So, do I have your interest yet? Would you like to hear more?

OK, OK. Who am I trying to kid? If you’ve read this far, you’re obviously interested and you can’t wait for all the juicy details, so, without further ado, here they are.

1. Create and Schedule “Smart” Tweets.
Smart tweets maximize your time online, allowing you to create, schedule, and automate many common tweeting tasks. Just imagine being able to create templates for your tweets, where you can re-use common messages and schedule them to occur whenever you like. With TweetSpinner’s easy-to-use tweetscript, you can create dynamic tweets that automatically change their content based on conditions you specify.

This feature is super easy to use and extremely flexible. You can use it to create tweets that rotate certain highly targeted keywords of your choosing from a list that you create. These “smart” tweets can be scheduled to be posted repeatedly with changing text to your Twitter profile at set intervals. Or, if you prefer, you can post them manually as you see fit. This is a huge time saver if you have multiple products that you promote, because you can also configure your smart tweets to tweet a completely different message from a list of messages (links included) completely on auto-pilot.

2. Schedule Rotation of Profiles and Designs.
Twitter gives you only a few options to play with regarding your profile’s look. A tiny bio. One URL. And some design colors. With TweetSpinner, you can rotate your bio, URL, and design features on schedule — every hour, every day, whenever you like. This helps you maximize the effectiveness of your profile by giving your followers more information and helps keep it fresh.

3. Smart Friends and Followers.
Now this is a feature worth getting excited over! This feature alone is worth the $15/month for the Pro Upgrade! This feature has dramatically increased my Twitter following with targeted followers that are genuinely interested in the topics that I tweet about. The click-through rate that I’m getting to links posted since using this feature to increase my following has more than doubled!

Sure, there are other products and applications out there on the market to increase your Twitter following that boast much more spectacular numbers, but number aren’t everything when you’re talking about a quality Twitter following. I would much rather have 100 targeted followers who are genuinely interested in my Tweets than 1000 followers who are just following me in hopes that I’ll follow them back and increase their own following.

This incredible feature is actually made up of numerous sub-features and options that you can configure to your liking.
- View your friend-to-follower ratio to find out who is or isn’t following you back and how many or your followers that you’re not following back. This feature uses filters that you set-up and you can even schedule it to follow back anyone whose follow you don’t return manually.
- “Smart purge” (unfollow) anyone not following you back. It’s smart because you can configure when and how it’s used.
- “Keyword follow” any user who tweets a certain word. Schedule it, too.
- “Mimic follow” any other user’s friends. This is a great way to follow all of your competitor’s friends.
- Create “nofollow” and “immunity” lists to never follow, for example, user XYZ or any user with “XXX” in their name. This feature also looks at each user’s recent tweets to avoid following “spam” accounts.
- Clean-up your DM inbox. Wouldn’t you like to purge old messages? This feature lets you purge up to 40 old DM’s from your Twitter inbox at a time.
- Configure sophisticated filters to only follow people who: are from certain locations, have a good friend/follow ratio, who have a certain number of friends, who you’ve previously purged, and so on.
- View pie charts showing you follower overlaps with any other user. “Close the gap” by mimic following.
- View reciprocity scores and pie charts for any keyword or mimic, showing you the percentage of users who return your follow. You can then focus on the keywords and mimics that result in the best ratio of new followers for you.
- View color coded lists of every person you follow by date, keyword, and status. Easily see when you followed them, if they’ve followed you back or if you’ve purged them.

Interested? If you tweet, you should be. Like I said, I have been using this application for about a month now and I’ve been able to increase my Twitter following from a measly 120 followers to close to 2000 targeted followers that are actually interested in what I tweet. Oh yeah, I almost forgot. That’s just one profile. I’m using TweetSpinner to increase my productivity and following for all four of my twitter profiles from one easy to navigate account interface.

Go ahead. Check out TweetSpinner for yourself and give it an honest test run by spending the $15 for the Pro Upgrade. You won’t be disappointed.

OK. So, hopefully by now you have taken some time, visited the links that I recommended in the first two posts and read all of the information available. Some of you may have even already started writing and publishing blog posts. If you’re one of these new bloggers, congratulations and welcome to the blogosphere!

Now, let’s get down to business. As I said in How I Make Money From Blogging Part 2, in this post I want to cover how to monetize the content of your posts and provide your blog yet another income stream. There are a few different ways you can do this. When you’re first starting out blogging, your audience may not be large enough for your to command big dollars when trying to sell links within your posts, but don’t worry, there are other ways to make money within the content of your posts.

An excellent way for new bloggers to start earning some money from the content of their posts is by promoting affiliate products. I have written about how to make money with affiliate marketing in the past. It definitely has it’s advantages, especially when you’re just starting out. Be sure to be sincere when writing about the products you promote. The best way to do this is to actually purchase or use the products and services that you intend to write about before you promote them. Believe it or not, it is very easy to tell when reading a post about an affiliate product whether the writer is actually speaking from experience with the product/service or if they’re just writing their review from a press release or copying and pasting product info between some of their own words.

Yeah, it happens. Unfortunately, more often than you would think it would.

Remember, when you blog, your readers are your life line. Write for them and give them your honest feelings about the products, services or programs you promote. Give them the quality they deserve and they will return to read more. In time, they will readily follow your links, buy the products you recommend and maybe even tell their friends about the great info they receive from your blog posts.

Once you’ve been blogging for a while and you’ve grown your reader base, you should be able to start selling links within your posts through a service like Inlinks. If your reader base is large enough and active enough, you may even be able to command a pretty decent price for links within your blog posts. That’s right, when your blog starts to get enough traffic, people will actually pay to have links to their products, services or websites placed right within your blog content!

As I said earlier, Inlinks is a great service for selling links within your posts. In fact they even provide a service that helps you promote your blog or website in the same way. Those of you just starting out, can purchase links through their service to be posted on higher traffic blogs from within their network of bloggers for a low monthly fee starting at just $10 per month. A link from a high traffic blog is a great way to gain much needed exposure for your blog and help you to spread the word about yourself and your blog.

Now you know How I Make Money From Blogging and you should be able to follow my advice and do the same for yourself. Of course, your success will depend on how consistently you post to your blog, the quality of your posts and how effectively you promote yourself and your blog.

Hmmm, do I smell a blog series about promotion on the horizon? The only way you’ll know for sure is to come back and read some more! If you want to be sure you don’t miss out you can always subscribe to my RSS feed or get this blog delivered directly to your email inbox. See you soon.

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OK. So, hopefully by now you have taken some time, visited the links that I recommended in the first post, read all of the information available and decided which blogging platform you want to use. Some of you may have even already purchased a domain name and/or a web hosting package. If you’re one of these people, congratulations, you’re well on your way.

The next step is setting up your stand alone blogging software on your hosting account web server. This can be a rather complicated step for those “less computer literate” people out there, but it doesn’t have to be!

If you’ve taken my advice from earlier and set-up your hosting account on HostGator, they have excellent step-by-step video tutorials on how use their Fantastico Deluxe script to help you install the free blogging platform from WordPress (also suggested earlier). In fact, Hostgator even has dedicated online support specialists that will do everything they can to help you through any problems you may encounter along the way.

Once you’re all set-up on your web server, you’re ready to start putting your own stamp on your blog!

Now, it’s up to you to get those creative juices flowing, but before you start writing posts there are a few things you will want to take care of first. The design, look and feel etc. of your blog is very important in making a first impression on the reader. Once again, it isn’t the sole factor that will determine your success, but good design and layout is always better than poor design and an ugly color scheme that will turn off your readers. Make sure that when you pick a WordPress theme to install on your blog (the default theme it comes with is boring) it fits your taste, niche, vision, color scheme, etc. There are tons of quality themes available for free from the WordPress Theme Directory, so you shouldn’t have any trouble finding something that fits your style or niche.

Another thing you’ll want to look for in a theme is room for ad placement. Selling advertising is a major money maker when it comes to blogging. You’ll want to make sure that the sidebar of your blog theme is laid out in such a way that there is ample room for banner advertisements and ad widgets. When you first get started blogging, you probably won’t be able to sell much advertising space right away until you have a large enough audience and good quality traffic, so it’s a good idea to start out by placing ad widgets and/or affiliate banners in your side bar to monetize your blog until you can drum up that a large audience and command top dollar for your ad space.

Personally, I use the services of WidgetBucks and AdBrite. I have found that they perform the best by serving a mix of paid-per-click and paid-per-impression advertising models. Another popular choice is Google Adsense, but I have found that both of the others perform better for my particular websites. The same may not be true for yours. Always keep careful track of your ads conversion stats and test different ads from time to time to see which ads are performing best for you. You can also fill some ad space with affiliate banners to generate commissions from your traffic. If you need a refresher, I have written about how to make money with affiliate marketing in the past. It has it’s advantages, especially when you’re just starting out.

So, let’s re-cap. By now you should have decided which blogging platform you want to use, chosen and/or purchased a domain name, purchased a web hosting package, set-up WordPress on your web server, picked a theme/design/colors for your blog and chosen your advertising method to monetize your blog.

WHEW!

When you say it like that, it really seems like a lot of work. But it wasn’t so bad. Was it?

If you think about it in terms of what it takes to start-up a real, money making business, it really isn’t much work at all. You should have been able to do it all by yourself and if you’ve followed my advice up until this point, you’ve only spent about $20 US ($10 domain name, $10 first month web hosting) on start-up costs!

When you’ve reached this point successfully, you’re ready to start filling your blog with posts that will capture your readers interest, provide them value and make then want to return to read more. In the next post in this series I plan on covering how to monetize the content of your posts to provide your blog yet another income stream.

Stay Tuned!