Blogging is becoming one of the most popular ways to make money online. There are so many ways you can make money by blogging. Putting ads on your site, selling your goods and services from your blog and writing reviews are just a few. I am finding writing reviews is a very good way of making money from blogging.

With sites like PayPerPost, Blogvertise, Smorty and others can bring in some good cash for doing what you are doing anyway. PayPerPost has been very good to me since I joined them. Even though it’s only been three so far, their payments have always been on time. I’ve only done a couple of posts a piece for Smorty and Blogvertise and they don’t seem to have many advertisers at this time, but both have paid me and add to my blog earnings.

I just got into this blogging thing a bout four months ago and I have a long way to go and a lot to learn. But it’s good to know that I can make money along way.
Check out my blogs at:
Mike’s Money Making Rants & Raves
That Says It All
My Quest to Make a Living as a Comic Book Superhero Artist
My Quest to Make a Living as a Surrealist Artist

Do you breeze into a room and everyone turns and looks, or do you feel like you are up on the ceiling and noone has noticed you? When you blog, do you feel like the biggest baddest blogger on the planet and everyone should read your post, or do you write and hope for just a tiny reaction, a single comment, a backlink on another brand new site, or a place at the end of a mighty long blogroll? However you feel, the bottom line is, if you blog you need to be in there networking and attracting people to you and your blog. If you are a shy flower, read on for some inspiration.

I was watching a cat the other day and was amazed at how in a matter of days it had turned from a timid little townhouse kitty, afraid of its own shadow, into a cock sure cat with its nose in everything in its new rural surroundings.

When the doors were opened on a new garden and a new outdoor world, it was the first to run out and roll and jump and play with flies and stalk butterflies, while its killer older brother stood and just looked around from the door, lost and overwhelmed. The little guy also walked straight up to a dog and said hi while his brother, the bold one (haha), stood transfixed with arched back, claws out, spitting like a sailor.

As a life-long supporter of the underdog, this revitalised little cat is right up my alley. And what struck me was how its timid naivety was its greatest asset. Because unlike its more aggressive brother who made no bones that it was aggressive and stand-offish and street smart, this little thing took its “adversaries” aback by appearing so nonchalant, thereby gaining immediate acceptance. You know, you can just imagine the dog thinking, Bloody hell, this cat must be a tough ‘un coming up to me like this, I better be nice else I am going to get a good hiding.

But the reality is, that cat is so naive it doesn’t really understand where it is at or what could happen to it. Luckily it has enough innate survival skills to know when it is time to step back, but even then, it does the opposite of what you expect from most other big bad cats. It doesn’t act all big and then turn and run like hell, it just moves backwards and then huddles, staring at what it is supposed to be scared of, apparently not fased, just giving some space for tempers to cool down.

I don’t know, maybe I am humanizing this thing too much or misreading the signs, I am not a cat whisperer, but what it made me realise was that the internet is a great platform for the shy folks in life to really shine. There is no need to feel daunted by anyone because at the end of the day, all the internet is is a digital world, and if you can write and make a case with words, hell, you don’t need to have good body language or know how to posture or any of that more complicated real life interaction stuff.

So blog about what you want, and who you want, and make a good case. And then, when it is time to network and promote the post, remember the cat and don’t be afraid to email some of these big boys and tell them they are the focus of one of your posts, and they should check it out. What is the worst that can happen? They ignore you, or worse still, blog about you in a negative way. There is no such thing as negative blogging when thousands of people read what you have to say!

I am going to go through all my past posts on The Pisstakers and just make sure that the people I have linked to are aware of their mentions, and see what happens. The good guys will get back to me and the lesser bloggers won’t. At least then I will know where I stand with the network I am a part of up to now. And then I can appraise and move on – a little more street smart.

There is money to be made with taking surveys. There are tons of online survey websites that will pay you for your opinion and time.

Find the Right One

There are the survey websites out there that are scams. You are the best judge as what is a scam. Is it too good to be true? Yes? Then it’s a scam.

Once You Find a Good One…

Stick with them. Many survey sites will reward you with more survey opportunities. Some even offer special promotional surveys given via mail, or products sent to you so you can take a survey on them.

What I Recommend

My girlfriend, Emma, makes about 30-40$ per month taking surveys. The best result she’s had is through SurveySpot. SurveySpot has a minimum payout of 5$ and they will send you a check in the mail.

Now that she has been using Survey Spot for quite awhile now, she gets the chance at many surveys as well as higher paying ones. Yesterday she received one in the mail (a cd survey) and completed it in 30 minutes, for 15$.

What You Can Earn

You can expect anywhere from 1-5$ survey offers from different websites. Some surveys as I mentioned can get you 10-15$, and many do promotional surveys where you are entered to win extra money.

I’ve received surveys in my email in which they were from 2-5$ and the money was sent to my paypal. Surveys generally take 5 to 30 minutes to complete, and most of them pay you based on length.

Another survey website I have found is GlobalTestMarket, and I have just received enough points to get the 50$ payout. Now all I have to do is wait on my check!

I will do a complete review of both SurveySpot and GlobalTestMarket and you can decide if they are for you or not.

Update: Another survey website service is SurveySavvy. Whats unique about this one is they offer an affiliate program. You can get paid for referring your friends. You get $ for every survey they complete!

I was prompted to write this article up after reading the comment/question left by Jennifer Gniadecki in this week’s Comment Friday. Jennifer was asking about her business blog and whether or not she could or rather should start adding things of a more personal nature in there.

This is a topic I’ve discussed, argued and lamented over with a huge number of people over the past year or so as I’ve endeavored to develop myself as blogging media consultant. You see often people will jump very quickly into one camp or the other. Blogging is personal and spontaneous so yes you should write personal stuff in! Or, business sites should be all business otherwise you’ll look unprofessional.

I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle and Jennifer has almost answered her own question with the statement:

“I’m very friendly and personable and my life is mostly an open book…”

What makes a truly brilliant business blog is one that gives an insight to that person that you may be dealing with professionally in the future. It’s why we have face to face interviews, even though it may have nothing to do with the job itself people want to get a feel for who you are. You may be a good solid web designer (for instance) but if the job comes down to two people who are both equally solid web designers, they are going to go with the one they liked or associated with.

How do you judge what personal stuff to put into your business blog though?

Think about what you would say in a conversation with a new prospective client. How much personal information would you give if asked? I’m reminded of a conversation I had with my rep when I was deciding on doing a contract. She asked about my kids, to which I replied I don’t have any but I do have two dogs that are like my kids. We spoke for a couple of minutes on the types of dogs and swapped one or two anecdotes regarding our canine friends. We also spoke about the flu that was going around and the measures we’d been taking to avoid getting sick.

Both of these topics were not work related but gave us insights into the other person. I became a lot more comfortable with the idea that the person out there looking for work for me has identified me as a real person and not just a statistic in her books.

So how does this apply to blogging? Simply put if I visit two business blogs in the same field, one of them writes simply about the business and the other writes equally about the business but also lets me know a little about what that person stands for and how I can identify with them. Then I’m going to feel more comfortable approaching the second person (that’s if I like them of course which is part of the gamble). Of course I’ll probably approach both which is smart business but I’ve got a natural attraction to the person I already feel I know.

That is me though. It needs to be said that there are people who don’t want to know about you, all they want to know is about your services so don’t make your blog your only selling tool. Have a top-notch corporate website that your blog is attached to. Generally those people will be happy just going through the website rather than reading the blog.

But there will also be people who don’t like you or don’t have dogs or pets or birthdays (well maybe not birthdays but they certainly don’t care about yours and your employee’s birthdays). This is when you need to weigh it up in your head, do you want to work with these people anyway. Chances are if they don’t like you online then they may not be easy to work with anyway. The main point I want to get across here is that people will judge you on what you write about and you should keep that in mind.

So what can you write about?

We come back to what would you normally share with a client? If you are like me (and from the sounds of it Jennifer) then you are happy to openly speak about yourself to a degree. I’ll talk openly about my pets for instance but I won’t share my thoughts on the occupation of Tibet. The old rules about polite conversation should be followed, politics and religion are probably best left alone. Even strong opinions should not be made unless you are willing to lose someone who thinks differently. That doesn’t mean you can’t voice your opinions but try and avoid statements such as ‘anyone who does not like Star Trek are idiots’. Those Star Wars freaks will all get up in arms and…. hey I’m joking!!!!

When is it too much?

Obviously you don’t want to share too much as we’ve already discussed, I’m really talking here about your ratio of personal to business posts. There are a number of schools of thought here. Business posts should always outweigh your personal ones, you need to work out your level but a two to one ratio at the very least. Never combine them either, don’t talk on a business topic and then add at the end that you’re getting married.ÂLeave that for a separate post. That’s not to say you can’t write a business related personal story you just can’t mash two different posts into one!

I can talk to you from experience here. Quit Your Day Job was to be my business blog, I was going to talk about blogging, discuss the internet and talk about web design.ÂI now discuss movies, comics, pop culture, environmental issues, personal stuff and Aquaman. My blog suffered untreatable personal post creep and today has evolved into a purely personal blog. Which for me is fine, but for other businesses could be a disaster! You need to be aware of your post ratios, never let personal outweigh business related.

Blogging is a very personal thing which I believe has led to its success. If you want to make your business blog more personal then by all means do so, carefully. Don’t feel you have to or even should

I’ll leave you with one other absolute rule, and this one I can’t bend on. Truth. Always tell the truth, spin it, leave it out, whatever but don’t lie or mislead a customer. Ever. If you say you have a dog and you don’t and the customer asks you about it and you slip up even slightly you can forget your credibility.

As most Google Adsense users are aware of, you can have your Google Adsense account banned if you run ads on the same page as you host google ads on.

“It has come to our attention that invalid clicks and/or impressions have been generated on the Google ads on your site(s). We have therefore disabled your Google AdSense account.”

Invalid impressions can come from traffic exchanges.

So, how can you still run google adsense and have your website on traffic exchanges?

Well this tip is especially good for newer blogs or websites, that are looking to increase their traffic, but still make a little money with adsense. You can also lower your alexa rank by using traffic exchanges.

When you use traffic exchanges, the traffic goes to the main page of your blog. Such as, https://blogaboutyourblog.com. If you are hosting google ads on individual single pages, then you will not be getting invalid impressions. The traffic exchange is sending visitors to your main homepage, that has no google ads on it.

By having the ads simply on single posts or pages, the money flow won’t be much, but it’s better than nothing. Then you can save your homepage advertising for something else, such as AuctionAds.

To give you a better idea what you can earn, Blog about your Blog earned 7$ last month by just using 2 google adsense units on the single pages of this blog. These are two simply units, not exactly ideally placed, and really blended. Our income could have been greater with more predominant ad placement.

Now you’ve got the best of both worlds. Google Adsense and Traffic Exchanges, on the same website.

Comment Friday was very different this week. We had some very insightful (and long) comments, and it’s really nice to see. People are taking some real time to write good comments.

This week a lot of questions were asked, and I didn’t get a chance to answer them, so I’m doing things a bit different. First I am going to pick a winner, then post some questions and answers.

With no further ado, this week I have chosen HomeMom as our winner! She’s given BAYB some link love, and mentioned our Comment Friday on her blog yesterday. Since she has found us, she has been an active commenter.

A lot of people had a strong opinion on digg it seemed, most don’t use it! I found that pretty interesting, and I plan on sticking with digging to promote this blog even further.

“Do y’all have a bunch of Friends on Digg? What’s your take on that?”

I only have a handful of digg friends. Want to be my digg friend?

Is it just me, or are the comments a lot longer this week?

Some comments were extremely long this week, very nice and surprising!

how much of my life should be in my business blog?

I personally think if you want to add your personal stuff to a “business like” blog, you should create two separate blogs. With that you could cross promote if you’d like etc.

Thats it for comment friday this week, thanks again to our participants!

We are sitting at about 20-25 comments per week on our Comment Fridays, and I’m ready to increase that number!

If this is your first comment friday, it is a fun and simple idea. Just leave us a comment about anything you want, and we can get our own little discussion going.

Each week we will chose one lucky commenter to be featured as our Blog of the Week and that blogger will get a link to their blog, and a spot on our blog roll for the week.

I’ve been doing a lot of promotion on digg, and I would love to hear your opinion on it. Have you been on the front page? What is the most amount of diggs you have received? Do you even bother getting dugg?!

If you have a minute, please digg our latest article about alexa. I’m hoping to make the front page on this article, so please help us out, and give it a digg.