Make Money Online: SFM

If you are serious about blogging then you should think of hosting it on your own domain. It’s not easy to switch a popular blog from a sub-domain to a self hosted domain, so I would suggest you to host your blog on your down from the day one. Here are some benefits you will enjoy with your own domain that you were missing with a sub-domain:

1. Website address - When you buy your own domain, the name your blog/website will be like www.yourdomain.com which looks sound and easy to remember for your blog readers. And in case you place your website on free hosting websites then your website address would have been www.yourdomain.blogspot.com (for Blogger blogs) or www.yourdomain.worpress.com (for Wordpress blog). Now you can decide which website URL looks sounds and easy to remember.
2. Multiple E-mail addresses - When you have your own domain, you can create many e-mail addresses like info@yourdomain.com, webmaster@yourdomain.com, sales@yourdomain.com, yourname@yourdomain.com for different purposes and if required can point all incoming emails to these accounts to a central email account on your domain.
3. Directory listings - it becomes really difficult to get listed on Top web directories if your website is hosted on some free web hosts. And if you have your own domain, chances of submitting and getting approval becomes easy to some extent.
4. Brand Building - When you have your own domain shows your professional approach towards your business and thus will help in creating lots of value and trust among your website readers. People will not trust much on your services if it is hosted on free hosting sites like blogger or wordpress.
5. Promoting your domain - When you have hosted your website on free hosting servers, you are going to promote a sub-domain. And the first benefit of that promotion will go to your web hosting company and you will be the last person who is going to benefit from that. All links pointing to your free hosted domain will also be pointing to your webhosting company. Suppose you have a blog on Wordpress with address www.yourdomain.wordpress.com, now all links pointing to your address will also be pointing to Wordpress your free web hosting company. But in case of your own domain, you are going to promote that and thus will help you only.
6. Better search engine rankings - Having your own domain will hell you achieve higher search engine rankings if it is well optimized.
7. Better advertising options - there are many advertisers who will never love to advertise on a free hosted sub-domain. And with free hosted sub-domains, you will have limited access to everything. There are many free hosting companies that will not allow you to add any kind of advertisement to your sub-domain. But in case of your own domain, you will have access to everything.
8. Website layout - You can use any style sheet, Java script or templates of your choice on your owned domain. Even you can create a template of your own and use that. So you will have more freedom with your website design and functionality. But in case of sub-domain, you cannot do anything in coding section and you will have to stay with the limited templates that are offered to you.
9. Selling options - if you are able to get some real page rank, organic traffic and alexa ranking for your owned website, then you could think of selling it to someone on the internet. But you will not have any much chances of selling it if it was hosted on free servers.

Now if you don’t have a domain and convinced that you need one, you can get it from HostICan for $6.95 per month including 2,000 GB disk space only.

Popularity: 25% [?]

Paypal is the fastest and safest tool available today on the internet for transferring money. You will rarely find a website that doesn’t use Paypal as an option for transferring money. And there are some websites even who accepts only paypal as the mode of money transfer. If you don’t have a paypal account, you can create it within few minutes time. To create a paypal account, all you need is just an e-mail address which is working. So create an account on paypal today to catch lots of money making opportunities that are just waiting for you.

Here are many ways we blogger can use paypal to make money online from our blogs:

• Blogging - Creating blogs has not been difficult these days because you don’t need to be technically strong to create a blog. One can create a blog on any of blogging platform for free in just few minutes time. Blogger and Wordpress are the top Blogging platforms anyone can use to create to create his/her blog. People normally create blogs to post their articles/thoughts or what ever they want. And when you have a blog, you can use it to make money with paypal. You can make money by writing reviews for other people and their websites, selling products, Referral programs and by filling online surveys.
• Affiliate product selling - There are many companies who are willing to pay you some amount if you are able to sell their products and services via your blog. Most of the product selling websites pays you via check, paypal and direct bank deposit. With these kinds of websites, you will earn some fixed commission for every sale that is made via your blog.
• Online paid surveys - Paid surveys are the easiest and fastest way to make money even if you don’t have a blog/website. Most of the online paid surveys sites transfer money via paypal or Check.
• Paid blogging - There are many paid blogging networks on the internet that are ready to pay you if you manage to write some content for their advertisers. Linkworth, Smorty, SponsoredReviews and payperpost are among top paid blog networks where you will need to submit your blog before you get an opportunity to write for their advertisers. All of these blogging networks support paypal as the mode of money transfer.
• Selling text link ads - If you manage to get some real page rank and authority for your blog, then you can think of selling text link ads on your blog. Textlinkads is the biggest text link selling marketplace that sends the payments on the first of every month and Check, Paypal and Payoneer are mode this company uses for sending money to its publishers.

So start making money online now by creating an account on Paypal with your blog/website.

Popularity: 25% [?]

Alexa.com, a Subsidiary of Amazon.com is used for monitoring the traffic of a website. Alexa.com offers alexa ranking for website which is calculated on the basis of people visiting a particular website with Alexa toolbar installed. To speed up alexa rankings in the long run, focus more on quality content generation which will bring large number of people to your website.

Experience with Alexa

I started this blog three months back and so far have great success with Alexa rankings. In three months time, I have been able to bring its Alexa from 2,100,000 (initial Alexa ranking) to 200,000.

The only solution to improve the alexa ranking of a website is increasing the number of visitors who are using Alexa toolbar. If you are getting large number of visitors to your website and none of them have Alexa toolbar installed, then your website will not have much alexa rankings. And if the most of people who visit your website have alexa toolbar installed, then your website will have great alexa rankings.

I have created a list of tips you can follow to increase alexa rankings for your website:

1. Alexa toolbar installed - Install the Alexa toolbar and surf your website with the browser (Internet Explorer or Firefox) where you have installed alexa toolbar.
2. Alexa Ranking Widget – install alexa ranking widget on your website like I have installed on my Make money online: SFM blog in sidebar. When this alexa ranking widget is available in your website, every visit to your website will count as a positive vote towards improving your overall alexa ranking.
3. Motivate others - motivate your site visitors, friends, fellow bloggers and webmasters to use alexa toolbar.
4. Firefox SearchStatus Extension - install alexa toolbar or SearchStatus ‘Add-ons’ in Mozila Firefox on all system in your office and set your website address as their default homepage.
5. Blog about Alexa and its ranking system - blog about Alexa, alexa toolbar, its ranking system and ways to improve rankings will create a lot of interest among bloggers and webmasters who are wiling to improve their website alexa rankings.
6. Work on Forums - Devote some time on webmaster forums and spread your website link their in your signature section. Most of the webmasters have alexa toolbar installed. So when they visit your website will help improving your alexa rankings.
7. Content about seo & blogging - write content about seo, blogging, social networks and spread it in forums and social networks like Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit, Propeler, Mixx.com etc.
8. Using StumbleUpon - submit your website/blog stories on StumbleUpon which will bring lots of traffic to your website and thus will have some positive impact on your alexa rankings.
9. Directory & search engine listings - Submit your website on Dmoz, Yahoo and other popular web directories. Once you are approved on Dmoz directory, you will be automatically included in Alexa directory. With this submit your website on popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Lycos, exactseek.com etc.
10. Traffic exchange programs - Work on traffic exchange sites and submit your website details there. One can find the list of traffic exchange sites on Google.com by making a search for ‘Traffic exchange’ in the search box available.

You can download Alexa toolbar from here and for Mozilla Firefox SearchStatus Add-ons from here. If you follow these simple tips, you will see great increase in your alexa rankings.

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Bloggers can earn money for their honest reviews and advertisers can build a lot of buzz for their product and services with SponsoredReviews.com. Bloggers, who are willing to earn cash for their blogging efforts, should join this pay per review service.

Advertisers - Advertisers can create a lot of traffic and buzz for their products and services with SponsoredReviews.com. What they have to do is post an opportunity for the bloggers to make bid on or even can directly search for the bloggers of their niche and get paid review for their products and websites. With this service, million of blog readers will read about their product and services, thus will generate a lots of targeted traffic. And for every review on blogs, advertisers will get links for their websites and thus will help in improving their search engine ranking and overall link popularity.

Bloggers - with SponsoredReviews.com, bloggers can earn cash for every review they make for the advertisers. Bloggers are supposed to write honest reviews about advertiser’s products and services. The greatest benefit to bloggers with this paid review site is that they can write review about the topic of their choice or according to their blog niche. To get a post for review, bloggers have to make bids for the opportunities created by the advertisers. There are lots of opportunities for the bloggers to bid for and thus the bloggers can be very selective about the opportunities they are willing to bid for. For every opportunity, minimum word count, min bid, max bid and lots of other information is available in ‘Find Advertisers’ section on this website.

Each time the bloggers write reviews, they will receive 65 percent of total amount. Suppose the bloggers write review for $100. So in this case the blogger will be paid $65 and the rest of money will go to SponsoredReviews account.

Bloggers can earn up to $175 per advertiser and $90 per blogger referral. Referral payments are all based on the amount of money spend by the advertiser and the amount of money earned by the blogger.

Rules and Regulations - Here are some rules that bloggers must read before submitting their blogs here for approval:

• Blog must have 10 non paid posts with 200 words in each of them
• Blog must be 3 months old at least
• Blog must follow the 2:1 ratio of non paid posts to paid posts
• Bloggers are supposed to complete the reviews they accepted within a week In case they are not able to make it in a week time; their account can be suspended on SponsoredReviews
• Blogs 3with little traffic or links may be rejected

Once we have created an account here, will submit our blogs on which you are willing to write paid reviews. When we submit our blog in related category with other details, we have to set the ‘Desired Price’ for each post. Here SponsoredReviews gives you ‘Suggested Price’ which is calculated based on your blog link popularity, Technorati and Alexa rankings. I would suggest one to set their ‘Desired Price’ within their ‘Suggested Price’ range.

Payment System - They send payments to bloggers twice a month for their reviews via paypal. If you don’t have a paypal account, create one today. To create a paypal account, what you need is just an email id. Bloggers can keep track of their earnings and payment schedules in their account home page on this website. And they send payments once a month to bloggers for their referral efforts.

So bloggers and advertisers both have endless opportunities to make from their blogs and websites with SponsoredReviews.com

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Blogcatalog as the name suggest is the catalog of blogs where bloggers can submit their blogs and can get in touch with the bloggers of their niche. Most of the bloggers are aware about this popular and fastest growing community for bloggers. We can surely get some serious traffic to our website from this blogger community if worked with passion and dedication.

Blogcatalog is offering many features to the bloggers here. Bloggers can submit their blogs as well as can view other blogger’s blog. Blogcatalog has great discussion forum for bloggers where they can join the discussion or can start their own discussion. They can join groups & create new groups of their own, create new friends, commenting & messaging other members, joining the bloggers of their niche and many more features.

You can view this post as a review of Blogcatalog and I will try my best to cover all features and methods that can be used to drive traffic to your blog/website:

How to Join?

Go to Blogcatalog.com, create an account there and submit your blog here. Don’t submit a recently created blog here. Submit a blog that has some posts on it and has some age as well. If you submit a fresh new blog, your blog may not get approved here. But in my case, I was fortune to get my blog approved here with 10 posts and 2 months of age.

When submitting your blog, don’ forget to choose an appropriate category and tags with a good title and description for your blog. Once your blog is accepted here, then that will be visible in the category that you selected at the time of submission and in your profile pages.

Participating in discussion

Blogcatalog has some interesting categories where bloggers can participate in the discussions of their interest.

• Blogcatalog Questions
• Blogging Help
• General Discussion
• Making Money
• Shameless Blog Promotion

If they want they can ‘Start a New discussion’ of their own in the above categories. For starting a new discussion, you have to submit your thread in related category and have to add tags related to your post.

Group discussion

Blogcatalog has some great groups for you to join. Once you join a group, you can participate in group discussion there. You can even ‘Start a new discussion’ of your own in that group.

Also you can create a new group of your own and invite people to join and participate in the discussion going on at that group. Some of popular groups created on blogcatalog are:

• Personal blogs
• Stumbler group
• Blog promotion
• Technorati
• Digg Exchange
• Blogspot blogs
• For Women bloggers
• Bloggers choice Awards
• RSS sharing
• Bloggers Unite

Top money making groups

1. Money making blogs
2. Adsense Group
3. Social media marketing & blog monetization
4. Make money online
5. Paid post companies
6. Advertising revenue sources
7. Auction your advertising
8. Marketing ideas
9. Earn money to blog
10. Pay per day

Join my groups

1. Money making bloggers
2. Blog Review
3. Link Exchange partners

I’ll be adding more groups to this list in near future.

Joining Neighborhood

Go to blog directory listing available with proper categories which could also be sorting by country, Language and user and join the bloggers of your niche. Spend some time and add as many bloggers of your niche you can. When you join the bloggers in your neighborhood, they will also prefer to join you. Post your review/comment about a blog and in response you can expect your blog also being reviewed or commented by that blogger. You can join me as your neighborhood and your comments and reviews about my blog here.

Making friends

There is no limit on the number of friends we can add to out list. So the key for getting traffic will be adding maximum people to your friend’s list. When you add a blogger to your friend’s list, he/she may check back your profile on blogcatalog and your blog as well. More friends mean more presence for you and your blog on blogcatalog. You can join me, my groups, and my discussion and also can add me as a friend at my blogcatalog profile page.

Creating widget

Blogcatalog is offering many widgets you add to your blog to bring more traffic to it. Bloggers can add the following widgets to their blog sidebar

• Recent Viewers
• My Neighborhood
• Open Discussions
• My communities
• My groups
• My News Feed

All of these widgets are highly customizable and thus you can make changes to them as per your requirements.

Posting a broadcast

In Broadcast section, you can view already started broadcasts and have your opinion on them and can even ‘Post a New Broadcasts’. When you post a broadcast that will be visible to all the bloggers who have added you in their friend’s list.

I’m creating a quick list of things we can do at blogcatalog to bring more people to your website/blog

1. Participating in the existing discussions or start a new discussion of your own.
2. Joining the popular and groups related to your niche and create few groups of your own
3. Sending shout to other members to join your groups
4. Adding other blogger’s of your niche in your friend’s list
5. Submitting all of your blogs in the blog directory available on blogcatalog
6. Adding more bloggers in your neighborhood
7. Adding widgets to your blog/website
8. Asking people for blog review or asking them to review your blog
9. Check the bloggers of your niche visit their blogs and leave comments there
10. Submitting in broadcasts section

Popularity: 4% [?]

Blogging can be a great resource when you are thinking of making money on the internet. I know hundreds of bloggers who are able to make good amount of money using blogs. There are some bloggers who are making their living out of blogging. When it comes about making money from blogging, you are not going to invest even a single dollar in your online business. So in case you are willing to earn some money online, keep on reading….

On the internet, there are many websites where you can create blogs for free like blogger.com, wordpress.com, blog.com, myspace.com, weebly.com, vox.com. But most popular blogging sites are Blogger.com and Wordpress.com, where people really love to blog about the things they are most passionate about. Both of these blogging platforms have great facilities and one can start making some money from their blogs instantly by using the affiliates programs of their niche.

Before setting up a blog on any of blogging service, you will need to decide the niche and the keywords you will be targeting in your future blog. There are many areas one can blog about like ‘Some Financial issues’, ‘general Health issue’, ‘Travel related’, ‘About Celebrities’, ‘Products Reviews’, ‘About money making ideas’ etc. But the best idea for blogging will be to blogs about the things you are most passionate about. To blog about a particular topic or niche, you don’t need to be an expert of that. But you must have the passion for that and will need to keep on adding relevant post to your blog about that topic.

So once you have decided the topic for your blog, you should start adding relevant posts on your blog. You can begin with writing small general articles or reviews about the topic of your choice.

There are plenty of ways you can earn money from blogging if you are able to drive some traffic to your blog:

Google adsense

According to me, Google adsense is the easiest way to earn some profit from your blog. Google Adsense is a pay per click program where the bloggers are paid for every click that are made on the Google adsense ads placed on their blogs. You must have seen “Ads by Google” on many blogs in their sidebar, footer, within post or even in their header. To use Google Adsense, one need to apply for it with a blog and once approved by Google adsense Team, can use the Adsense ads on his/her blog. Google adsense offers contextual, image based and search based ads that blogger can place on their blogs. Adsense ads are highly customizable and are available in many formats like 160*600, 250*250, 200*200 etc. Bidvertiser is also a pay per click program like Google adsense.

Affiliate programs

There are thousands of affiliate programs available on the internet that bloggers can use on their blogs. In case of affiliate marketing, you are paid for each sale that you generate through your blog and not just paid for every click. To earn profit from affiliate programs, one can make post targeting some specific affiliates and even can add the banners and links for affiliates in their sidebar, header or footer. But to get maximum success with affiliates, one should aim at the products and services that are some way related to their blogs. If you have a weight loss blog, go for weight loss specific affiliate programs. Some of best affiliate programs include Amazon.com, Commission Junction, ClickBank, LinkShare, Google adsense products.

Text Link Ads

Bloggers can make some handsome amount of dollars every month from their blogs by adding text link ads on their blogs. There are many websites that pay to bloggers for placing text link ads on their blogs like textlinksads.com/, linkadage.com, textlinkbrokers.com etc

Selling Advertising

Selling the space to advertisers on your blog is the best and consistent revenue stream a blogger can dream of creating on his blog. If you have a blog that is very popular in a particular niche, you have great chance of selling some advertising space on your blog. You can charge hundreds of dollars for placing a small banner for a client in your blog sidebar. And you have more space available in your sidebar that you can use to sell more space to advertisers on your blog. But to get this kind of advertisers for your blog, your blog must be very popular and should have stable reader base.

Using paid blogging

There are many websites on the internet like payperpost.com, reviewme.com that pay to bloggers for writing reviews for their affiliate products and websites.

So it’s not really difficult to make money from blogs. One can earn high amount of money from the list of resources suggested in this post with their blogging skills.

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