Let me give a link to my PTC blog first: http://ptcbleepings.blogspot.com/

Though I am currently active in PTC domain, I don’t feel well enough to stick with it. I may try new ways of making money online soon, which I haven’t tried so far. Should you say, Best of Luck?

The difficulty lies in the approach. You can’t just put Adsense code and get clicks. Most of the visitors know that the links with small description are nothing but the ads. So, there are very low chances of getting clicks as compared to Entertainment related sites (or blogs).

There are some ways to overcome this. Let’s see some possible ways:

Direct Flat-Rate Advertising

This way certainly eliminates the element of clicking. If you think that clicks are also very important in this type of advertising, I suggest you to see my post about comparison between flat-rate ads and other types like PPC and CPM here.

But the main disadvantage of this advertising is the amount of efforts needed, if you are not so much popular. And there is certain limit on income also. You can’t convert your increasing traffic into increasing income, unless you increase ad-spot price on your site.

This also includes paid links. But you have to be careful here. You can be punished by Google, if you put direct links to non-related sites. Punishment generally includes lowered PageRank and decrease in the rank at Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

CPM ads

This type of ad is very comfortable, if you have high traffic site. The key factor also includes origin of traffic, that is, from where you are getting traffic. Most of the advertisers prefer USA, Canada and European countries.

Support My Advertisers!

And if you are getting good amount of traffic and page-views, but can’t see a conversion of it into income, why don’t say Support Me Please!

You can easily say these words, if you have more than one Ad networks active in your blog, as I had read it in Adsense support forum. These words don’t point to any particular ads, and so there should not be any problem with it.

But there should be some etiquette here. You should keep your site or blog free from intrusive ads, generally seen within blog posts and in interstitials. Excessive amount of Referral links within your posts or sidebar should not be used.

The actual message that these words should convey is like this: “You are visiting my site and are happy with it. If it is so, politely look at the ads, and if you find something interesting there, just click on it!”

Conclusion

You have to have a different approach in creating income stream from your blog or site, if your niche is related to internet-savvy people. You can’t afford to rely just on PPC ads, rather you have to make a shout – Support My Advertisers Please!

Did you hear that?

So, here is the post about Alexa, which is so comprehensive that I really need not to say anything else about Alexa!

http://www.doshdosh.com/20-quick-ways-to-increase-your-alexa-rank/

Enjoy…!

Let me just introduce Entrecard’s new mechanism for advertising price quickly. Now on, the advertising cost on your blog is simply 2 to the power n, where n is the number of ads that are in queue. So if you have 4 advertisers in queue, then the advertising cost for the fifth one would be 2^4 = 16 ec/day.

If you want, you can read more on Entrecard’s blog.

The only thing that is good in this new structure is that, it will terminate the activity of gaming with the system; that is, dropping cards in excessive amount daily. Now on, famous blogs will have much higher cost than others, which was not the case before. But except this good thing, there are really two serious problems with this new structure, which are mentioned below:

Problems caused by the new pricing structure

First problem – I really can’t understand why they have chosen such exponentially rising advertising cost. If you advertise on a 1024 ec/day charging blog, the next advertiser will have to pay 2048 ec/day for the same spot. How can this be fair in anyway? Is the popularity and traffic of that blog is doubled in one day? No! Then why one should be charged the double figure?

Second problem – Due to sky-touching cost, the advertiser will have to wait for the price to come down and so, they will be checking the advertising cost frequently. And the one who is first to see new lower figure, will become the advertiser. Others will have to wait again one day, fielding for the lower cost. Isn’t this annoying and wasting of time for advertisers?

Two simple solutions to these problems

Solution to the first – Let the advertising cost be somewhat linearly rising. I have personally thought of a scheme for that. It’s described below:

Let the cost of advertising be zero, only if there isn’t any ad in queue. Then after, cost increases by an adding factor 10 ec up to 5 ad-queues. So, if there are 4 ads in queue, the price will be 40 ec/day. Then after, let the adding factor be 20 ec up to 10 ad-queues. Then after, adding factor is 50 ec for up to 15 ad-queue and for the rest of the ad-queues, adding factor is 100 ec.

For the sake of convenience, I have put the whole idea in the form of table as below:

Solution to the second – To resolve the second problem, let the bloggers be allowed to put up to 4 Entrecard widgets (Each widget showing different ad). The number 4 is again an approximation, based on the number of advertisers that are willing to advertise. That number can be more, but should not be less. Also, a square spot having 4 Entrecard widgets in 2 rows and 2 columns will look fine.

If this step is done, more advertisers will be able to put their ads at quite lower price, though resulting in comparatively more income for the blogger. Evidently for the prices to be low and stable, each widget must have its own ad-queue.

So, this is my opinion for the pricing structure in Entrecard. I am eager to see your comments about this idea.

Commenting on other blogs is an easy way to do it. But you can’t get so much exposure with it, not even after commenting on a high traffic blog; because you are not alone as a commentator on it.

So, Article Directories come to help you. In such directories, you have to submit your article (or say, post) for approval. It is recommended that one should submit only unique and informative articles to get approved. You can get backlinks also for your blog, resulting in higher search engine ranking.

Here is a link to some famous Article Directories you can use:

http://www.seoresearcher.com/articles-directories-list-alexa-rating-ordered.htm

If you are somewhat experienced in blogging and reading the blogs, you must have seen that many topics like Google Adsense, Entrecard, Affiliate Marketing, Paid to Post etc. are found on almost all Make Money Online blogs. And only a very little information changes between such posts.

So, I am not going to publish posts about the topics that are already there in Blogosphere in massive amount. Rather, I would like to give you links to the posts on other blogs which should be useful to you. If necessary, I will make some notes on such Resources type of posts on my blog.

And yes, this experiment is going to be done due to two fair reasons: First – I can enrich my blog easily by accommodating more and more topics easily. Second – Readers’ time will be saved if they have already come across such topics before. Of course, any personal notes from me they can read quickly.

This doesn’t mean that I am stopping publishing my own posts. As soon as I find a topic which is not very popular but helpful enough, I will definitely post it.

Now, let me begin. I would like to post a resource-post about Paid to Post opportunity for a blogger to make money online. And only one resource is enough for that. Look at below:

http://www.doshdosh.com/a-definitive-list-of-paid-blogging-websites/

Though this is an older post, it lists all popular Paid to Blog programs. You should not consider the popularity of these programs given in that link (due to age of post), but should try all of them.

Let me introduce its working in simple terms, because more details about its mechanism you can read on www.Entrecard.com itself.

So, there are two ways to earn ec (Entrecard) points (and so the money!). First way : You can let other bloggers to advertise on your blog and earn ec points on daily basis (minimum 2 ec/day). The advertising cost for your blog (which is 2ec/day at the start) can be increased if the rate of dropping of card on your blog increases. Don’t panic, the dropping of card is described below.

Dropping of card is the second way to earn ec points. If you are logged in to your Entrecard account, then you will find a “Drop” button on other blogs (which are joined in Entrecard program). Just hit that button and you have dropped your card into that blogger’s Entrecard-inbox. Each drop earns you 1 ec point and the maximum limit is 300 drops per day. Of course, you can drop only 1 card per blog per day. You can browse all blogs joined to Entrecard by going to Campaign page in Entrecard account. So if you have enough time, you can earn daily 300 ec points!

As this post is just an introduction to Entrecard, more posts related to it will be posted soon, which may include my success story in Entrecard!

So, let me first list down the most important plugins for your Wordpress blog. Here is the list:

(1) All in One SEO Pack - This plugin helps you to make your blog easily indexed by major search engines. You can easily manage meta tags, a description of your blog, title format for your posts and many other things.

(2) Google XML Sitemaps - This plugin saves your time in generating a site-map for your blog. Again site-maps help your blog or site to be crawled by search engines easily. And if your are using Google Webmaster service (it’s free ), then you must have your site-map to find out detailed analysis of your blog or site.

(3) Akismet - This plugin is already installed in Wordpress. This plugin fights against spam comments. In their words-“Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” To show off your Akismet stats just put <?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your template.”

(4) WordPress Database Backup - This plugin makes it easier to backup your data. If this data is lost by any means, your blog will lose all postings and comments. So it’s very important to backup your blog’s database. You can automate the backup process at certain time interval using this plugin.

(5) Subscribe Remind - Want your readers to subscribe your feeds? Then remind them by putting a reminder at the end of each post, which is the function of this plugin! You can edit the message shown at the end of each post. The message contains a link to your subscription page.

(6) FeedBurner FeedSmith - This is the plugin who use FeedBurner service for their blog’s feeds (who doesn’t use it?). In their words-“this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.”

This plugin also solves a problem related to Subscribe Remind plugin. If you don’t use FeedSmith, you will have problems concerning your Feed URL, because in the reminder message, your feed URL will be different than what is provided by FeedBurner and that will be ended up in a broken link. By using FeedSmith plugin, that problem vanishes.

(7) WP-ContactForm: Akismet Edition - Be professional on your Contact me page. Don’t put just your email address, but put a contact form using this plugin. And yes, this also provides protection against spam as do the Askimet.

In addition to these, you should also use plugins related to Social Bookmarking. There are many plugins related to this topic, and so I don’t suggest one. You can choose anyone for that which matches your taste. Just Google for that

Hope this plugins will work for you and save your time. If you have time, you can go through a list of 101 Top Wordpress plugins here.

BlogCatalog is like a large social networking site specially created for bloggers. You can find many other blogs belonging to your niche and see their content. You can also contact any blogger there by sending him (or her) private message or a message in his shoutbox. So, you can request a blogger to have a look at your blog and can get some feedback about your blog’s design and content.

There are also many communities on BlogCatalog. Joining communities related to your blog’s niche or related to new bloggers can help you a lot. You can easily get backlinks by posting on such communities. But don’t spam there, let it be clean forever.

BlogCatalog has a search engine too, which really brings appropriate results. You can get another source of traffic from there. And yes, BlogCatalog gives a Rank to the submitted blogs, which is out of 100. Better blogs will have their rank towards 100, and low quality blogs will have it nearer to zero. There is no authority-like option as in Technorati. So, it prevents tricky link exchanges as found in the blogosphere due to Technorati rank.

The best part of BlogCatalog is its helpfulness to the new blogs. In Technorati, your new blog will have no authority and hence the worst rank. In contrast, BlogCatalog doesn’t give a zero rank to new blogs. One another thing is pinging. You don’t need to ping your blog for BlogCatalog. It automatically does it for us, without any errors as found in Technorati.

As you may know Technorati publishes a list of Top 100 blogs. This is really a killing thing for other new but useful blogs. People love to see most popular things and so, the most popular things become more and more popular. If you love to see only popular ones, you can’t get out of it! I am a big fan of Stumbleupon and now, you should be knowing why (and why I don’t like Digg much).

In conclusion, BlogCatalog seems to be more dedicated to bloggers and readers than Technorati. I would like to see your feeling, so comment on!

Firstly, let me mention three essential things you will need for a self-hosted blog.

(1) A domain name, which you can buy at only around 15$/year.

(2) A web hosting service, which will provide services to set up your blog online. The average fees for such services are almost 7 to 9$/month, varying based on monthly bandwidth limit of your blog, disk space etc.

(3) A blogging-platform, which is essentially the software that handles the behavior of your blog. The well-known example is Wordpress, which can be downloaded for free from www.wordpress.org (not www.wordpress.com).

Steps to be taken

In these steps, it is assumed that you are going to install Wordpress in your hosting account.

• Firstly, buy a web hosting account and a domain name of your choice.
• Once you have your domain name and web hosting account, you are ready to install blogging software (in this case, Wordpress) in it.
• There is a very simple method to install the blogging software on your web hosting account. In your Control Panel (or CPanel), look for menus, which provide installation of various scripts. An example of such option is “Elefante Free Scripts”. Using this (or similar one) tool, you can install Wordpress just by some clicks only.

• During installation, you may need to enter account information for the specific blogging software. That is, if you are going to install Wordpress, just create your free account on www.wordpress.com and then provide the account information during installation.
• Also, any blogging software needs to use a database like MySQL. So, if you haven’t created it (which is most likely the case), the installation will ask you to create one. Don’t panic, you have to just give a name to create MySQL database, that’s all!
• One important thing to note: During installation, you will be asked to give a path for installation (just like usual installation on your PC). If you want your site to be a blog only, then give the path like “www.yoursitename.com/”.
• That is all! You have created your self-hosted blog! To verify, open your site and you should see a blog there (of course, without your posts).

How to login to start posting

Now, after setting up your blog, you want to start posting. But where to go for it? For logging in to manage your blog, you have to have Admin URL for your blog. To see it, login to your web hosting account and look at your installed program list.

Wordpress will be there. Now, look at Admin URL for it and note it down for future reference. After opening that URL, you are on the Login Page of your blog. So, login to it and after doing so, there is your Dashboard of Wordpress. Have a look around it carefully to see what you can do with it.

After all, learning is the process of building yourself! And if you really need any further help related to Wordpress, go to the Help page or Help forum to have your question resolved.

Hope, this post will help you in setting up your self-hosted blog. Comments and questions are always welcome!