I am now earning a full time income from the internet

Heck it only took 4 years.....LOL

Yep, 4 years to get it right and to build up to a steady weekly income. No I don't rely on affiliate programs or Google Adsense, they are the gravy added at the end of each month. I don't rely on them because their income is not a steady stream, they go up and down each day like a yo-yo. I am talking about article writing as a guest blogger, ghost writing for websites and of course my article writing over at AC. I also get a steady daily stream of paid blog post offerings which I have enough of to pick and choose from.

I really like the fact that I can get most of my work done in about 3-4 hours a day. Now I just have to break my nasty habit of surfing between jobs so I don't spend 9 hours a day "working."

Our house might have a nice Christmas this year with a few "house" gifts like a blu ray player or a LED TV, or both.

Gee it is nice not to worry about income anymore.

What to do when your blog runs out of steam

If you have chosen to blog about something that is a high income earner but holds a low interest for you to write about, you will eventually run out of steam (things to write about), so what do you do?

Should you move on and let that blog die a quite death? That will happen if you decide not to blog in it for weeks or months on end. Or do you do something with it?

Here is what I did and it works:

I have a weight loss blog that I post to about twice a week. After 2 years I was running out of different ways to write about weight loss supplements and exercise, my mind just could not think of anymore articles. So rather than just quit my blog, I decided to change the title (not the URL) to a general health blog. Now I could write about cancer, aroma therapy and even plastic surgery and by doing so I will attract those higher paying Google Adsense ads to the blog. A big plus for me is that my mind is now no longer restricted to weight loss articles but is free to think about a larger picture.

It boils down to the fact that niche blogging can be extremely limited and will burn out after awhile, but a good well written blog will last forever and will continue to generate income for years.

I just got slapped up side the head

Why didn't I think of this LAST YEAR??? I just got a taste of true reality. I am talking about why this blog and 2 of my other blogs really don't make much money at all.....because they don't solve people's problems.

Yes, I know that there are a hand full of money making blogs out there that entertain, are news worthy or just plain fun, but they are the exception. They have a loyal following and big companies buy advertising on those blogs. The rest of the true money making blogs actually provide a service, they solve a problem that someone is having....for a price.

I am sorry to inform you that unless you are providing a sought after solution to someone's problem, you are not going to make much money online. If you can entertain, have a huge fan base and people knocking on your email door to thrust those advertising dollars down your throat, you might have a successful blog. Me on the other hand, I am going to solve a few people's problems.

It is official, Digg has died

Digg, the very well known social bookmarking and promoting tool of the past 6 years has died, at least in my experiment. I had joined Digg about 2006 when it was still on the rise to becoming a force to drive traffic to any website that I submitted to them. I had several hundred followers and I in turn followed many hundred people and their "diggs." Just submitting an article or story to Digg would often result in 200+ visitors in under the first hour to that story. As I got more involved with Stumble (which is still around and in my opinion still a great tool) and Twitter, I forgot all about Digg, that was until last week.

I decided that I should drop in on my old friend, Digg and see what was going on. My several hundreds of followers were now down to 34. The people I followed were gone and only 65 were left. I did hear the rumors that 13 million members had vanished from Digg around April 2010 and looking at my stats, it looked to be true.

I decided to submit a few articles and see what would happen. I submitted 3 and then waited overnight to see the results. Well the results were dismal. No visitors, no comments and worse yet, I could not find them in my own account. I had to do a search for them.

Digg is now over run with non-stories. It seems that they have "partnered" with media providers and those providers are swamping Digg with "story ads." There are "stories" about laptop keyboard specs and weight loss supplement reviews which are thinly disguised ads. What I didn't like was the fact that you can no longer "bury" a story should it be just plain awful.

Yep, Digg is dead, officially buried by Twitter and people leaving because big media companies now rule it.

Modern media is using the internet as a cop out

This is an open message to all TV networks and local TV stations:

Dear TV producer,
I know that you have a website. I watch TV to not only be entertained but to get the latest news. When watching TV, my computer is usually turned off for the day. In fact I have spent enough time on the computer that I am almost sick of it......at least for today.

What I am writing to you today for, is that I am totally pissed off about the fact that during your news shows your reporters constantly tell viewers to find out more at your f****** website. I am NOT interested in finding the "rest of the story" on your ad ridden, slow loading, piece of s*** website. I want the story on TV - NOW. If I could jump through the TV screen and give you a thorough colon cleanseing (and I don't mean that in a nice way) I would. In other words - you are anal.

I would like to add that although you think that most people have a computer in their homes, not all are connected to the internet. Most people that are strapped for cash have dropped their internet service and now find free wi-fi service at the library (if they have a laptop) or outside a fast food place.

Now please start reporting the whole story on your TV news and forget you even have a web presence, your viewers don't care.

I am the world's worst marketer

I swear that I could not sell shoes to a barefoot person, I must be the world's worst salesperson. So what makes me say that? It is really simple........it is the truth.

If I was good at marketing, I would be pushing some product down your throat right now, saying it would solve all your problems and would cure all your children's and grand children's chin acne at the same time as making you rich beyond your wildest dreams, but the offer is for a limited time only. Then I would funnel your email addy into my email list and then send out emails to you until you bought what I was selling or until you wished me dead.

Nope, I am terrible at sales. All I do is put up a few ads and hope you click through and investigate them or look at a website I suggested. Most of you don't. Most of my words are not read nor heeded. They are just merely skimmed over and forgotten.

Yep, I am the world's worst marketer.

The real way to make a ton of money with Google Adsense

You have seen them, those websites that are plastered with Google Ads and you came to the site looking for a camera or diet pills. The page had very little to do with what you were searching for but down at the very bottom of the site was a mass of links to at least 300 other sites, all of them different subjects from each other and just one of them was about cameras, so you click on it.

Now you are on another website that is very much like the piece of junk you just left, but this time none of it makes sense, even the sentences are jumbled. Phases like "most effective diet pills 10K" are thrown in with "top video of model index 500." So what do you do? You see a Google ad and click on it because it makes more sense than the page did.

You have now gotten a good idea of how Google Ads work. They are used to take you off of a site. To have a successful Google Adsense website means that your website must be so crappy that the ads on it offer more information than what you have.

Everyone says that Google loves content, even Google says that. What it doesn't say is that the content has to be GOOD content or make any sense at all......it just has to be content, preferably unique content.

So to make money with Adsense, you need to write crap.....lots and lots of crap. Enough crap that people will click on anything just to leave your website, and you had better have enough ads on your site that they click on one that makes you some money.

Now you just need lots and lots of traffic to those crappy websites............good luck with that.

I have discovered another way to make money online

The little trick I learned was based on what I already use. It made me some very quick money in under 24 hours. I was shocked!! As you know, I write articles for AC (link to them is in the side bar). I also have a lot of old fiction and non-fiction books that I need to move out of the house. Rather than just bag the books up and head over to Goodwill or the other donation places in town, I have been reading them again, but this time writing up a book review on each of them. Once my book review is done, I list the book on a free eCrater store I opened up just to sell the books at a really cheap price, then I submit my book review to AC. They have been approving and paying me around $5 for each book review and I add a link to where to buy it when I submit the article. So now I have made $5, got a free inbound link to my store and have been getting hits on the book. I don't put the link to the book in the article, but AC likes to have "reference" links posted along side the article for their readers.

Now this method would work if you are advertising anything online. You could write an article to compare prenatal vitamins and then add a link to your store that sells the different vitamins. The big plus is that you get paid just to write the article and you haven't even sold anything yet.

You have got to be creative when advertising online and there are many companies that will help you do that.

Writing for a living

If you think that writing for a living is all rosy and unicorns, boy do I have an eye opener for you. When you have a client that loves they way you write but wants you to write an article for their website about something you know nothing about, you are in big trouble. You can either say no thank you and turn down a $50 assignment or just do a few minutes worth of research and see what you can come up with (and cross your fingers that the client likes it).

Last week I had a client want an article written about weight loss pill side effects. Since I don't use weight loss pills and the only effects I knew about were bouncing off the walls from the caffeine that were in some of the pills or diarrhea as one of the more well known pills were known for (no I will not mention the name of the pill) I almost turned them down. I emailed them about the diarrhea thing and they told me that they wanted an article that pointed that out!! It turned out that they are in direct competition of the famous pooping pill. So I wrote my article and got my money.

Great websites to sell stuff from

I have a few boxes of books and some other items to clear out of a back room. Normally I would put them up on eBay and make a few dollars for my efforts. In fact I was about to do that. Until I found out that eBay had jacked up their final value fees (FVF). Those are what you pay eBay after the item has sold. It does not include the listing fee or the PayPal fee. Damn, I would be "fee'd" to death!

So since eBay is out as a great place to list your books, DVD's, women's apparel, kids clothes and collectibles, what are some good places to sell? I know of several.

First is eCrater. They are a free ecommerce website that does not charge you anything to list items for sale on there. You set up your own store and you are ready to sell. Another place is webs.com which offers a free website and they have "gadgets" you can add to the website that will integrate with an etsy store or you can list your own stuff straight on the website you create.

I like eCrater and I have sold stuff using a store that I made on there a few years ago. I might just set one up for my books.

Should you allow commenting on monetized blogs?

You hear so much information on the web about how to make 100's of blogs just for Google Adsense or slapping affiliate ads on them. One of the main problems of having 100's of blogs to do that for you, is the problem of commenting on your blogs. Do you allow it, do you moderate it, or do you disable it? Here is my suggestion:

First you must realize that the advantage of a blog rather than a stagnate website is the fact that people can leave comments on your posts. Often it is not the content of your post that gets attention but the comments that are left. How many times have you read a news story on MSN only to find yourself reading that long line of comments left at the end of the story? Comments are also a sign of a blog's popularity. The more comments, the more readers.

That being said, there are times when you don't want to have comments left. If you run several blogs that you just want to write a post on them maybe once a month to keep them active and have them strictly for Adsense then you probably want to disable commenting. I also have one blog that gets its fair share of comments but when a blog post is over 3 months old I go back an disable the commenting on them. The reason for that is the fact that comment spammers will commonly spam old blog posts because those posts are indexed in Google and might give out some link love. By doing that I keep the free credit scores and Viagra comments to a minimum.

Another thing you might want to think about is if you do paid blog posts, do you want your readers to mention negative things about your sponsor? Or worse yet, leave a comment that you have sold your readers out? Most people won't bother to leave comments like that on a blog, but you do get those trolls that just like to stir up trouble.

Lastly I would like to mention that I NEVER, but NEVER have any of my blogs set on automatic publish of a comment. There is a program out that will insert malicious script into a blog via those gibberish scrambled comments which is something I had not heard before, but I am glad I moderate comments. 

Don't have a job or career that involves something you don't like doing

There are just too many jobs in my lifetime that I just really hated having. The first job I ever had was a stock clerk in a warehouse. Unpacking clothing from India to go into upscale women's stores and seeing the mark-up was enough to make you sick. After just 4 months of that I was laid off along with 50 others. I decided that I would not work moving stock around and making boxes for the items to be shipped out after sorting.

Next was a job at a solar company. That was actually an interesting job. I had no technical background at all but learned how to calibrate solar controllers (they turned the pumps on and off for spas), inspect the components coming in from sub-assembly contractors and even used a drill press. The job only lasted 1.5 years and then went out of business.

After that job was a short 3 month stint at the old Bullock's Department stores, in their accounting department. It was boring clerical work but it paid the bills.

Then it was back to electronics, this time I was an assembler and worked my way up to quality control. The company sucked, the pay was average and management was a joke. I was stupid enough to stay there 8 years and then I walked out - I had, had enough! It was time for me to have a job the I liked instead of just a job to pay the bills.

I found that job and company at the next place I worked. The company was good to their employees, the pay was good and I was finally rewarded for my work. It was still in electronics but I liked the place. I was there for 12 years when the owner decided to retire and sold the company. The buyer then moved operations and shut us down. My nice job was gone forever.

My next few jobs were short lived and lasted less than 2 years each. I worked as a CNA and hated that job with a passion. I sold digital cameras at one place for their Christmas season. I tried a short stint at having my own retail catalog business which did badly. I worked as a temp at several big companies and hated being a temp worker because the regular workers treated you like trash.

During those times I found blogging and enjoyed writing. Then I found out I could make money online as a writer. Wow, I thought, if I could only make a good living just writing. So I tried it.....and it worked, and I like it. I have been writing for the internet for about 6 years now and although the income from it was small at first, it has grown over the years. My writing came in very handy 2 years when I was laid off yet again. I had enough income coming in each week to pay the bills. Now when I look for work outside of the home for some extra cash and to get out and meet people, I look for a job that is not based on pay but what I would enjoy doing.

I wasted too many years doing what other people thought I should be doing and not doing what I wanted to do. Take a lesson from someone who has hated most of her working career and choose for yourself what you want to do with your career.

Paid blogging companies have gone cheap skate

It looks like the paid to blog companies have become cheap skates. Websites pay them to assign bloggers to write reviews about their products or websites. It is done to start a "buzz" on the internet and if done correctly can lead to viral advertising. Often the companies that want the "buzz" will pay up to $1000 to be mentioned on a well known or high trafficked blog. Most of the time they pay around $20 to $100 for a well written product review. But now that has changed.



What has been going on now is that the paid blogging companies are taking 50% or more commission on each assignment. So the company that wants the "buzz" is often paying $100 for a review and the blogger is only seeing $50 of that.

It has really gotten bad when you see paid offers like this (yes this is a real offer I just removed the letters and replaced them with "X"):

Please add anchor text "XXXXX XXXXXX" to the first sentence of blog post. Add the keywords "XXXXX XXXXX," "XXXXX XXXX XXXX," and "XXXX XXX XXXXXX" anywhere else in the article as well. The title should have the keyword "XXXXX XXXXX" in it. Post must be on home page of site for at least one month.
All that for just $5.00!!!!  Oh, I forgot to add that they want that on a blog that has a page rank of 3.....WTF!

Are they out of their fricken minds? I high lighted that last sentence for a reason, who in the heck has a blog post on their front page for a month?? Not if they are a good blogger.

Paid blogging has gone down the tubes for bloggers in the USA. The paid rates are so low now that only international bloggers will take the assignments and they don't fall under the disclosure laws that the USA has. So it looks like the paid blogging companies got around the FTC by being cheap skates.

Specialized job search websites

Are you just plain sick and tired of looking for a job and can't seem to find any out there? Try a specialized job board. There are job boards online that just cater to one particular type of employment. There are job boards dedicated to pilots, machinists and even tailors.

Unfortunately there are lots of junk job boards out there too. Take my last example of tailors, I took a look at what is out there in regards to sewing jobs and job boards dedicated to them.

What I found was a large number of junk websites that seemed to be put together for one purpose only and that was to attract people with keywords then slap ads all over the site, with little or no jobs listed on the website. Under the sewing jobs I found sewingjobs.org and sewingjobs.net - both are junk. They seemed to be run by the same person and the jobs listed were so old that I am sure that they were forgotten on the site. On one of the sites I found just 3 jobs squeezed between the huge blocks of ads. So did I find a good sewing jobs website? Yes I did. I found one that apparently only opened up on Labor Day (yesterday) and when I was on the site there were 4 other visitors at the same time (they have a widget that shows current visitors). They have zero Google ads and just a straight forward jobs board. You can check it out at the Pro Sewing Jobs Board It also looks like they are getting people to pay for the ads that appear on there so it must appeal to those who are visiting.

So you can see by my small experiment that not all job websites are created the same. Anyone can slap one together but it is the quality of traffic that will make it a good or junk website.

Google to drop the use of PageRank

What would you do if Google's PageRank disappeared from the Google toolbar? If you have a website or practice some sort of basic SEO, you would probably panic. A Google employee hinted at just that in October 2009. Since then Google has only updated PageRank twice on the toolbar, the last time in April 2010. It would not surprise me in the least that Google might remove the page rank part of the algorithm to their search engine.

Now I have some thoughts on PR:

• If Google did remove all reference to PR, how many companies, that broker link selling would go belly up?
• How many blog owners that currently make money selling links would have to find real jobs or learn real online marketing?
• What method would webmasters use to show others that their website is worth advertising on? Would it be pure traffic, Alexa rating or something else?

If you had a new website or blog and did not know anything about how to get your site noticed you might resort to hiring a SEO company. For example, if you sold wholesale apparel, that company (SEO) would have to try and get your company ranked high for those words "wholesale apparel" to show up high in internet searches so your website would get noticed. Normally the SEO company would try and get high PR ranked websites to link to your website, but if PR is taken out of the picture then most small SEO companies would not know what to do. They have based their entire methods on linking and not telling their clients that Google wants good content. You see, in fact, Google wants content and its search has changed because of it.

Around April-May, Google released Caffeine into the world wide web. At the same time Matt Cutts made a few videos that stated that Google will be actively searching the web for unique content. So now you have the real clue as to what is going on with Google, they don't want linking as much as content, unique content at that. So bye-bye paid linking, bye-bye link farms, and good riddance to websites that are nothing more than a few paragraphs set up for Adsense only. Who knows what might be next, maybe real quality websites!!!

Making quick money with photos

As you know I earn money on Associated Content (the link to the site is in my sidebar). What I really like about them is that I can make some really quick money with them at times. Not only do I write articles for them for pay, but I also read what other people have written on there and have gotten some great tips on earning even more money with them.

Just recently I discovered the easiest way to earn money with AC and it is not by writing articles, nope, it is putting up slide shows on there. The big plus is that it doesn't have to be your own photos. I use a royalty free, copyright free, photo website that I can use their photos, for free. All I do is put a series of 3-5 photos together and write short captions for each of them, publish them then tell a few people on Twitter and now they have traffic. One of them got Stumbled and I "earned" $2 that day, just for one slide show.

If that sounds easy to you then go and join AC, like I said the link is in the side bar, and make some quick money.