Trawling the Net

I've always loved Halloween, it's just a great time of year. Having the chance to scare the life out of children, dressing up, having friends over.... It's awesome.

I don't have many plans this year unfortunately. I'm very, very busy and will probably be spending all my time working for college, or trying to get another short story or two published. If I do have the time to spare, I can see myself having a few friends over for a scary movie night. Dressing up is mandatory, of course.

What will you be dressing up as? Or will you be dressing up at all for Halloween? Any parties, trick or treating or other fun stuff? Or do you prefer not to celebrate the event? Come, share. Let us get to know one another. :D

I'm heading to a Concert in November, which overall is shaping up to be a pretty great month. The act Asethetic Perfection is performing in Dublin on November 19th, and I'm really looking forward to going. It's not often a band I actually like can be found in Ireland, let alone close enough for me to actually go on a date I have free. Needless to say, I'm proper thrilled about this.

My article writing has stalled. I burned myself out in September, and now I can't think of anything to write for either Triond or Factoidz. Hopefully my spark will come back before the end of the month so I can get something published before Halloween. Finger's firmly crossed anyway.

I've been asked a lot of times, "How do you make money blogging?". I usually find myself repeating the same thing over and over again on numerous different websites, so I figured it was time to finally do one big blog post and get it over and done with. Now, whenever I get asked that simple question, I can just direct people here and everyone can get every detail of my advice.

If you already have a blog, then skip down past the first few parts.

PLEASE NOTE: For about the past year I have been a terrible example of blogging for money. I've been busy and neglected my blog network and earning sites, and so please don't use my earnings as an example. I only manage to get maybe a week's worth of activity on any one blog every month, whereas a dedicated person working a month's worth of time can make much MUCH more than I do.

 Setting Up a Blog
 Depending on how professional you want your blog to be, will depend on how you set it up. In most cases, BlogSpot is more than enough for a blog owner. It offers loads of options for customisation of your blog, and is free to set up an account. It also allows you to purchase a domain name in the event that you want to have a www.yournamehere.com style URL, otherwise the standard blogspot subdomain should be plenty for your purposes.

Next up is deciding what kind of blog you want to write. I'll leave this up to you, but niche websites tend to earn the most when it comes to making money through your blog. If you write good quality, valuable articles for people to read and come back to, you'll make far more than a personal blog writer who every so often posts something interesting or amusing. Make sure whatever you write is easily understood by people who want to read it, is interesting and most of all that you enjoy writing about it.

Getting Viewers
Getting Viewers is the most important part of your blog, for obvious reasons. You need readers who will keep coming back to your blog to read your articles, so keep an eye out for what your readers like and respond to. Make sure your articles are interesting and well written, and FREQUENT. It's better to write up one slightly above average article every day than five really well written posts in a month.

Then you need to get your first viewers in to see your blog and know it's there. If you've managed your SEO well, then you should find a trickle of readers starting to pour in from Google and other search engines. This is your most valuable source of readership, and always, always keep an eye on what search terms people are using to find you and remember to keep those search terms in mind when writing your blog posts. Aim for a keyword density of about 2 keywords or phrases every paragraph at the very least. Preferably squeeze one in every sentence, but be careful not to oversaturate your posts.

Entrecard is a good way to get your first few viewers. Sign up to Entrecard and then look through the list of various categories to find the one which suits your blog the most. Visit a few of the blogs there and drop your Entrecard on their blog. This let's them know that you visited them and more often than not they'll visit you back to drop off their own Entrecard. Make sure to drop back on anyone who drops on you because it encourages people to keep coming back to drop their ECs. Then, using the EC Points you earn, you can buy advertising on people's blogs, getting you even more viewers.

Monetising Your Blog
And here's the part you were probably most interested in. After all, setting up a blog isn't that difficult, so why should you worry about that bit? Well then, here we go.

Affiliate Earning
One of the most common ways to make money while blogging. There are two ways I advise doing this if this is how you plan on making money while blogging.

• Clickbank is one of the most used affiliate marketplaces when it comes to blogging. There are thousands of digital products for you to sell, and for each one you get a cut of the money made if it's bought through your affiliate link.
• Amazon Affiliates (UK) and Amazon Affiliates (US) both offer great opportunities to earn through Amazon sales. This is fantastic if the blog you're doing involves reviewing books or movies or something similar, since you can include Amazon affiliate links in all of your articles.

Paid Links
Linkbucks offers a great opportunity, especially for Bloggers and website owners, in which you can make money just by sharing links.  The ultimate way to make money through Linkbucks is by creating a script which you insert in the code of your website. This automatically converts every link on your web page or blog into a Linkbucks link type of your choosing, allowing to earn every time someone clicks off your website. Just insert the code once and you'll be making money in no time.

Paid Posts
SocialSpark is probably one of the best ways to make money while you're blogging. By accepting offers to write on your blog, you earn money by writing reviews of websites, products and services. SocialSpark pays through Paypal, so it's incredibly easy to join up. So long as you can keep to their terms and conditions, and write good quality posts, SocialSpark will prove to be one of the best income streams for you.

Advertising
The last thing (but still extremely important) for you to think about is advertising programs. Overloading your web page or blog with ads is a sure fire way to drive away visitors, so only throw these in once you've got a decent level of repeat readers. There are two services I can recommend here.

• AdBrite: AdBrite is a good alternative to the extremely strict Google AdSense. I'd normally advise staying away from Google AdSense until you already have a very large readership and a top level (.com) domain name. AdBrite make for an excellent alternative.
• Adgitize: I cannot recommend Adgitize enough for a blogger. An advertising solution aimed solely at Bloggers, Adgitize is one of the greatest services a Blogger can sign up for. They have so many ways to earn money on their service beyond just their advertising, and they reward Bloggers for being active members of the Blogging community and doing the things a Blogger should do. They also drive a small amount of free traffic your way! Follow this tutorial on making the most of adgitize.

So there you go! Those are all the methods I use to make money from blogging. And despite only actively blogging one week a month at most, I still make a substantial amount. You could easily make much more if you were careful and stuck to your schedule!

So my search for employment came up a bust this summer. I honestly don't know where I'd be qualified to work though, so I suppose that's to be expected.

Ideally I'm happy stacking shelves somewhere that I can understand to some degree the stuff I am in fact stacking. A game store (video games or tabletop) would be perfect, since I'm slightly OCD regarding shelving and really love gaming, so win-win.

I've not been able to get a job in the past six months, which is a shame. But being a full time student nowhere wants to hire me. The only place which called me back had to apologise because they were looking for full time staff all year around, and I can only offer my time during the summer. So I've been trying to make money online through various means, and none of them successful due to being away from my computer for long periods of time during the summer. As I'm sure you can tell, this blog slipped my mind completely. Adgitize earnings are down and I can't even remember the last time I dropped Entrecards on sites.

Oh well. Back to college, back to work....rather illogically. Let's see if I can keep posts coming more than twice a week for at least two month straight, eh?

So I started focusing more on Factoidz after figuring out that maybe writing for multiple sites isn't such a bad idea at all. Another piece of motivation for doing this was watching my Triond earnings slowly decline towards lower and lower CPM values, which as you can guess unnerved me to some measurable degree.

I've decided that I love Factoidz. It is more limiting in its scope of articles than Triond, but the earning potential for the website is infinitely higher. It pays for loads of different things, offering bonuses to people who keep writing quality, well publicised articles and people who take up their article assignments. Combined with their Buzz It Up program and the fact that people are offered incentives to create quality backlinks to already existing articles, it certainly takes a great deal of the work out of the publicising of your article which is ever present in Triond.

I'd recommend signing up to Factoidz if you haven't already, and get writing!

With the exams well and truly over, I can now settle back into a summer of unemployment and being constantly poor. Fun times truly lie ahead.

Silver lining means I now have more time to write Triond and Factoidz articles, which is handy for rectifying the lack of money problem I have. Hopefully, if everything goes according to plan. I hope to get at least one new article on each site every two days, ideally one on each every day for the whole summer. That should offer a huge boost in earnings from both websites, and I'll be sure to post payment proofs if people want them.

I don't have any holiday plans for the summer, primarily due to not being able to afford one, but I do plan on hanging out with my friends. I've already gone to the cinema twice to see new movies, and there are plans to go to the zoo. So supa fun socialising lies ahead. Hopefully I'll be able to afford it.

I'm entering the exam period for my university, which means stress levels are really very high right now. Everything should be over in 3 weeks, which is fortunate. It's not too long a period of time to be worried over stuff...