Let’s try to win some easy cash…Take a look at this selection of the simplest contests over the net. Use your blog or you email and cross your fingers.

Cash from Entrepreneur Life

Here your chance to win $50. Entrepreneur Life is offering this money prize to one lucky reader of his blog. To enter you have to follow these simple rules: Subscribe to his RSS Feed, write a post about this contest (50 words at least) linking back to the contest post and then announce your entry by leaving a comment.
Ends on May 19th.

Free cash every saturday

Zero and Up is running an interesting contest where you can win up to $10 (via Paypal). You only have to subscribe to their RSS feeds by mail. One winner will be randomly selected every Saturday. So remember to check your email!
No deadline.

Amazon Gift card

Gift cards are always welcome! You can win one of them joining Prime Time Money contest. The card value is $50 and you can spend it on Amazon. Subscribe to his RSS feeds by mail or reader and then submit the secret phrase. Yyou’ll get more entries if you leave a comment on any of his post.
Ends on May 15th.

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

Another Friday, a week flew by. Happy May! I have been busy working on websites and trying to make sure we have some great contest prizes for next week. I’m still looking to bribe some sponsors ;).

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.

Yesterday’s post was about vlogging. Have you ever made a Vlog post? Why or why not?

When looking to sell a review or link, make sure to read Pay Per Post Pitfalls. It provides interesting advice on how to negotiate with link/post buyers.

April has surprisingly been a down month for us. Our RSS readers continue to increase (thank you!) but our traffic has been the lowest it’s been in a while. Still pushing about 10,000 visitors I’m always looking for more readers.

Here is the best for the month, some of these articles might of been overlooked.

Bloggers Guide to SEO: This article definitely was in the making for a while. I think it is very helpful for newer bloggers, or those who aren’t practicing SEO. Even some novice bloggers found the guide useful. Yes, I am working on a follow-up!

Could Mixx Be the Next Digg?: This article caught fire on social media thanks to some great submissions. Mixx is one of my new favorite social media sites. It’s not sending a lot of traffic, but it’s still fun to use. Make sure to join the new Blog about your Blog Mixx Group.

5 Indepth Blogging Tips: Blogging tips are usually a nice quick read. We put together 5 quick tips with the help from one of our readers.

How to Retire at 21: This was an interesting blog review of Retire @ 21. This website and blog I definitely enjoy so make sure to read the review.

Making Enemies on Social Media: This post was a little difficult. I wasn’t sure how I wanted to write it. We’ve obviously been penalized by Stumbleupon due to some “enemies” which is very unfortunate. Who would of thought we got negative criticism on that post as well? Do we really complain that much?

Hope you all enjoy our best and favorite posts for the month. We appreciate all of your comments so keep them coming!

Video Blogging (Vlogging) could be the future of blogging, some have predicted so. People want their information fast, easy and a lot of it. Several bloggers that I follow have either turned strictly to vlogging or make sure to do one weekly or monthly (even more).

Benefits of Vlogging

Vlogging allows you to connect with your readers on another level. Some bloggers like to add pictures to their blog to give a face to the name and blogger. Better yet, is vlogging. This allows you to interact with your readers to not only put a face to the blogger, but also show them even more personality.

Typing an article can be time consuming, sometimes you may not get to write everything you want to. With a vlog the topic is basically endless. You can say whatever you want for as long as you want. There is no word limit.

On a vlog you can incorporate different topics and questions all into one vlogging session. Instead of writing 3 small articles, you could combine them into one vlogging video. This is excellent for answering readers questions. You could basically do this with writing, but vlogs seem to flow better with different topics. The transition is much easier.

Overall it seems vloggers can really express themselves better. You can really be yourself instead of trying to write in a certain format.

Vlogging Is Nice… But…

I still don’t like it that much. I’d prefer sticking to regular blogs. Heres why:

Some vlogs seem like a waste of time. Get to the point, I really don’t have 10 minutes to spend just listening to ramblings. Some vloggers basically put together half hour shows regularly.

There is no text to get search engine referrals. Unless you already have the traffic or the video does well on social media, it may be a lost cause.

Watching videos online can be a hassle. Sometimes there is a missing file or plugin I need in order to watch the video. With slow loading times this can be another issue.

Is Video Blogging the Future?

It could be, but I could never imagine doing an entire blog with just video postings. I don’t think that blogs could generally, really excel with just a video blogging format.

Do you video blog?

Once AuctionAds moved to ShoppingAds I pretty much was done with their service. I had made enough to cash out so I wasn’t really trying to keep promoting it. These ads are good for some blogs and niches, but not seemingly for blogs like this.

Revisiting ShoppingAds

A few weeks/months went by. I figured I should check my account to see how everything was going. I knew I had some referrals, but not sure if they had kept using ShoppingAds.

Logging in I found out that I had about $100 in referral cash!

I figured to try to start running the ads on my other domains. If other people are obviously making money with them, I’m sure I could find a way too.
Shopping Ads Offering CPC

Before, AuctionAds/ShoppingAds would only offer Cost Per Action (CPA). You only got paid for someone clicking your ad, then bidding or winning the item. That has changed with the new Cost Per Click (CPC) program.

While running CPC it is basically like Google Adsense, just with products and pictures. So far I have found out that the CPC isn’t that bad. I don’t have enough data to give an estimated #, but I am working on it.

If you aren’t sure which ads to run in your niche you can never go wrong by selected the most popular. This is a handy feature that you can use to have the ads being the most popular phrases searched for.

Running ShoppingAds

I am looking for more ways to incorporate ShoppingAds into my websites. Here are a few reasons or tips on using ShoppingAds.

ShoppingAds referral program is decent enough to push and earn money on. You earn 5% of all revenue generated by your referral for 6 months.

ShoppingAds is great for niche sites. If you are blogging about products it’s a perfect match.

You can run ShoppingAds along with your Google Adsense. I will be experimenting again with running ShoppingAds with Google on this blog.

Run as many blocks as you want. There are no limits.

Try different things. ShoppingAds runs on the keywords you input. Constantly try different ones to find the best results.

Have you tried ShoppingAds for your blog?

Today is a lazy day for us, I got too much sun yesterday here in sunny San Diego. It’s been almost 100 degrees here! We are also waiting for some packages (birthday gifts!). I figured I would take it easy today and tell you about some upcoming BAYB things we have going on.

Upcoming Contest

In celebration of my girlfriend Emmas 21st birthday (and my 22, yeah im getting old! lol) I want to do a May contest. I hope I can give away some items everyday for a week. We only have so many prizes to give away here, we would love some sponsors.

Please contact us if you are interested. Each sponsor will get a nice mention on their day.

Affiliate Program

We just started playing with the OIOPublisher wordpress plugin. There are plenty of great features that can make monetizing your blog easy. Use the coupon code QWERTY-17 to save $17 on the plugin! You can buy it now for only $20.

The plugin comes fully equipped with what I’ve always wanted. An affiliate program.

For our affiliates we are offering 20% for referring advertisers to us. You can earn up to $10 if you refer someone to buy a $50 review!

There will be more information provided as I make it easier to purchase links directly. Go ahead and register as an affiliate!

Guest Posters

Blog about your Blog started off with several authors contributing on a regular basis. I think thats what made it unique and exciting. That participation has dropped off and we are always looking for more quality authors.

We are headed to Vegas from May 9-11 and we have prior birthday plans before that. I’d really like to get some more authors posting in here.

If you are interested please contact me so we can get you set-up.

Court let the blogosphere know this morning that Google seems to be updating PR. So far we are still sticking at PR3. However, some of my other domains seem to be upgrading to a higher PR.

The highest reported seems to be Daily Blog Tips with a strong PR 7.

My twitter seems to be going crazy with the talks of the PR update.

Have you seen changes on your PR?

Mylot was a huge blogging fad, it seemed everyone joined and promoted it. It was a great thing for bloggers, because commission was easy. I made about $30 with little effort before my earnings fell off. I still have 30 cents pending.

Mylot was a huge blogging topic about a year ago. Every make money blogger was heavily promoting it as the best new thing. The last time that I wrote an article about Mylot was Feb 2007!

What is Mylot?

For those who don’t know, Mylot is a huge community with 127,478 members. It is basically a souped up forum with a little bit of Yahoo Answers mixed in. You can start any topic, ask a question or just simply make a comment or observation.

For each thread started or reply, you earn money. The money is small and I’m not exactly sure the algorithm. However for popular topics and replies you are essentially paid more. Once you reach $10 you are eligible for payment.

The real money is made with getting a bunch of referrals.

Mylots Referral Program

When you refer someone to Mylot you basically will earn 25% of whatever the person you referred earns.

A great feature is that you get to see how much your referral earns you each month. My referrals are no longer making me any money, I referred them over a year ago!

Promoting your Blog on Mylot

I just had remembered I made a few posts in Mylot and of course left my my URL. Checking my statcounter I noticed a few referrals from Mylot.

The blogging section isn’t very popular at Mylot, but there is tons of opportunity to promote your blog whatever the niche is.

Mike of Mikes Money Making Mission did this in a great way. Mylot was one of his biggest traffic referrals. The best thing is you are basically paid to promote your own site (since you are paid per post).

It does take a bit of effort, but if you are on daily for a few minutes it can be well worth it.