There are plenty of reasons, but most of them boil down to the fact that blogging is something I have a passion for doing, and not necessarily analyzing ad nauseum.

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.

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

One thing I didn’t have back then: an income to show for my blogging. Naturally, this led to quite a few sighs from my husband when he heard things like “Oh, sorry I didn’t get dinner started yet. There was a breaking news story I wanted to blog about.” Likewise, my mother-in-law would cluck and grumble to herself that I was frittering away my time unproductively but, since she clucks disapprovingly over just about anything I do, I didn’t pay her much attention.

My friends’ incredulity would get to me, though. They simply couldn’t understand why I wanted to spend my time building up backlinks, establishing a solid and loyal readership, and constantly pursuing the day when I’d be able to pay some (if not all) of my bills with my blog(s). “Come lay out by the pool,” they’d urge me in summer. “Come skiing with us,” they’d beckon in colder months. But, although I did take them up on their offers now and again, I maintained a belief that I needed to put in a certain number of hours per day online.

Five years later, that’s paying off. My husband saw it when I announced — a year early — that we’d paid off his car. My mother-in-law sees it (though she pretends not to) now that we can afford to visit her almost half as often as she expects. My friends? Well, so many of them have lost their jobs to outsourcing, layoffs and business closings in the past year. Now they’re coming to realize how much more “secure” my hobby-turned-job is than theirs ever was, and that maybe I wasn’t so foolish for passing by those (expensive) days at the pool or on the slopes.

Which is not to say that any of them actually get the fact that if your name isn’t John Chow or Darren Rouse you aren’t going to be earning Big Bucks while on vacay. (Though, to be fair, both gentlemen put in their dues and sweat-equity, too. I’m just jealous.) If you’re a little guy, or a gal like me or a big (in internet-weight only) gal like Barbara Ling, you’ve still got to put in time at the keyboard. And despite seeing that such time translates into money, friends and family still don’t always get that fact.

This week, for instance, I’ve sold two articles to Pajamas Media, a half-dozen high-paying paid reviews written elsewhere, designed sites for three bloggers, monetized two others as part of my blog-consulting business and made my standard earnings from the paid blogging companies I work with, along with regular AdSense earnings, too. The result: I out-earned my husband. Twice over.

Does that mean he’s been any more understanding when, say, I’ve suggested I’d rather pick up Subway than spend an hour cooking dinner? Or that my son, who has a new basketball and hoop to occupy him while Mommy works on her laptop on the deck, gets it that I can’t stop what I’m doing to hear yet another knock-knock joke? Do friends (who want me to set them up a blog, then design their blog, then teach them how to blog and to monetize their blog… for free) understand when I decline an invitation to the movies or karaoke at the local bar?

No, no they do not.

Fortunately, I’ve worked up a short list of sure-fire ways to circumvent these problems now (well, with everyone but my son — and since I’ve managed to get the others off my back I actually have more time for him as a result).

• Hard evidence: I print the day’s earnings to show my husband the instant he walks in the door. If dinner’s not ready but the bank account’s fatter than when he left that morning he suddenly doesn’t mind that trip to Subway quite so much.

• Calendar it: When I have a deadline for an article at PajamasMedia.com or for a paid entry I put it on the calendar. Not just mine, but the family’s calendar, too. In red letters. Big ones. Seeing those obvious tasks reminds my family that I’m not just sitting around the house eating bon-bons all day (because these days my butt sure couldn’t convince them of that).

• Be inaccessible: Whether its phone calls or email from friends I hardly ever answer it during “working hours” (by which I mean the standard 9 to 5). I’m increasingly adamant about treating my blogging time like a business, so I set up email rules to send most of my friends’ messages to a specific folder that I don’t check at all during my ‘business hours’. I don’t take their calls, either. Sure, I felt bad about that at first then realized that if I called them at their jobs they wouldn’t hesitate to say “I can’t talk now.” I just cut that one particular step out.

• Put your foot down. I have one friend who has actually been blogging for a while herself, too. She’s made noises about wanting to earn an income from blogging, but I’ve yet to see her actually make any legitimate effort to do so. (Though she does complain a lot about how little she actually earns.) She used to call me during the day to talk about how problematic her morning had been, and when she realized I was only half-listening she’d get quite offended. It didn’t matter how many times I told her that I was working, that I had to make the most of the very few hours I actually have available to be online. I finally had to tell her that, in order to avoid it becoming an issue between us, she needed to call me after 5 p.m. Period. No exceptions unless there were police or ambulances involved.

The thing is, when it comes to friends and family seeing us at the computer, they’re used to equating those keyboard hours with wasting time. Try as they might, they just can’t understand that there’s more to blogging than web surfing; that writing can’t be done well with someone else yammering in your ear; or that most entries take four times longer to write than to read. Since we’re just “futzing around”, they reason, a little interruption won’t be a big deal.

But we know better.

That friend of mine who I told not to call me until 5 o’clock because it might interfere with my blogging hours? Yes, she initially took it as hard as you probably imagined. But you know what’s happened since? Her blogging income has doubled now that she’s channeling her own energies in the same path I’d been trying to channel mine. I called her the other morning to congratulate her on that fact. She picked up the phone and said, “Hey, it’s not after five o’clock yet. We can’t talk. I’m making money.”

And you know what? I was thrilled for us both.

Post from: Blogging For The Money

When Friends and Family Don’t Understand Problogging

Although the plug-in isn’t officially supported, I’ve installed it on all of my blogs and have been quite pleased. The plug-in adds a new line to email notifications and to the comment-moderation screen. Both have worked fine in WP 2.5 and 2.5.1, although I don’t know about previous versions.

One advantage of using the plug-in: you can leave the comment body intact. With comment authors using paid links as their URLs as part of a money-making link-building campaign you can keep their supposedly “helpful” comments without worrying their links might be making your blog spammy.

Post from: Blogging For The Money

Clean Up Comment URLs In One Click

That’s right: some people are making money via link-building services using blog comments, and they’re making anywhere from $1 to $15 per link. On your blog. The attraction is obvious: not only do the companies paying for such links get a “do_follow” link, but they get one that’s likely to be permanent.

The downside for bloggers is obvious, too: it might look to human readers like you have a popular blog thanks to the high number of comments your entries receive, but search engines may interpret those subsidized comments as paid entries and penalize you.

Post from: Blogging For The Money

Easy Cash… Or Comment Trash

Today, though, I ran across Microsoft’s list of command-line switches for Outlook and realized I could easily create shortcuts in my Quick Launch bar to accomplish those things with just one click. If you’re using Outlook, too, you’ll find this a surprisingly easy yet helpful little trick.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Right-click in your Quick Launch and select “Open Folder”.

2. Right-click again in the Quick Launch folder and select New -> Shortcut.

3. When prompted for the item location, paste the desired shortcut location.

• To create a new task, copy and paste (without line breaks):
  "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\OUTLOOK.EXE" /c ipm.task /a
• To create a new appointment, copy and paste (without line breaks):
  "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\OUTLOOK.EXE" /c ipm.appointment /a
• To start a new email, copy and paste (without line breaks):
  "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\OUTLOOK.EXE" /c ipm.note /a

4. Name your shortcut and press “Finish”.

5. To change the icon for the a shortcut, right-click on it and select Properties > Change Icon and choose the appropriate one from the list that appears. Then click “Apply”.

That’s all it takes to end the hassle of Alt-Tabbing through programs next time you want to remind yourself to do something or dash off an email asking your spouse to pick up dinner on the way home.

Post from: Blogging For The Money

Making Outlook More Efficient

So I really didn’t expect to learn much from Mark Frauenfelder’s book Rule the Web: How to Do Anything and Everything on the Internet—Better, Faster, Easier. But here it is, just a week after I picked up a copy in the hope of providing my husband with a resource (other than me) to answer his never-ending “How do I…?” questions about using the internet.

Before giving it to him, I figured I’d sit down and browse through a few pages and maybe find one or two tips on things I didn’t know. Then one or two became one or two dozen, and soon I’d dog-eared the book so much that I realized I needed my own copy. So, I kept that one and bought a second one for my husband’s use.

Not long after that, we got a call from my mother-in-law which began with “I’m having problems with IE 7.0. How do I…?” and, while my husband walked her through the explanation, I hopped online and ordered her a copy, too.

Sure, there’s plenty of information that’s going to seem rudimentary to some folks: how to use eBay and Google, how to subscribe to RSS feeds, etc. But there’s also plenty of information that even long-time internet users don’t always know (or might have forgotten). Whether it’s personal productivity or system maintenance, finding new sources for news or safe places to download free software, Fraunfelder’s covered it in simple, straight-forward language that even my mother-in-law can understand.

Which means, if I’m very lucky, she might just stop calling here every two days at dinner time in search of free computer help. At $10.17 for her own copy of Rule the Web, I think that’s worth every penny.

Post from: Blogging For The Money

There’s Always More To Learn About The Web

Well, I’ve got good news for you.

Last week LinkWorth introduced “LinkPost Jobs”, a way for bloggers to take paid posting opportunities without waiting for an advertiser to choose them. Simply log into your LinkWorth account and view the Alerts on the right-hand side of your screen. If there are opportunities available you can click through and take them right away.

Keep in mind that their company’s financial month runs a bit differently from most. Although reports are run on the first day of the month, payout is on the 11th. I’ve noticed that new opportunities tend to come after that date, too, perhaps a sign that advertisers renew their accounts once payments have been issued to bloggers?

Post from: Blogging For The Money

Make More Money With LinkWorth

• How to write attention-getting headlines;

• How to craft descriptions and summaries to draw readers;

• How to write compelling excerpts.

Now there’s even advice on the best and worst times to post entries. (Found via ReadWriteWeb.)

After analyzing 10,000+ entries that became popular on various social bookmarking sites, the best times appear to be Tuesday through Friday between 10am - 2pm PST. The worst times? Late nights and weekends.

So, should you restrict yourself to posting your best efforts during those hours? Not really. Even the study author, Jake Luciani points out that range doesn’t account for the time it took for a post to get to the front page of various social bookmarking sites.

I’d point out, too, that it also depends on your frequency of posting. A good post written late at night and left as the top entry on your blog for an entire day will still catch that 10 am - 2 pm traffic, giving it pretty much the same odds of getting bookmarked… if you have readers who actually do such things.

That’s the ultimate determinant, if you ask me. There are plenty of blogs producing quality, useful content for readers who, for whatever reason, still don’t submit entries to social bookmarking sites. I’m not sure why that is, but it’s a trait I’ve noticed recently… just as I’ve noticed that some readerships bookmark every single entry at other sites, regardless of their general usefulness.

Which is why I’d be interested in study on what prompts people to social bookmark an entry: is it the general usefulness, the originality, the readers’ desire to look like they’ve “discovered” something, or veiled butt-kissing in the hope of getting a return bookmark?

How about you? What makes you Digg, Stumble or bookmark something? Share in the comments.

Post from: Blogging For The Money

Timing Entries For Post Popularity

Speeding up a website takes work but it’s worth it. The hardest part, as Faulkner once said of good writing, is to “kill your darlings”. If you think that lagging javascript or cute little widget that makes your comment section take forever to load isn’t harming your blog, then perhaps you ought to think about all the comments you aren’t getting because of it. Ditto for any social networking widget that regularly causes slow page-load times. (Hint: watch your browser’s status bar to find the culprit easily.)

For a whole host of other ways to speed up your page load times check out this series from DailyBlogTips. It’s a long list — and one I’ll be working through myself — but it’s worth it.

Post from: Blogging For The Money

The Need For Speed