almost a year and now they have come out of beta. BlogBackupOnline is a cool service that lets you backup your blogs for free (up to 5MB). The great thing about this service is that it takes no technical knowledge to set up your blog backup.

You sign up for a free account, provide them the url of your blog and they will take care of the rest.

Now, they are in a mode called Freemium which means they are still free for most starter blogs with less than 5MB of data. But, they are also ready to cater to bloggers who want to back more data as well who require technical support.

Professional account will include:

• 50 MB of storage
• Support for backing up content linked from your blog
• Support for restoring your blog
• Email support
• $4.17 per month ($49.95 per year)

Enterprise account will include:

• 1 GB of storage
• Support for backing up content linked from your blog
• Support for restoring your blog
• Phone support
• $8.30 per month ($99.95 per year)

You have nothing to lose by trying out this free service and can sleep tight knowing you won’t lose your blog content. Again, it is always wise to have multiple backup strategies but this will be a good start if you don’t have any at the moment.

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