Our last contest generated a nice amount of entries that landed us into the top 5,000 blogs on Technorati. I wanted to thank our great readers and writers for making that happen. This time I have even better prizes for you, with more winners! I want to thank our contest sponsor Bidvertiser for putting up great prizes.

How to Enter

There will be two ways to enter this contest. First, make sure to subscribe to our RSS Feed. You must leave a comment on this thread stating you have done so for the entry to count.

The second way to enter is to blog about us. This will gain you two entries in the drawing. In your post you must include Blog about your Blog and our sponsor Bidvertiser.

Bidvertiser is running a promotion where you can get 20$ worth of free advertising for new advertisers. In the post feel free to promote your affiliate link after you sign up for the program.

You can gain the maximum 3 entries for doing both!

It doesn’t have to be in a separate post, just make sure to include what’s stated above.

Prizes [Update]

First Place 200$ cash via paypal from our sponsor Bidvertiser (Bidvertiser has upped the first prize amount to 200$!!)
Second Place 50$ cash from Bidvertiser
Third Place 50$ cash from Bidvertiser!
Fourth Place A full website review by Adsense Tracker on this blog
Fifth Place Your blog will be featured on A Links Blog. A Links Blog provides free links for all bloggers.

This contest will last until October 29th Midnight PST time. At that time, the thread will be closed to comments and track backs and your entries won’t be counted.

Now you’ve got the rules and prizes, get entered!

I am pretty familiar with www.StoresOnlinePro.com. I actually attended one of their conferences in San Diego. For attending we ended up with a free dinner, a mp3 player, and 2 day planners. I was a little disappointed with the conference, the invitation appeared to be for “making money online”, not just about Stores Online.

I did learn, however, that Stores Online is very hands on. If you are considering starting an eCommerce website, they are definitely one to consider. You may pay a little more for their software, it runs for a pretty penny, but it’s very customizable.

StoresOnline will TEACH you how to make your website using their software. They have conferences around the world. I also had the opportunity to attend an all-day workshop to work with their professionals and get a personal consultation. The price was low, something at about 20 or 30$, but I didn’t have the money or interest at the time to start my own store. For attending their conferences and workshops they give you special rates, deals, and discounts that apply to their products.

To learn even more about Stores Online, I would definitely check to see if a conference is going to be near you.

My name is Chris, and I blog at ChrisBlogging.com. Find out how I made $4,891 last month as a freelance writer. 

A lot of people think of freelance writing income as nothing more than a tally of how much money is earned. And if you do not want to go beyond the basics, this is true. I can tell my readers how much money I earn each month, but if I stopped there, they would never see the finer details.

Here are three finer details that surround my freelance writing income in one way or the other.

1. Even though my PayPal fees are usually in excess of $150/month, the service does wonders for my freelance writing career. In fact, if I could not accept PayPal payments my job would be much more difficult. No, paying their fees is not fun, but it is worth it due to all the time and stress that it saves me.

2. Being a freelance writer means that you are in charge of collecting payments. In the world of freelance writing, this can often times be difficult. If you are dealing with a slow client, make sure that you follow up with them every five days or so. This is not to say that you should hassle them, but you need to stay fresh in their mind. Of course, you should base this on your past dealings with the client. If you trust them and they have paid you in the past, consistent follow ups may not be as necessary.

3. Keep track of the money that is due to you, as well as the money that you receive. This will allow you to stay organized at all times. If you do not track your payments due and payments received, there is a good chance that you will not receive all the money that you worked so hard to earn. Remember, you are running a business, and a huge part of that is keeping track of your payments.

You may never think of these details when you consider how much money can be made through a career in freelance writing. But without these details in mind, it would be much more difficult to succeed.

If you are smart about how you use tagging (now natively supported in WordPress 2.3!), you can land on the first few pages of Google results. I have done this a couple of times when I covered a story about Kyla Ebbert and another about Melinda England.

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Whenever you post a story, you should always tag your posts with the a couple key things. All People, Places, Companies, should be tagged. PPC, easy enough to remember right? If you tag more than a key amount of PPC items, you run the risk of Google thinking you are trying to tag your entire article. DO NOT DO THIS. This is why Google has a spider, which you can tell to visit your site daily via the robots.txt file if you want to.

Also, use search friendly urls. This helps you get Google to recognize what in the world you are talking about. Google can’t see what http://asfjnkfas.com/?p=283 is from the url but it can see http:/sasfhadfs.com?p=customurlthatcanbesetupinwordpressadminpanelbutdonotmakeittoolong.

This is where upgrading to WordPress 2.3 will really put you ahead of the competition, so if you have not upgrade, upgrade today! If you follow all these steps, you might not have as successful traffic as getting 759 Google hits for one article, but you definitely will have SOME increase in your traffic. You’d be amazed what a little tagging can do!

Ryan

Thanks all for the ideas regarding our next contest. The contest will be great with over 200$ worth of prizes! I do appreciate the ideas, and the best ideas have to be a writing project. I do hope to do one of those sometime, but I don’t think it will be right for this contest.

Thank you Sheila for the great idea of a writing project. Christine Senter also mentioned a particular writing project that we should do. Since Sheila has already won Comment Friday, I am picking Christine.

I’m sad to see that our comments have really died down. On certain fridays we could pull in maybe 30! Last week we had 11. I love seeing the same people coming by, and I am going to start picking winners who have already won.

On many blogging tips lists you will see that they stress responding to comments. I’m guilty of not responding to some comments, but I’ve been trying to be a little bit better on that. I’m also guilty of something else thats just as bad…

Respond to Contact Emails

What blogging advice you don’t generally find is how important it is to respond to contact emails. When I wrote about Effective Emails Marketing I mentioned I didn’t bother to responding to the first example. By not responding I potentially lost a reader.

The Importance of Responding to Contacts

I never thought about how important responding to emails could be until reading about it on Daily Blog Tips. A blogger approached Daniel to do a guest post. Being too busy, but not too busy enough not to respond, he replied. He said how he was ‘swamped with work’ and couldn’t do it.
The blogger replied

“You are really great to reply. I asked many other bloggers and it is only you who have replied. Thanks.”

Daniel made great points about why it’s important to respond to emails.

“Because when you do so you are solidifying your relationships, improving your credibility and showing that you are a down-to-earth person. Would you exchange the 10 seconds it takes to write a reply with a loyal reader? I would”

Not only did he gain the bloggers respect, he also made himself look better than however many bloggers didn’t respond.

So the next time you get a contact email think twice about overlooking it!

Last week I got a little off track and we didn’t get a winner. This week we definitely will. I’ve got some great stuff planned and I need your help deciding what to do.

If this is your first comment friday, the idea is pretty simple. Leave us a comment about anything you want. I will select one lucky commenter that really stands out, and I will be giving out a free link to that person. In addition to that that, I will be giving them a free blogroll spot.

Okay, what I need your help with is that we are wrapping up the prizes from our last contest, and we’ve already got sponsors for our next one. For the Mp3 player we got over 40 entries! Congrats again to our winner Laura (your prize will be sent soon!). For this contest, Bidvertiser decided to put up 200$ worth of cash prizes!

Now the question is what kind of contest should I do?