With the internet booming with bloggers and new websites everyday, more and more people are finding a way to make an income online. Some of course better than others. One person, Michael Dunlop, has seemingly made it his goal to show you how to retire at 21.

Young Retirement

“In the world of retirement, 21 is the new 60.”

The concept is a little fuzzy for me, I haven’t been able to tell if Michael Dunlop is actually “retired”. However, he writes about and interviews many of young entrepreneurs that are making tons of money online, at a very young age. He even offers a Free Ebook full of tips to make money online.

The Retire@21 web page is very well laid out to help you find what you are looking for. Diving into this website for the first time I can’t figure out which part is my favorite, so I will tell you about them all!

Interviews

Michael has put together an amazing list of interviews with young entrepreneurs. There are currently about three pages, with many more to come I’m sure, since we haven’t been interviewed yet (hint).

Most bloggers should recognize the names Nate Whitehill, Tyler Cruz, Jonathan Volk, Aaron Wall, and Yaro Starak. All have been interviewed by Michael at Retire@21. Each interview asks about 10-12 questions of internet related questions.

Two Great Toplists

I am a sucker for anything that ranks websites, I always want to be included. Michael has put together two great toplists to be apart of.

The first is the Top 21 Young Run Websites. This includes Facebook (age 23), Runescape (age 28) and Wordpress (age 23). It even includes Entrecard, which is run by 21 year old Graham Langdon.

The second toplist is a version of the Top Making Money Online Blogs. Michael has purchased reviews from several different blogs. The list is compiled of which blogs were best for the money including how many clicks, words, and comments were received. Currently Tyler Cruz is at the top of the list, however Michael is still continuing his experiment.

Now Can You Retire?

Retire@21 is a resource website and blog with plenty of information. The layout is pretty simple, however there isn’t a search bar so I couldn’t find everything I wanted to. The website flow is very busy, but it’s pretty clean, the balance is very nice.

I can’t find really anything bad to say about this website, which is why I have subscribed to the RSS feed and you should too! Don’t forget to grab the Retire at 21’s FREE Secrets to Making Money Online Ebook.

Health is a growing awareness that everyone seems to be focusing on. From tv, to radio and now to blogs, nearly everyone seems to be trying to get healthier.

For that very reason, Israel of Fat Man Unleashed has released his new social media website, Healthranker. Healthranker allows bloggers, webmasters and users to submit health related articles. Related articles include, diet, exercise, fitness, basically anything to do with being healthy.

Israel is very excited about his new Health Ranker website, and for good reason. I see more and more bloggers post about health tips, recipes, and losing weight. Those articles basically have nowhere to be promoted except for digg. I’ve already submitted a guest post I wrote on FatManUnleashed for ranking.

Remember Healthranker is in beta, so there may be a few bugs. Any problems you encounter make sure to submit to help everything flow better.

This Isn’t The First Time…

that we’ve seen Israel featured on Blog about your Blog. A few months ago we covered the release of his blogger workout ebook. The ebook features workouts especially for bloggers. There are great ways to lose weight and exercise and continue the blogger lifestyle.

I’ve also gotten into his weight loss movement, by guest posting about FatManUnleashed. I mentioned my Master Cleanse Diet, didn’t go the way I had hoped. So my new method has been morning routines including walking, exercising and eating a nice, but small breakfast.
I’m excited to see how Healthranker will do in today’s blogosphere. I am predicting great things, so make sure to go and get signed up and start submitting your health articles.

When I mentioned buying wholesale, Ebay and auctions where brought up. Surprisingly, for how much I am online, I don’t buy online at all. I can’t say I’ve ever won an ebay auction. I did however use Craigslist to buy a T-Mobile Sidekick. I have used both ebay and Craigslist to find bargains.

Typo Buddy

Everyone loves a bargain, especially bloggers. Sometimes certain items are only available online. Typo Buddy is an interesting tool for those seeking cheap auctions. Typo Buddy is a tool to help you find commonly misspelled items, listings & words on eBay and Craigslist.

As I mentioned I never buy online so I thought this would be a valuable tool to pass on to my readers. I’ve just spent about 10 minutes searching for misspelled “Disney” auctions.

The popular searches on TypoBuddy so far are Abercrombie, Banana Republic, Disney, Ipod, playstation 3, and Wii. I can’t believe people can misspell some of these things, especially when setting up an auction. I guess for a bargain I would buy from someone who misspells Disney!

Thanks to Deal Locker for letting me know about this handy tool.

Project Wonderful is another ad service that bloggers can utilize easily. It is another “wonderful” widget that is easy to use, for the most part. I took an “un-monetized” spot of our blog, in-between our Topspots and Blogroll and turned it into a money maker.

Project Wonderful

Project Wonderful is a great resource to use if you are having trouble monetizing your blog. If you are can’t fill your banner space, put in project wonderful until you can find a more permanent sponsor. Better than an “advertise here” button. By just setting your widget for a couple of cents per day, you can easily earn several $ per month.

You can place the widget anywhere. We have the widget on our sidebar, but some websites like 365toFreedom put it in every post. The ad sizes you can have include, 117×30, 125×125, 234×60, 468×60, 728×90, and 160×600.

A plus to it is that you can use the money you’ve earned and advertise with it. You can find several cheaper advertising for only pennies per day.

Some Wonderful Tips

When you set up your ad box, make sure you select a minimum bid. If you don’t you will get flooded with advertisers bidding 0.00$ and you will be essentially advertising their site for free. This is a huge hassle having to reset your ad. You must delete it then make a new one.

Starting with less advertising boxes could cause your price to raise. It can only helpyou to have more competition! Our minimum price set with one ad has been 50 cents, but has gotten up to 2$+. Remember it’s cost per day, if we could keep up 2$ a day that’s an extra 60$ per month. With more ad boxes available, your advertising can be sold for less. Every blog is different, however this is just what has worked best for us.

I’m big on incentive, possibly give your advertisers a reason more to advertise, than just the banner. Everyone who advertises with BAYB, usually gets a nice big stumble. Our current advertiser, http://getsomecomputerhelp.com/ got a nice stumbleupon boost of a few 100 visitors.

Has Project Wonderful been wonderful for you?

Promotion and discussion on forums can definitely help your traffic as well as web presence. I’ve even tried to run my own forum however it proved to be too time consuming and difficult to fight the spam bots. The benefits of forums are great and I really wanted to tap into that area.

Instead I’ve tried to be active on several forums (as well as social media) because it’s important to branch out. Talking to other bloggers and conversing can really only help you expand.

Out with the Old

BloggerForum once was a great place for link exchanges, posts about new money making opportunities and a place to share your blog. They took some downtime figuring out a new way to fight the spammers. As they have re-emerged (I had no idea they were back until today) they are missing several key categories, as well as no easy way to search new posts. I was there several minutes without success.

PayPerPost Forum was a great place for me for a while. Lately their forum hasn’t become as blogger friendly, just postie friendly. My blog promotion and social media promotion wasn’t very well received the last few times. Stumble and digg requests go unanswered and blogging news needs constant bumping to keep it alive.

In with the New

Bloggeries forum has been very impressive so far. It’s one of the few “new” forums I’ve joined. Several seemed to pop up all at once. I’ve given Bloggeries forum a shot and it’s been pretty good. I’ve gotten to know the owner pretty well as well as converse with several members. The posts have already proved to be worth it, sending about 20+ unique visitors in just two or three days.

9Mb is a webmaster forum that is owned and run by Nomar. He is previously from KingNomar.com but that has been sold. The forum is a mini-digital point. They have a tight community of users who are frequent and active. It’s good for link sales, exchanges as well as blogging questions among other things.

Have you moved on to any of the new forums yet?

Search engines provide one of the biggest tools in the world right now. Information can be delivered to you in a matter of seconds. With so many people getting as much information as they want, the information then sometimes becomes popular. Such as internet videos. Some people have become internet celebrities due to their videos. Stars such as Will Ferrell have used videos to go viral and become even more popular.

Introducing Vid Search Live

Vidsearchlive is an internet Video Search Engine that gets videos from MySpace, MetaCafe, Veoh & Yahoo all from one location. This provides all the videos you want to get and search for all in the ease of one website. What I think will turn webmasters on to this is that you can then embed the videos onto your own website or blog.

This technique is used for other things such as searching for popular articles, pictures, etc all in one place. The is the first I’ve seen with videos.

Apparently YouTube didn’t appreciate their videos being displayed on  other sites, and have banned external script feeds. This means it will no longer work on VidSearch. I would recommend VidSearch remove them all together from their website. No reason to still have the ability to search them and get nothing.

On top of videos you can also search for music and listen to it on the website. It pulls from Esnips (which I’ve never heard of) the problem with it is it gives you the song several times. I found several titles that wouldn’t play when I searched for them.

With internet users looking to get even more information faster, I think we will see a lot of these type of sites emerge in all types of different categories.

Entrecard’s best idea (besides trying to change the price system. JC is almost off the most popular list, ridiculous) is the entrecard shop. However, the first batch of sellers were really lacking. The items consisted of worthless raffles that weren’t appealing at all. They were just more attempts at gaming the system trying to get credits. Some were selling tickets at something like 110 each, with only 10 tickets allowed. The prize was 1,000 credits. I wonder where the rest goes?

However the new batch of sellers, BAYB included, has offered some great items for sale, mostly at a reasonable price. Basically, I think we’ve scored so far. With our seller status I sold 4 125×125 banners for 1 week at 400 a pop. That’s 1600 credits earned in a week. These banners will be removed in the next couple of days, because their week is up. With those credits I’ve been able to “reinvest”.

The Entrecard Shop Loot

The thing about weekly, monthly, or yearly advertising is that it will be gone at some point. With the credits earned, I’ve been able to buy several blogposts that are permanent. It has driven little traffic to the site, but the reviews have been great and are tapping in to their audience.

Among blog reviews, I’ve been able to purchase ‘critiques’ as well as timed banner advertisements that cost way less than purchasing on their entrecard.

The two, possibly best, things are the guest posts I was able to purchase. Yes, I got to buy two posts that were used for BAYB and Words of a Poet. Brian wrote about his experience with interviews as easy content and traffic. It brought up the idea of starting interviews at BAYB again. Brian is still selling his guest posts for 400 credits. I think it’s an awesome idea, his posts are good too.

The other one was a “poem about anything”. This only cost my 75 credits and I was able to use it as a post at my poetry blog. The poem is entitled Monday Off and flows pretty well with the rest of the poetry on the site. Two posts for 475 credits, maybe I will just buy the rest of my posts? Or not.

What have you been able to buy from the entrecard shop?

As niche blogs become even more popular, the reliance on google for bloggers is at a new and different high. Much of the traffic for certain niche blogs come from search engines, mainly google. So when (and how much) does google crawl you?

SeoMeter

Add your website to SeoMeter, and start to keep track of search engine’s crawling!

SeoMeter allows you to monitor when search engine’s crawl your website or blog. Getting listed is free and the tool records in the database how often you get crawled.

You can see on our badge that our CC or crawl cycle is .9. The CC is the time between two consecutive crawls done by search engine robots. So if our crawl cycle was 1, that means we get crawled once a day.

You can also notice our rank, which I thought was pretty cool. You can check out the top 20 websites in blogging. Looks like we are in the top 5.

Why Does this Matter?

SeoMeter puts it simply and states that this

“allows webmasters to monitor their website’ crawling activities, and to collate crawling trend against their ongoing marketing campaign and other SEO strategies.”

However, I’m just more fascinated on graphs and how much the trends change over time. This gives you different things to check your experiments. Maybe you start posting more or less. It could affect your search engine referrals.

What determines search engine’s crawl rate is best outlined at the SEOmeter blog. The factors include content updates, pinging, sitemap, robots.txt and server speed.

How often do you get Crawled?