In times past this blog has been a blog about blogging. I’ve also blogged about marketing, and pretty much anything that mattered to me at the time. I’m finding now isn’t the best time in the world to be starting a blog to make money.

Sure I’m still making some money – not nearly as much as I used to, especially being banned by google because somebody clicked on too many links from my page – none of my fault.

I’ve made a new plan or goal in life – first off I am spending 6 -8 hours working out 3 days a week, and changing my diet. I’ve lost 75 pounds since January 12th, 2009. (Yes that’s under a month but I have a lot of weight to lose – I started weighing 660 lbs, and now weigh 577).

This is my primary goal right now – my wife works in Private duty home health, I am currently between jobs – other than my blog, which I have neglected a bit as of late. These days just about everyone is either between jobs or knows somebody else who is.

Why – being between jobs isn’t such a bad thing – for me I have always had excuses for why I couldn’t lose weight, or workout. My main excuse – was I have a lot of work, not enough energy, and not enough time.

Well – my wife took that excuse away agreeing to work, while I workout – for every hour she works I spend an hour in the gym – for the most part anyways. We are also changing our diets together and eating healthier. I have no excuses now to losing weight and it’s working like a charm – almost as good as if I were accepted on the Biggest Loser, which I’ve always dreamed of being on.

This year I’ve decided I can wait until I get accepted on the Biggest Loser – and maybe die in the process or I can be my own biggest loser. I spend 6-8 hours x 3 days per week using water weights while swimming, water walking, and water kickboxing.

I’m also drinking 1 gallon+ water per day, and cut out 90% of soda – I’ll have a coke zero every now and again but mostly drink water.

My other focus – I’m going back to school to get a degree in Sustainability(that’s green technology, green science, green business, basically anything green or eco related.) With my desire to go into green technologies as a career – I’ve decided to change my blog’s theme a bit. From now on this blog will feature a lot more information on going green and being an eco-friendly blogger.

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Consider this a primer to making money with a blog.

Image of Affiliate Money

Blogging can be very profitable. Can we all make as much as Darren Rowse or John Chow? Not likely, $43,485 per month is a lot of dough.

Can we make a fraction of that? You betcha. Would you be happy making just 10% of that?

Think about it, being able to earn $4,348 per month working from home, in your spare time.

Think about being an authority, someone people come to for answers. Imagine attending events related to your topic, so that you can live-blog the event.

Being a professional blogger has many perks.

The key to being a professional blogger is authority. Blogs are about building your brand – your credibility.

What is the number one reason people are coming to your blog? I can guarantee it isn’t because they may find the “adsense ad of their dreams on your site”.

Most people are visiting your blog for the information you provide. Information is the #1 use of the internet. Capitalize on that.

Blogs are ideal spots to find the information that people are looking for. Blogs not only provide fresh content, but through comments they also provide a way for others to share their information on a certain subject.

Search engines love blogs because of their frequent updates, and the more you update your blog, the higher up in the rankings your blog will rise.

Why your readers keep reading your blog:

1. Readers feel catered to rather than regarded as potential customers (unless you alienate your readers by posting faulty content, or misleading articles).

2. Blogs have a more human feel to them over regular websites.

3. People love to share their insights on subjects, and they can do this on most blogs via the comment section.

4. Blogs are easy to keep up with due to RSS feeds. Subscribe to a blog, and all you need to do is follow them in your favorite RSS reader.

Blogs are known to bring in repeat visitors more than any other type of website.

General websites may get bookmarked from time to time, but with a blog they may read your rss feed every couple of days and will come back when they are searching for some information related to your niche.

Regular blog visitors are  of a higher caliber than any visitor, so treat them right!

Blog visitors will leave comments, and help improve your blog. Google and other search engines even look at how many comments a blog post has when determining their rankings.
Blog visitors will also suggest your site to their favorite social media sites like: Digg, Stumbleupon, Myspace, Facebook, Propeller, Yahoo Buzz, Mixx, etc…

Blog visitors are also many times bloggers themselves, and many cases if they read a good article on your blog, they may write one similar and link to you as a courtesy.

I recommend trying to look beyond Adsense for your ad revenue when blogging. Adsense is surely a great way to make money, but it’s also a great way to lose money, there’s many who’ve abided by google’s terms of service and just as they were about to get paid got banned from the service.

Don’t lose your hard earned money.

Another reason not to use google ads is because they will take your reader away from your blog. Your visitor probably will be lost for all time, and won’t come back.

What’s the best way to monetize your blog?

Ask any big time blogger where they make most of their money, and they all agree that it’s through affiliate programs like MarketLeverage, Clickbank, or Pepperjam Network.

Many big time bloggers also make a substantial income with their own products, or services. Offer your own ebook, cd, dvd, video tutorial, etc and you can make a lot of money. Just make sure that the product that you offer is related to the topic of your blog.

Another great way to ensure the success of your blog is to build a newsletter and offer freebies for new subscribers. This should be launched from day one. Send your list top notch articles related to the niche, and from time to time add an affiliate advertisement. A good website for hosting your newsletter on is AWeber, or you can use a php program there are many free ones available.

Spread a few affiliate text links around your blog for good measure, and you will make a lot more than if you used google adsense. Just don’t overdo it, give quality content and a few affiliate ads, maybe make 1 in 10 articles be a review for a new e-book or product.

There are literally a million and one ways to make money from your blog – be creative and most importantly offer your readers a high level of value.

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Well, this may not be blackhat but it’s definitely gray.

Image via Wikipedia

The key to successful blogging that I’ve been mentioning lately is focused dedication and continually writing new content. You may notice that I don’t always post new content every day to this blog, although I do try to. A lot of the content I create, I use on article sites, squidoo, hubpages, etc.

This is an easy quick way to churn out articles with reckless abandon:

1. Purchase Dragon Naturally Speaking, or find an alternative speech to text program.

2. Google the topic that you want to write about, or visit goarticles.com and search articles there.

3. Launch Dragon NaturallySpeaking and rewrite the article on the fly by putting the article into your own words. Most people can speak faster than they can type and this is a much faster way to write articles.

Please note that the key here is to make the article look different and not duplicate as far as the search engines are aware. It’s also to save you from any copyright issues.

How you make money with this technique:

Well you could post it to your blog and make money off your blog’s advertising, OR you can post your new article to squidoo, hubpages, associated content, helium, or any other site that pays for articles.

If you do it right you could potentially write 5-10 posts in an hour, if you submit these to Associated content as exclusive posts you could earn as much as $5 per post, plus an additional $1.50 per 1000 pageviews. In essence that’s $25-50 for an hour of work!

Let me know if you’ve had success with this technique!

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Pillar Article Writing Week + Contest + 7 tips to Perfect Pillar Articles.

We all sometimes get stuck in the mode of just writing our thoughts, or small news articles, or informative but small articles daily.

This week I submit a challenge = Write 1 Pillar Article for each weekday for the Week of November 24th – 28th, 2008. You can write them each day, or write them now – and schedule them for that day, either way works. If you miss a day, that’s fine – just try your best.

I suggest working on them this week though, because next week is Thanksgiving, so it may be a bit hectic at times.

I will have a post for each day where you can come and leave comments explaining what your daily pillar article is about, and a link to it. (read to the end for the best part…)

At the end of the week I will be picking the very best Pillar Article, and I will give that author a free one month verbal recommendation advert in the sidebar with a link to the blog, and your pillar article.

I will also write a 500-1000 word review with pictures and the works.

You will also be given 1000 Free Business Cards that you can use as you like courtesy of Business-Cards.com:

Last but not least – the biggest REASON to Participate: I will stumble / digg Every pillar article submitted – and I also am suggesting that everyone else who participates do the same. This could mean each article could get a ton of traffic.

The last bit – please when writing your pillar article, put something like this at the end: “This Article is part of National Pillar Article Week” and please link back to this post so that others will be able to find out about the trend too – the more people who participate, the more stumbles / diggs everyone will get.

If you like, you could also write a blog post about National Pillar Article week, on your blog as well, with a link back to this post.

7 Free Tips for Absolutely Marvelous Pillar Articles:

1. Lists are a Blogger’s Best Friend. Not all pillar articles are lists, but lists are easy for people to follow, and the human mind just likes them. Lists are easily organized and many times lists, even crappy ones just get a lot of traffic.
2. Images are like defibrillators for your blog. Good Pillar articles if not lists, contain a lot of images to back up what is being taught or discussed.
3. Details, Shmetails. Pillar articles are detailed as can be, without fluff. Layout as much info as you can on a subject with as little un-needed info as possible.
4. Hot Topic – if ain’t hot then it’s just not. If you check out digg, linkbait and pillar articles are always on a hot topic that’s unique. They ar e also exhaustive.
5. Snappy Titles are better than Snapping Turtles. Well snappy, may be an understatement, but the title has to be exciting and draw in the reader – it must give them a reason to click on it.
6. Proof-read – Just do it.. Pillar articles are free of blemishes, so to speak. Make sure to use proper grammar and punctuation.
7. Sub-headings almost as good as Headings. Good Pillar articles also feature good use of sub-headings, and bold fonts. For instance look at this article how I’ve used h2 tags for sub-headings, and bold font for my main points.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

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Too many posts to handle? If you missed out on a great post from last week, here’s a quick digest of the top posts that you may want to check out:

Free Ebook: Ten Commandments of a Kickass Blog
Posted on Monday, November 3rd, 2008 in Announcements – Views: (228)

Join our Newsletter get “The Ten Commandments of a Kickass Blog” FREE!

I’m launching my newsletter this week. As a free gift to new subscribers we are giving our subscribers a FREE copy of my newest ebook entitled: “The ten commandments of a kickass Blog”.The book tells you the 1 thing that you must do above all else to become a successful blogger.I’ve gotten my blog up to 45,000+ hits per week, and this lays out what I’ve found is the number one, and possibly the only thing you need to do to be successful.

Sickening Racist Obama Jokes floating around the web…

Sickening Racist Obama Jokes floating around the web…
Posted on Friday, November 7th, 2008 in Politics & Community News – Views: (2732)

Just when you thought America has turned a proverbial leaf, it appears that some big Racist Obama Jokes are floating around.Come on people – aren’t we beyond our stupid petty differences?I mean heck, some people actually believe the guy is a muslim. Barack Obama is neither Arabic nor Muslim. But if he were – what would be wrong with that? Shouldn’t anyone be allowed to run for President in America despite their ethnic background, and their faith?
Shocking Negative Searches on Barack Obama in Google Trends…
Posted on Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 in Politics & Community News – Views: (326)

I was taking a gander at Google trends, and am seeing some curious trends right now.There are many bigots apparently ‘afraid’ of an Obama presidency.FACT: Barack Obama is not, and never has been a Muslim. Anyone who says otherwise is Bearing False Witness and breaking a commandment – therefore must not be Christian.Fact: Obama is NOT the AntiChrist, there is no reference to this anywhere in the bible.

John Mccain Out of Touch – He thinks this is normal?
Posted on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 in Politics & Community News – Views: (323)

I know this is a little late for election news, but John Mccain was talking about his mom, who wanted to go to France, so she went to France, she wanted to rent a car, but they wouldn’t let her because of her age..So she went and bought a car, so she could drive around France.Must be nice to just be able to drop a load of cash in a new car out of nowhere, instead of renting one.

The Top 3 Laws of Professional Blogging.
Posted on Friday, November 7th, 2008 in Blogging – Views: (357) The top 3 laws of blogging.

Law #1 is write.Law #2 is write some more.Law #3 is never stop writing!I know this sounds quite redundant. Writing is the untold key to successful blogging.The more you write, the more traffic you get, the more money you make.Yeah, I know sometimes it’s not easy to ‘just write’. Sometimes we want to do other things that we feel are ‘helping’ but aren’t as important.

Breaking Economic News: It Sucks. Break that! Sell Your Gold to Buy Christmas Gifts…
Posted on Friday, November 7th, 2008 in Making Money Online – Views: (201)

I know the economy is bad right now, and it’s not getting better. Everyone keeps talking about it, companies are laying off left and right. The holiday season looks bleak.Well here’s a good way to make a little extra christmas cash. It’s simple, easy and doesn’t take any effort.The economy may be going down, but gold is going up. People are moving their investments from stocks to metals.If you need money to buy Christmas for your family, then selling your gold is a good option.

John Mccain’s Concession was an Eloquent end to a Tough Election…
Posted on Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 in Politics & Community News – Views: (185)

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Image via CrunchBase

The top 3 laws of blogging.

Law #1 is write.
Law #2 is write some more.
Law #3 is never stop writing!

I know this sounds quite redundant. Writing is the untold key to successful blogging.

The more you write, the more traffic you get, the more money you make.

Yeah, I know sometimes it’s not easy to ‘just write’. Sometimes we want to do other things that we feel are ‘helping’ but aren’t as important.

Some common distractions that can ruin our blog:

• Twitter
• Re-designing
• Trying new ad networks
• Reading other people’s blogs.
• Thinking. Sometimes we try to hard to think up the perfect idea for a blog post, when it would be better to write 3 quick opinion pieces, or smaller articles
• Commenting on other sites. Yes this has a place, but again not as important as writing.

Get this in your head – if you’re not able to write 5 blog posts per day, there’s a good chance that you’ll never be a full-time blogger.

You’ll never be like John Chow, or Darren Rowse. They know how to keep quality content coming.

Sure it’s all been said before, I’m sure some of them have said the same thing many times.  For the person arriving from the search engines though, it’s only the first time.

If you don’t write, they won’t come. I worked so hard on so many things that just didn’t matter, and when I finally just decided to write as much as I can – my blog took off overnight.

Here are some ideas on types of posts you can write:

News Posts. Every blogger should make it a point of blogging about current events, even if you’re a niche and your blog is on pet grooming.

News posts are great and can bring a tidal wave of traffic. The best place to find news to report is google trends.

I talk about google trends a lot, If you don’t check google trends at least 1-2 times a day while writing, then stop reading my blog, and give up blogging.

Sure that’s harsh, but ya know it’s a tough world, and I’m not going to sugar coat this. You can be successful, or fail – your choice.

Regular on-topic Posts. These are the cream of the crop posts that you write. These have to be extremely tailored toward the topic of your blog. They need to be above and beyond, most news posts I work maybe 10 minutes on. Pillar Articles I work an hour or more on.

Series Posts. These can take a couple of days to write sometimes, but they are great for building sticky traffic.

Here’s another great idea for building your blog – tired of writing? Why not try adding some different media types. Why not record a video instead.

Video’s are great because you can upload them to a ton of different places, and will bring you a nice amount of traffic.

A nice tool which lets you upload your video to many different sites at once is tubemogul (it’s free) give it a shot!

Poll: Do you find yourself getting distracted when you should be writing? Also have you had similar results using Google Trends to bring in traffic?

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Jason Calacanis, one of the most influential bloggers on the scene right now, founder of Mahalo, exploiter of twitter and facebook, has announced he is going to quit blogging. What has the world come to? Eh, maybe it’s for the better.

I’m waiting to see a social network popup just around ‘betting’ whether or not he will come back to blogging. After-all I’ve quit blogging for a bit usually during the summer slow-down, but I always come back. For a true blogger, it’s almost an addiction, I can’t see how one can claim to completely give it up..but we will see.

After all Jason is known for link-bait scams, perhaps this is another one of his publicity stunts.

My personal message to Jason Calacanis: If this truly is the end for you, I tease, but I hardly know you, I regret not having the opportunity to get to know you better, or form any kind of relationship. I do however wish you the best of luck in any endeavor that you go to from here. Have a happy retirement!

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I have it on good authority that I’ll have the funding for our roadtrip this week. Give a few days to gather up all the equipment, we will be launching on our trip, maybe on monday – June 23rd.

Visiting 50 states is going to be a huge endeavor. I’ve promised my sponsor that I can and will complete the tour and interview 50 bloggers in 50 states(and some of Canada). If funds are stretched though I have the option of finishing the roadtrip remotely. But hopefully between sponsors, donors, etc we’ll be able to get it done.

My sponsor is lining me up an interview possibly with Amber Mac a tech vlogger / journalist who is big in Canada – also I’ve dropped an email to John Chow – who has agreed to do an interview IF I can get there before he leaves for a month in Mid-July.

I’m starting in Ohio and have to race to get the interviews done in the eastern USA then get to Vancouver, BC as fast as possible.

Interviewing John Chow would be a huge opportunity, and will help push the exposure this trip gets. I’ll also be interviewing a less famous blogger in BC  – my goal is to give the average joe blow blogger some exposure and interview everyday joe’s. But a john chow here and there will definitely be nice too.

STay tuned – this is going to be big.

We still need bloggers – especially in Northeastern, OH – Northern PA – and Northern NY (my first 3 stops.)
Submit your blogs here!

TNX – pronounced ‘thanx’, as in sms texting language is an up and coming Text-Link Exchange marketplace.

The premise behind TNX is that by increasing the amount of ‘quality’ links coming into your website, you will also increase your search engine rankings, and thus get more traffic.

It’s a good practice when using services like these not to disclose the fact that you are using them as google frowns at the practice. As a rebellious blogger though and not a fan of being told what I can / can’t do – I recommend giving them a try – both as a monetary source as well as a source for more traffic.

One thing I like is that they have a market where you can buy / sell / trade TNX points - you could also give them away in contests and what not. It’s like a liquid commodity, and personally I like them a lot better than Text-Link-Ads.

They do offer full-control over what kind of links are placed on your site, as well as what kind of sites your links show up on.

If you’re looking for an affordable method of ranking higher in google and a new way to make some money online go ahead and give TNX links a try – and when you’re done swing on over and let me know how well they’re working for you - I would also like some tips to share here on how to use them more effectively if you have any – feel free to leave a comment.

I’ve chosen the cities that we will be stopping in. We will take any blogger in the state as long as they are able to meet us at the chosen city.

I do apologize for any who would like to be interviewed but cannot meet us in these destinations, but we have picked them as they are logistically the best cities to visit in order to save as much gas as we can.

I’ve already calculated the trip being around 15,000 miles, and costing at least $3,500 just in gas alone.

As such  – Donations are GREATLY welcomed. Just send money via paypal to:
yourstruly AT patrickcurl DOT com

We are splitting the trip up into two blocks to take a small break /  breather.

Without further adieu here are the cities that we’ve picked:

First Leg:
Starting in Cleveland, OH.
1. Erie, PA
2. Buffalo, NY – We’d like to do the interview @ Niagra Falls if possible.
3. Toronto, ON
4. Montreal, QC
5. Montpelier, VT
6. Manchester, NH
7. Portland, ME
8. Boston, MA
9. Providence, RI
10. Hartford, CT
11. Trenton, NJ
12. Wilmington, DE
13. Baltimore, MD
14. Washington, DC
15. Richmond, VA
16. Raleigh, NC
17. Columbia, SC
18. Atlanta, GA
19. Tallahassee, Fl
20. Mobile, AL
21. New Orleans, LA
22. Jackson, MS
23. Little Rock, AR
24. Memphis, TN
25. Lexington, KY
26. Huntington, WV

Ending in Cleveland, OH

Second Leg:
Starting from Cleveland, OH.
1. Lansing, MI
2. Fort Wayne, IN
3. Chicago, IL
4. Milwaukee, WI
5. Minneapolis, MN
6. Sioux Falls, Sd
7. Omaha
8. Kansas City, MO
9. Wichita, KS
10. Oklahoma City, OK
11. Amarillo, Tx
12. Albuquerque, NM
13. Denver, CO
14. Cheyenne, Wy
15. Pocatello, ID
16. Salt Lake City
17. Cedar City – Camping w/ Relatives
18. Flagstaff, AZ
19. San Francisco, CA
20. Portland, OR
21. Seattle, WA
22. Vancouver, BC
23. Calgary, AB
24. Billings, MT
25. Bismark, ND
26. Winnipeg, MB

Ending in Cleveland, OH.

We are also selling small vinyl stickers on our car – they are going to be just a little bigger than a standard mouse, and will take up any free space on our car that isn’t covered by our sponsor(which we are announcing soon – this company is an awesome new company with great potential).

If interested send us a graphic / logo you would like to use – Each vinyl sticker will cost approximately $50 and will also include free 125×125 ads.

I’d also like to thank everyone who’s still following this trip – believe it or not – not only are we planning this cross country voyage but we’re moving cross country in the process – we just bought a house in Cleveland and are moving from Utah this coming week. So please bare with me if I’m not updating daily, as we will be unable to really update while on the road (getting our laptop soon).

We are totally excited to get this trip launched – if our sponsor agrees to the expenses I sent in – we will be on the road most likely June 2nd.

Best way to stay updated is of course to follow me on twitter: user = patrickcurl

Hey,

I’m not really a hotshot blogger, in fact I’m quite the opposite.

I don’t believe I have all the answers, or that I’m all that special. I do have confidence though in what I’m saying, and I know it works.

I believe humility is an important characteristic to encompass, and I know I’m not the perfect person yet. Which is why I am asking you, my readers the following questions:

What would you like to see on this blog?
What would you change about this blog?
What suggestions do you have for this blog?
Ultimately do you enjoy this blog, or do you think I’m full of fluff?

I have been told that the ads are a little excessive – but right now I’m just testing a bunch to see which ones I’m going to keep, then I’ll dial it down a lot.

I’m probably opening a can of worms here, but I know I have a lot of room to grow – and I’m not one to think I’m better than anyone.

One other question: Do you think I should start a podcast – and blog about the results of using podcasts on blogs?

I’d like to thank all of you who comment on this post, in advance – you are really what makes blogging such a fun / important part of my life.

 Full feeds, are the ONLY way to Go!

I wrote in my post “
Blogs need to eat too! Feed your blog with 39 ways to build your RSS Subscriber base. So easy a slackjawed yokel could do it!” one of the tips that I state to increase your subscribers is is to use full feeds, I’m going to expand on this a little further.

There are 2 main reasons that opponents of this thinking cite as their reasons for using partial feeds.

1. Using a partial feed forces the reader to visit their site – and essentially raise their stats, ranking, and bring in more money from advertisers. This may actually be true if you’re a large blog, with tons of great content like mashable.com, but for the small-time blogger, 90% of your readers are going to be too lazy to click on through and read the rest of your article.This hurts your credibility. You build credibility by writing awesome articles that everyone bookmarks, shares, and loves. If people can’t, don’t, or won’t read your post, they can’t see how great it is, and won’t bother visiting your blog anymore. You want people to read your content no matter what to build up your name, brand, and reputation.

   Secondly, many readers, automatically just unsubscribe from any and all blogs that use partial feeds, if you’re ok with losing 40% of readers out there, then by all means use partial feeds, but I highly advise against it.

   Also according to feedburner, having a partial feed will not increase clickthroughs to your site at all.

2. Using partial feeds, can save your content from being scraped. That’s not always true, and the damage of losing subscribers, followers, etc out-weighs the alternative.It’s also possible that partial feeds can actually help scrapers, as the keyword density may be better.

Conclusion:

Successful blogging is about getting your message out there, and making your readers happy, think of what you would do in their situation, if reading a partial post do you always click through to the website? If so you’re the exception…

Personally, I get pissed if a blogger actually expects me to click through to their website, when I’m surfing my reader.

Most bloggers are lazy, or way to busy to click through on every post, especially if they’re researching for a new blog post, which is what I am doing 90% of the time I’m using my reader.

Bottom line: Stop pissing off people off and Switch to a Full Feed!

Here are a few other great blog posts I read recently to back this up.

• Full Feeds are Better
• Why Not to Switch to Partial Feeds