Unfortunately, most of the free or premium templates that promise they’re “ready out of the box” are cookie cutter templates: install it and your blog will look just like everyone else’s. Sure, if you have some basic skills you can at least swap out the header image, but as far as configuring it to look the way you want? Good luck with that: you’ll spend hours, and chances are it’ll never quite look like what you imagined.

Or, you could sign up with One-Theme.com, a site that offers Wordpress themes based on three basic layouts that can be easily configured to make your blog look the way you want it to look. Choose your layout based on whether you a template for a standard website, a news site, or a regular blog, then select your color scheme and you’re ready to begin configuring your options. Want to run widgets? You can! Need to insert AdSense? No problem!

Best yet, your theme will be XHTML valid — something that even my former paid blog designers didn’t attend to. Let me just tell you, there’s nothing more frustrating than shelling out a few hundred bucks and installing a custom theme only to get one email after another from people who can’t read your site on their browser! XHTML compliance means your blog will display properly in almost every browser, at almost every screen resolution, and that translates into both site accessibility and happy readers.

And, yes, in case you’re curious: I’m planning a redesign of this site soon.

Post from: Blogging For The Money

Spiff Up Your Site

From Blogging for the Money:

• Search engines serving a charitable purpose - Turn your online time into a good deed.

• Cut and Paste Cleanly - Strip formatting from MS Word or other apps so you can paste straight into blog entries.

From Chubby Mommy:

• My a-ha moment about exercise - It doesn’t have to be grueling to do some good.

• When did I become a matron? - Here’s a wedding I won’t be participating in, whenever it happens.

From I Think Therefore I Blog:

• How to freeze summer fruits and vegetables - Grocery stores and farmer’s markets are practically giving away summer’s harvest. Take advantage of the low prices and stock your freezer with savings in the process.

• Five fast ways to cut your grocery bill - Simple little steps to help you save big each month.

• Next weekend it’s cheap to go camping - Plan a trip with the kids to take advantage of free admission to any national park.

• Today’s Deal: Save $99 on a market umbrella! - This end-of-summer clearance is a great buy. I know because I have one!

From Electric Venom:

• Informal straw poll - What the press says about Obama’s appeal doesn’t seem to jive with what blog commenters think.

• Tippling Tuesday: The Drink Your Worries Away Edition - What discretionary spending item could you not live without?

• Word Fugue: The “Do Not Call” Edition - Got a minute? Play my addictive word-association game.

• News Flash: Republicans Aren’t Against Social Assistance - Guess who first introduced VA benefits, a pension for retirees, and Civil Rights laws? You might be surprised at the answer.

Post from: Blogging For The Money

What I’ve Blogged This Week

Now you can, with PureText, a completely free program that I’ve quickly found indispensible. PureText removes font formatting (bold, italics, etc.) along with embedded objects, indenting, bullets and more. What you get is, well, pure text much like you’d get if you pasted into Notepad.exe, copied the result and re-pasted it where you want.

In other words, it saves you time and typing. I’m pretty much in favor of anything that does that!

Post from: Blogging For The Money

Cut And Paste Cleanly

LinkWorth: $637.04. This is slightly down from previous months primarily because I took several days off in August. It’s still one of the easiest forms of my blogging income, however.

PayU2Blog: $130.00. Also slightly down due to my vacation(s), I still consider PU2B to be a mainstay for day-to-day income generation.

Sponsored Reviews: $468.00. I continue to love working with this company since it allows me to bid on reviews that are relevant to my readers while setting my own price.

Text-Link-Ads.com $188.64. What’s not to like about earning money that requires very little work on my part?

Others, including private advertising: $155.55.

Online freelance writing: $850.00. (This income is directly related to having established regular readership at my other blogs where my writing on certain topics served to interest various online magazine editors.)

Total: $2429.23. Yes, that’s about 1/2 of what I’d previously been making but without the stress, worry and struggle of trying to come up with good content despite cruddy opps. As soon as I became more selective about the assignments and paid opportunities I was willing to take on I began blogging more, which led to an increase of traffic and that, in turn, led to an increase in offers from advertisers.

Not bad for doing something I love and would be doing for free anyway!

Post from: Blogging For The Money

Another Profitable Month

How do they work?

You use a charitable search engine just like you’d use Google. Alongside your search results, the engine will display context-related ads. The search engine earns money from those ads and turns around and donates a percentage of it to charity. The precise percentage varies from 30% for some to 100% for others.

Can I pick my charity?

Yes, maybe and no. Some charitable search engines do allow a user to designate a specific charitable purpose. For instance, GoodSearch specifically asks users to enter the charity they want to support and verifies its existence. (There are also easy steps to make GoodSearch your default search engine in IE, Firefox or on your Mac.) Other charitable search engines either rotate donations through their own list of selected charities or ask their user community to select a new charity each month.

What charitable search engines do you recommend?

I’m a big fan of GoodSearch primarily because it’s an attractive interface that returns highly relevant results. Other favorites include:

1. Clicks4Cancer - When I want to shop on the web, this is the place where I start. For every purchase made after following an advertiser link (e.g., Amazon, eBay and iTunes) they donate 70% of their commission to one of their cancer-related charitable organizations. That’s shopping I can feel good about!
2. SearchKindly - Basically a Google interface, SearchKindly donates to charity every single penny generated by ad revenue. Every one. On top of that, they regularly post their earnings and donations status to keep users informed. Charities are selected by user polls.
3. Search and Give - Powered by Microsoft’s Live Search, this site lets registered users select their own charities to support and tracks their donations. Donations are made annually to a user’s selected charity. Every search earns a penny for your cause, which might not sound like much until you think about how many searches the average blogger performs in a year. That can seriously add up!

This is not an exhaustive list, of course, but simply the charitable search engines I use most. Want to find others? Click on one of those links and search for them yourself. You’ll be doing something good for someone while you do.

Post from: Blogging For The Money

Search Engines Serving A Charitable Purpose

But let’s face it, sometimes those comments hit your InBox when you’re just too busy to reply. What then?

Then, my friends, you use Hit Me Later which acts like a snooze button for your InBox. All you have to do is forward the comment to X@hitmelater.com, replacing X with the number of hours — or the day of the week — when you want that comment sent back to you. Voila, it goes away and returns at a time of your choosing.

So let’s say you’re sitting at your computer at 1 o’clock in the afternoon but really prefer to start your mornings around 7 a.m. by replying to commenters while your creative juices awaken? Forward the day’s comments to 18@hitmelater.com and you’ll clean up your InBox for that afternoon while scheduling your replies to suit your morning mail routine. The service is free, there’s no registration required, and both your email address and the original senders remain private.

Gawd, I just lurves the internet.

Post from: Blogging For The Money

A Snooze Button For Your Email

Bloggers using Captchas swear by them as a means of thwarting spam comments, but readers often feel they’re more of a hassle than they’re worth.

Now, all that time and typing is being put to good use thanks to the Recaptcha project. Instead of random words, sites participating in the project are using Captchas featuring words from old manuscripts and scanned archives that were marked as unreadable by scanners. When those words are displayed to a human user, who then types them in, the responses are added to a database, much of which is reviewed by humans to ensure accuracy prior to modifying the scanned archive.

Currently around 40,000 sites have signed up to be Recaptcha partners with over 4 million word responses being logged every day. In the last year alone the project has helped decipher over 400 million words, including digitization of the NY Times archive from 1908.

Suddenly, those little screens don’t seem nearly as annoying, do they?

(Source)

Post from: Blogging For The Money

What’s In A Captcha? Lots, Actually

I am distracted with cutting my toe nails, spending my husband’s money, and just generally being a nuisance to anyone unfortunate to cross my path. My day is passing in a blur from the moment my children manage to unlock my bedroom door and use me as a jumping castle to the point where I am begging my kid to go to sleep or so help me God that kid will be decorating my wall: “Duct Tape Still Life’. I am not complaining though. Life happens.

I won’t promise anything to you but I won’t blog until the next time booze prices go up and I have to get sober. Seriously! Don’t hold your breath though, you’re likely to turn blue.

(And in case you’re wondering, I didn’t write a single word of this entry. The Lazy Bloggers Post Generator, found via Void Where Prohibited, did it all for me. Now if I could only figure out a way to monetize this post.)

Post from: Blogging For The Money

The Lazy Blogger

Hence I’m putting this one on hiatus. I’m not saying that I won’t blog again at some point but, the way I see it, if I’m bored with it then readers must be, too. So find me over at Electric Venom or I Think Therefore I Blog or Chubby Mommy or Queen of Snark, or even at Pajamas Media, where the blogging’s infinitely more fun.

Update 08192008: I’m baaack.

Post from: Blogging For The Money

Thanks For All The Fish!

So let me put it this way: with many of the great companies I recommend (see the link at the top of the page), you’re 100% guaranteed not to make one thin dime if you’re using a free hosting site.

Why? Because you — the blogger — have absolutely no control over the content you put up there. Most free sites prohibit bloggers from using paid links, and there are plenty of stories on the internet about bloggers who’ve learned about this the hard way when their blogs were taken down. Worse yet, free hosts don’t even have to have a valid reason to delete your content: it’s been known to happen for no other reason than because a competitor or malicious person “flagged” a site as offensive. So if you’re serious about making money with your blog then you need your own host. Now.

How do you choose web hosting? There are a number of important factors to consider: including bandwidth, features, reliability, customer service and, of course, price.

1. Bandwidth - Since bandwidth reflects the amount of data transferred, so your needs depend largely on how much traffic your blog has and what kind of data you’re making available. New bloggers, who’ve yet to establish a large audience, obviously don’t need as much bandwidth as a site getting tens of thousands of hits per day. But even a new site can use a lot of bandwidth if it’s crammed with downloadable files, podcasts and bloated images. The general rule of thumb is to find a host that offers smaller bandwidth packages for lower monthly fees to begin with, then upgrade your hosting plan as needed.

2. Features - As the folks at WebHostingBluebook.org explain, it’s a good idea to list out your plans for your site before you start shopping for hosts. Do you intend to run numerous scripts? Will you need a large database? What about forums? Compile the list of your planned (or even hoped-for) features before you begin shopping around for a host to ensure you’ll find one that can meet your future needs, too.

3. Reliability - Anyone who’s been blogging for a while can tell you nightmares about finding their site’s not responding shortly after they’ve been linked by a high-profile blogger. Or having their data lost due to a massive server failure. (All too often bloggers learn the hard way why backing up one’s own data regularly is the most important blog-related task.) But don’t just take the company’s word about their up-time: do some research to find out what others have to say. One good place to start is the web hosting bluebook which rates and reviews in detail the top 10 hosting sites.

4. Customer Service - Although this is usually addressed in company reviews, your own experience is important, too. Any company which takes more than 24 hours to initiate a new account after you’ve signed up is almost guaranteed to take that long when you’re a paying customer having problems. So remember: until your data’s on their server it’s still an easy thing to find a different, more customer-oriented host.

5. Price - Even a quick glance at those hosting reviews shows that prices for basic monthly hosting are all over the board. I’ve seen bloggers moving from free hosting tend to make one of two mistakes. Some go for the company with the cheapest hosting prices only to find themselves dissatisfied a few weeks later when they discover the service isn’t reliable, the server’s speed is slow and their requests for help are never answered. Or they go top-dollar in the belief that their site is going to make it big right away. Personally, I’d recommend a more middle of the road approach: $5 to $6 per month is a fair price for a reliable hosting site with good customer service, plenty of bandwidth and a number of features.

Yes, making the move away from a free hosting company will cost you money in the beginning. But it’s also necessary if you plan to make money in the future. As the saying goes, you’ve got to spend money to make money… but when it comes to hosting fees you don’t necessarily need to spend a lot if you know what you’re looking for to begin with. Good luck!

Post from: Blogging For The Money

How To Find A Good Hosting Company