Another week, another set of contests for you to enter and possibly win. Here’s my picks from Contest Beat over the past week.

$100 Cash

This one is nice and easy and you can enter in a number of different ways from subscribing to the RSS, blogging about the contest or even making a comment. Just make sure you enter before the end of the month!

A Coffee Machine

Although this one is for Canada and US residents only, the prize is still pretty cool. Le Gourmet TV have a Grind Central Coffee Grinder to give away and entering is as simple as watching a video and then answering a question. Check out the details here.

1,000 GB Monthly Hosting

I thought this hosting competition was special because instead of the usual $5/month hosting that most people givwe away they have a 1GB diskspace, 1,000 GB transfer account up for grabs. To enter you need to subscribe to an RSS feed.

A Pair of $1,500 Diamond Earrings

Goldsmith Jewelry have a pair of nice diamond earrings to give away and entering is as simple as blogging about their site and also the contest. The contest closes on February 4 at which time a winner will be voted upon (not sure I agree with that), but a nice prize nonetheless!

Don’t forget to check out Contest Beat for all the latest contests, you never know, you might make some money, win a Wii, whatever! 

Many bloggers have been sucking entrecard dry by using it to help them to grow their own blogs. As Graham the owner of entrecard often says is that entrecard will and has helped the smaller to medium sized blogs. Those bloggers have found to ways to use entrecard to their advantage to increase traffic, readership, comments and feed readers.

The latest one to use entrecard to their advantage is Mike Huang of bloggin-ads. He put together a huge contest with lots of blogging sponsors. His main method of putting it together was by messaging tons of top entrecard users. Not only did he raise 4,500 entrecard points in prizes, he also lured bloggers to donate about 60 different prizes.

What I like about the contest is that each of the 12 winners will win a package of prizes. Each “package” has about 5-6 prizes and each seem to include at least a few entrecard credits.

Blog about your Blog apparently was one of the first responses to the offer as we are listed first and wrote to Mike within minutes of receiving the email offer. We are in group one offering a 1 month blogroll and a 125×125 monthly ad below our entrecard widget.

This contest will run until Jan 31st. To enter you can subscribe to bloggin-ads, post about the contest, post comments as well as stumble and digg the contest post.

Head on over to the contest page to take a look at all of the contest sponsors.

I’m always looking for new ways to make money online. I’ll try anything at least for a trial run, so I have joined AudioAdHosting that promise a new way to make money online.

Audio Ads

What if you could earn from every visitor that visited your website? Sounds too good to be true, I agree. Pay-Per-Play is a new ad service, instead of contextual ads, you display a code that is an audo ad.

Each audio ad is 5 seconds long from companies like HBO, Taco Bell and others. This sounds like a great idea, I’d obviously love to get paid for every visitor to our site. Is this “revolutionary idea” before it’s time?

Can it Work?

The reason why television and radio ads are successful is because people are listening. How about those who don’t have speakers or aren’t turned on? How could you be paid for those advertisers? If you are, how are they able to make money on that to be able to keep this system alive?

I’ve also been promised this before. Places like The Newsroom have been big busts for me. I’ve received several 100 views, clicks etc, but am under 1$ in earnings.

So how much will I be paid for every visitor? Funny thing is I can’t find that anywhere! They tell you, that you can earn for every visitor but not how much. It could be 100$ or a fifth of a penny. How much really depends in this situation.

I’ve also had “technical difficulties” where instead of a commercial all I hear is an annoying scrambling.

It can work…

Pay-Per-Play is an interesting idea that can be fine tuned to really work. However, they jumped the gun in releasing their services. On their login page you see

“We are STILL making extensive database changes this week. We have not resumed posting new hit counts yet, that comes next.”

Why would I run this service and trust that it will make me money? The information and overall service at this time is lacking. I hope they make some big changes soon and get out of their seeming beta stage and really step it up.

However, it can’t hurt to register it’s free. Try Pay-Per-Play ads and tell me what you think about it.

We are getting back on track here at Blog about your Blog. Our articles have been doing great, hitting the front pages of sphinn and of course Blogging Zoom.

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 50 entrecard points.

Leave us a comment about anything you want. I’d love to hear how many bloggers ‘workout’ to stay in shape. I have responded two questions left by Comment Friday readers about what they’d like to see on our blog, let us know. Any questions you have.

We have our first official Comment Friday sponsor. James from TotalWebReview is trying to promote their contest in which they are giving away 20 pages on One Buck Wiki. Three winners will each win 20 pages a piece.

Other prizes include advertising, blog reviews and 200 entrecard credits. The value comes out to be around 700$ in prizes!

To enter you can subscribe to Total Web Review by email, make a post on your blog, as well as commenting, voting etc on Total Web Review.

There is also advertising available for only 2$ per month, for a 125×125 banner ad. You may notice Blog about your Blog already has one 🙂

I have mentioned before my efforts to lose weight. Being a blogger isn’t the best job to have when you are bigger or getting big. There isn’t much physical activity involved. One week of working a “real” job that I was on my feet 9 hours a day, I lost weight easily.

I’ve mentioned trying the master cleanse diet which isn’t exactly the healthiest way to lose weight. It was hard to keep the pounds off as well. Due to the recent chaos and holidays my weight hasn’t exactly stayed down due to it all.

After I started messenging to Israel of Fat Man Unleashed he mentioned he was releasing an ebook for bloggers to lose weight. Just by mentioning that I was on board! His blog is basically about healthy weight loss so it made perfect sense to write the ebook.

Weightloss Ebook

Israel is the perfect one to write an ebook and share his experience. His blog is doing quite well with over 700 rss feed readers. So far he’s already lost 44 pounds!

The great thing about his ebook is that you can do whatever you want on it. There isn’t any specific time or order. The idea is just to set aside just a few minutes a day, whatever you can spare (15 minutes?).

The Workouts

What’s unique about these workouts are you are using the materials that surround you everyday. Your computer chair (or fart catcher as Israel says) is the focus of several routines, like chair squats. If you are like me you don’t have a full workout station at your disposal, so use what you have.

The technology game, puts values on how many phone calls and emails you receive. These values are given by pushups. So every time you get some work done, take a break and do some pushups! Even those who have a laptop there is a section just for you.

For more information about weightloss check out his blog. What he seems to enjoy most is being real with his readers. He doesn’t sugarcoat being “fat”. He tells it like it is and how he is going to change that and get to his ideal weight.

Take a look for yourself at Fat Man Unleashed and get his free ebook.

With the opening of the entrecard shop many interesting and unique items are for sale. Most are overpriced, but I did find one cheap gem among the items.

I purchased the item which a sonnet written about your blog and published at Q for Quack.

It’s posted as an image and I thought it was pretty creative.

It’s a little tough to read so here are the words

Behold, there is a site for new writers
those who have talent, and those who are bright
and express themselves not being fighters
detailing opinions on wrong and right

not only aiming to provide content
that will help keep the visitor informed
allowing editor time to present
the writers which it wishes to be formed

supposing that they come along to see
not falling over their steep window sills
they might steer themselves from that buzzing bee
and you won’t end up “green around the gills”

now the end has come to my silly flog
clicking this leads to Blog About Your Blog!

I want to thank Jessica over at Q for Quackers for this. Hope you enjoy, so far we have the only one!

The apparent dislike for John Chow in the Blogging Zoom community is obviously present. I didn’t realize this and submitted a post about our entrecard on JohnChow dot Com. The response was immediate and negative. I got paragraphs for comments as well as very irrelevant discussion.

Many must not of read the article and just though I was praising John Chow like many do. I could care less really, however advertising on his widget not only brought us traffic, but also gave us more entrecard points which is good for anything. I don’t care much about him, or how much money he makes. However, he is getting all that traffic and money and I’d sure love a piece of it. Why not?

Why the Dislike for the Chow?

John Chow has not been offering much valuable content, if he ever did. He’s just enjoying being on top and earning thousands of dollars per month. In the meantime he is continuing his eating out pictures and traveling being a web celebrity.

He’s taken a lot from blogging, but how much has he really given back? No real golden tips, besides that it CAN be done. That there is life without adsense and after google slaps you.

So what? His posts consist of how much his blog is growing and how much he is earning. He often mentions his advertising and rates, as well as how great the advertising is. It’s not of much interest for me, he stays on my feed reader but I often just skim through the articles.

So what? Don’t read him. Take him off your feed reader and ban his URL from your computer.

However by blogging about him, arguing over how bad he is, you are just making him even more filthy rich. So in a weird twisted way, you are just helping him be who he has become.

Blogging Zoom Article

It was weird to see that my bloggingzoom article had less than 5 votes but over 10 comments (it’s more now!). While bashing Chow, many instead live and die by what Vic of Blogger Unleashed says which is fine with me. His blog has become very successful in a short period of time. He claims to be “controversial” but I think he’s mistaken for bashing and cursing. However, I do like Vic and it’s great what he’s been able to do.

What I don’t appreciate is to be judged and bashed by a simple post that wasn’t even read by them in the first place. I make enough money with my blogs and run this website because I enjoy it.

I guess I am asking for it, submitting this article to Blogging Zoom, but we’ll see what happens. Maybe it will be read this time? Maybe I can start getting ‘bashed’ too and rack up some links.