What’s nice about this post is that instead of just focusing on the wealth bit , Matt has included the other two to give a bit balance.

This is a new blog with a lot of promise.

Be sure to pay a visit and subscribe to their feed.

Heres the link: 78 Blogs To Make You Wealthy, Healthy and Happy

It’s easy to make good money on a daily basis taking part in surveys and taking part in offers.

Before I joined I spent quite a bit of time looking to see what other people thought of the program. I
don’t want to waste any of my time on a program which didn’t pay its members or wasn’t going to be around for a long time.

I discovered that they are completely legitimate and pay their members very well.

How does it work?
Well, companies need consumers to review products, services, and websites and are willing to pay money to have them do so. CashCrate gets paid by these advertisers for our participation and they pass 75% of that money back to us. That is how they are able to stay in business and the earnings stay sustainable.

How You Get Paid
There is a minimum pay out of $10. I is very easy it is to reach payout. I made over $12 in the very first few hours after I signed-up. So the $10 payout can easily be reached in less than a day’s worth of participation.

Payments are processed on the 20th of the following month. So all of my May earnings will be sent to me by check on June 20th.

You Can Succeed Without Referrals
I want to stress the fact that you can make great money on CashCrate without ever getting a single referral.
One way to do this is by taking part in the $0.80 daily survey that is always available once every 24 hours. Even just doing that and nothing else will get you a guaranteed $24 extra dollars a month.

You can also make an extra $100-$200 a month just by doing the free offers and trials available in the “complete offers” section.

I hate programs where you get pressured into signing other people up in order to make money and succeed.

However, if you like to share your success and want others to participate along side of you… CashCrate does have an awesome referral system. In fact, it is one of the best I have ever seen!

CashCrate Referral Program
First of all, with CashCrate you are paid for two levels of referrals. The first level being the people that directly sign up under you. The second level is people that sign up under the people that you recruited.

So you can get paid for who ever you get to sign up and who ever they get to sign up.

As soon as you join, you start at the Bronze level. This allows you to earn 20% of
what your 1st level referrals earn and 10% of what your second level referrals
earn. (Don’t worry, your referrals are not getting paid less. This is extra money that you get
paid in addition to what they get paid.)

The referral program tiers work like this:

• Bronze – 0-49 Active Referrals – 20% First Level, 10% Second Level
• Silver – 50+ Active Referrals – 25% First Level, 10% Second Level

You will also get a $3.00 bonus for every active referral from the United States
who gets paid their first $10

I compared this referral program to the other GPT (Get Paid To) sites and believe CashCrate is the highest paying by far.

If you do decide to sign up for CashCrate, I ask that you please use my link.

Who Can Join?
Almost anyone can join. Even people from around the world. Remember though, that people who are from English speaking countries will have more offers and surveys available to them than those from other countries.

This is because advertisers usually want information and participation from people in the countries they sell their products in.

If you are from a non-english speaking country, this may still be an option for you. There have been many successful people from other countries who make money by getting english speaking referrals. So there is still a way to make CashCrate work for you if you are really interested.

Click here to find out more

Surprisingly a number of free sources can bring significant levels of traffic in their own right.

Using lots of free advertising helps to ensure that your website or blog has significant market coverage. This is important to act as a backstop for the times when search engines decide that your site is not for them.

The purpose of this post is to provide a range of free advertising options for you to consider. It will also reference some excellent free reports which cover the topics in some depth.

Where and how not to advertise

• FFA sites
• Porn, Hate or Warez sites
• Sites set-up specifically for link building
• Sites setup specifically for building page rank or SEO.
• Automated Traffic exchanges.

Stick with the tried and true “Good Neighbourhoods”. Ensure that links to your site are from pages related to its topic. Ensure that the anchor text contains the keywords you are trying to target.

“Natural linking” is what search engines like. They expect authority sites to build links slowly (no more than 10 per day is a good rule). Any use of “instant back links” is likely to result in the site in question being removed from search engine listings at least in the short term.

Search engines also expect that there would be a reasonable variance of anchor text. For example if you where targeting “dog collars”, you would have a range of links on the topic i.e. blue dog collars, green dog colors etc.

The best links to get are one way, from a page with a small number of outgoing links and a high page rank. However almost every link has some value & it should be taken unless it will disadvantage your site.

Where it consider advertising

• Free Classified Listings – Craigs list, Freeadvertising form, Fijiji, adland Pro and USFreeads are good examples. You can find a more detailed listing here

• Web Directories – There are a huge number of online directories accepting free submissions. An example is Web Directory1. Generally they require a reciprocal link to get a free listing. These are easy to get and will give good short term gain. However the gain tends to drop off with time as your listing is pushed down by other new submissions. There is an extensive list of free directories at vilesilencer, directoy listing

• RSS Directories – If you site doesn’t have an RSS feed get one. Then submit it to all the RSS directories you can find. These will serve your new material to a huge number of people. there is a list of blog and RSS directories here

• Blog Comments – Placing links on blog comments can give good results. Just be aware that most blogs have “no-follow” turned on their comments. This means that your link will get no “link-juice” but may still be of value from a traffic perspective. A good free tool to use to quickly find blog pages relevant to your subject is CommentHut. There is a paid version which works very well. The free version is still worth the effort download. It will save you a lot of time. A quick way to check for no-follow on links is to download the SEO for Firefox plugin.

• Article Submission – Write a short 500 word article, include the resource box at the bottom with links back to your site. Then submit the article to a good range of article directories. For best results submit a different version of the same article to each directory to avoid duplicate content. You will be rewarded in a couple of ways. Firstly with a bit of short term Page Rank from the directory. Secondly with traffic from the article directory, especially if the article is on a popular topic. Finally there are downstream effects as webmasters download your article and put it on their site. You never know where your article may end up. There is an excellent list of article directories here.

• Social Bookmarking Sites – These sites highlight web content which has been selected and voted popular by its members. A number of them allow you to publish your RSS feed. If your post is viewed as being popular then a significant amount of traffic can be generated to it. A first rate guide to social bookmarking is here

• Traffic Exchanges – These sites will send visitors to your site when you have visited other sites of other members. Generally the traffic doesn’t convert well, but it is instant and a good way to start your site promotion off. A good place to find the highest converting traffic exchanges is here. One traffic exchange with a slightly different model is TrafficSwarm. With this traffic exchange you get to choose the sites you visit by selecting an advertisement placed by the site owner. This does give better targeted traffic than the standard traffic exchange.

• Advertising Bars – There are advertising options which involve you installing an advertising bar on you browser. As you surf, advertising is displayed at the top of your screen. For each ad you see you are allocated points which in turn are able to be exchanged for advertising of your own. Check out Agloco .

• Yahoo & Google Answers and Mylot – These sites can be excellent advertising opportunities. Develop a solid reputation by answering questions fully and with some depth. Where appropriate add links to your site in the resource section. Where you see a pattern of questions in your niche, put up a post about that topic. You can then link to it for later answers. Sometimes the questions and answers achieve good rankings in search engines. Always include links to your sites in your user profile. As you build more authority, other readers will check out the profile and your site.

• Forum Posting – Three good advertising opportunities. Firstly you can generate traffic from the forum by including a link to your site at the bottom of every post. You do this by including it in your forum signature. Secondly some forums are well optimised for search engines and threads are often listed with good rankings. Always include your keywords when initiating threads in forums. Finally put a link to your web page in your forum user profile. As become well known, other forum users will check out your profile and your site. Here is a useful list of forums which have SEO friendly signature links

References:

Social Media Daily

Encyclopedia of Free Online Advertising

This time its 15% on new orders for the balance of the month. Coupon code is: august.

The starter kit at Text Link Ads is also worth checking out if this is your first purchase. For orders over $125, when you enter “starter kit” in the coupon field there is a discount of $100. So that’s $125 of text links for $25. Not a bad deal !

Click this link to find out more

It was created to change and create links in posts.

It has two functions:

• Adds affiliate information to existing links. The affiliate information is added after the links are created. This means the affiliate link is hidden from the reader.
• Converts certain keywords like “Yahoo!” to Yahoo!. The keyword search is case sensitive, and you have to pre-pend http:// to the links.

When adding affiliate information, you need to know the HTML query to add to links. Most sites give you things like affil=username to append to the URL that tells them who referred the visitor.

This is great because it does away with the need for manual affiliate link masking, which can be a slow process when completed by hand.

And its also very easy move where the affiliate link points to. Very useful for experimenting with different offers.

The link to the Link Modder Plugin is here

Second Life is an online “game”. Each person is represented by their avatar (a 2 dimensional moving picture). In second life you can get clothing, land, building, jobs and make money. You interact with other players and can buy and sell possessions. Pretty close to real life.

You’d think this was just a bit of fun but get this, in the last 24 hours US$1.3M had been spent in the game. 1.6 million people had logged in over the last 60 days and the total population is about 8 million people.

There are a few real millionaires in the game. Mostly in property.

The official currency is the Linden Dollar. Approximately 1 US dollar is equivalent to 260 Linden Dollars (LD)

All in all, there is a great little economy flourishing inside this online game.

So how can you make money in second life ?

Here are some of the options:

• You can work for someone. Yes there are real (virtual jobs)
• You can sell products
• Hold Events
• Undertake Training
• Develop and design – property, fashion, buildings, furniture and fittings
• You can also sell real life products in Second Life then deliver them in the real world.

There are as many opportunities for innovation and profit in Second Life as in the Real World. Open a nightclub, sell jewelry, become a land speculator; the choice is yours to make. Thousands of residents are making part or all of their real life income from their Second Life Businesses.

By way of example, here are just a few in-world business occupations which Residents founded and currently run, and make part or all of their real life living from. Try searching for these categories via the in-world Find menu:

• party and wedding planner
• pet manufacturer
• tattooist
• nightclub owner
• automotive manufacturer
• fashion designer
• aerospace engineer
• custom avatar designer
• jewelry maker
• architect
• XML coder
• freelance scripter
• game developer
• fine artist
• machinima set designer
• tour guide
• dancer
• musician
• custom animation creator
• theme park developer
• real estate speculator
• vacation resort owner
• advertiser
• bodyguard
• magazine
• publisher
• private detective
• writer
• gamer
• landscaper
• publicist
• special effects designer
• gunsmith
• hug maker

To provide some idea of the earning potential here are some numbers as reported in second life.

Note the significant increase in users with a positive balance. These have almost doubled in 6 months. Now these balances don’t necessarily represent trading profits since dollars can e sourced from peoples online accounts. However those funds are going to move around the Second Life economy and end up in some ones hands.

To join is free although to own land you need to upgrade to a premium account which is about $10/month – discounted to $72/year if paid up front.

Usually when people join they spend a lot of time getting up to speed and working out the secrets to making money. There is a very good guide to get up and going and in profit from day one. Its called Second Life The Ultimate Guide To Riches and is available by clicking here.

As time has gone by the tactics revealed in original release are not as effective as they once were.

Rob has released an update which contains the latest techniques he is using to make money online with blogs.

The latest book is a good read and provides clear concise instructions on setting up your blog, getting traffic and making money from it.

Here is a selection of chapters:

The 5 Blogging Commandments
The Step By Step Blueprint For Highly Profitable Long Term Niche Blogs

• Market Research & Keyphrase Lists
• Owning Your Blogs – Domains & Hosting
• Making Your Blog
• Content
• Optimizing Your Blog
• Pinging
• Promotion & Backlinks
• Web 2.0 Traffic & Promotion
• Outsourcing & Building Your Blog Empire

Money Squeeze Techniques
Advanced SEO

I read this book in about three quarters of an hour. The writing style is clear an easy to understand. Its a great introduction to blogging for beginners.

If you are considering starting a money making blog, Blogging To The Bank 2 is worth investing in. Simple clear instructions to get you started on the right foot. As a beginner you will easily save yourself the price of the book by following a proven path from day one.

Check out this link for more info.

Most success programs teach that if you set a goal, publically state it, go after it and then tell people about progress along the way, there is a better chance of success.

The first two sites in this list have done just that and as a result are developing a loyal following as their readers get to see the achievements unfold as the months go by.

I subscribe to each of these sites through my rss feed reader. If your interested in making money online I recommend you do to. They each provide a source of fresh ideas and reading their posts will help keep motivation levels high.

Here’s the list, each of these bloggers regularly provides earnings updates:

The Million dollar Experiment Down Under

Rob regularly provides up-dates on his money making strategies and his goals. Rob is a New Zealander, far away from the key US markets and demonstrates that it doesn’t matter where you are, a simple formula and tons of persistance will get you where you want to go.

Mikes Money Making Mission

Mike is based in Cornwall in the UK. His writing style makes it all sound so easy. He has a series of blogs on a range of subjects. He also provides regular updates on his earnings and is making steady progress with monthly income growth.

My Debt Free Goal

Amy Bass is a stay at home mother of four children ages 6, 4, 2 and a two month old. She is trying to earn money online and through side jobs to pay off $72,900 worth of debt by April 2009

Swollen Pickles

At the time of writing a relatively new blog. Swollen Pickles covers a broad range of topics and is always a good read.

John Chow Dot Com

Love him or loath him (I enjoy his style) John Chow is a star blogger. Look at what John does with his blog, his posts and his readers. John is a master marketer who has achieved rapid blogging success. He has aggressively adopted a formula which he just knows will do the business. John also regularly shares financial progress on his blog.

Dosh Dosh List of Blogging Success

Also check out this post at DoshDosh for a list of super successful blog sites.

I’m sure there are many other bloggers who regularly share their earnings. If you are one or know of a site that should be added, please leave the URL in the comments and I’ll have them added.

Check out JohnChow.com, Steve Pavlina, Darren Rowse these are all bloggers with earnings in excess of $10,000 per month. There are many others who are achieving more than $5,000. So yes there is the potential to earn well if you get it right.

Make no mistake blogging is not an easy road to riches. For most its a seriously labor intensive business, especially in the early stages. It will likely take a year or two until any real rewards begin to flow.

Will Blogging Work For You

Here are a few attributes of successful bloggers:

They really enjoy the topic they write about, be it golfing, internet marketing or chinese tea.

They are reasonably bright, with an inquisitive mind and good communication skills.

They have some technical aptitude with have a good grasp of web basics, HTML, SEO, RSS etc

They are good writers. Lets face it, if writing isn’t your thing then look for something better to spend your time on.

They are self starters with a purpose and determination to succeed

They are disciplined, sticking to a posting schedule no mater what else is happening in their life.

Blogging is not an instant road to riches. It takes a lot of hard work, day after day, month after month, to build a worthwhile asset which generates good money on an ongoing basis.

Blogging Platform

For very little money ($10/month) you can run your own blogging platform on a shared hosting account. Having tried a few, I recommend WordPress, primarily because its easy to use, has good SEO out of the box (even better SEO with a few plugins on board) and a huge variety of free templates available.

Another option is Joomla which is also very popular.

Most shared hosting plans have a feature called Fantastico. Fantastico automatically installs WordPress and Joomla for you. Better still, when there is an update Fantastico will handle that for you too.

A lot of people go for the free platforms, Blogger is a good example. These are a zero cost way to get started but they are not nearly as easy to customize as the hosted options.

Choice of Topic or Niche

The very most important criteria for the choice of topic is that you select something you are interested in. Lots of people pick a topic solely because they think it will make them money, then stop blogging way before being successful when they have lost interest. You have a lot more chance of sticking “to the program” if you blog about something you are interested in.

Make a list of all your hobbies, everything your enjoyed doing at school. Use the digital point keyword tool to see how often each topic is searched for. Eliminate anything which has less than 1000 searches a day.

Now go to the Adwords keyword tool and check your topics to make sure there is good demand from advertisers for the topic. You need to ensure that your niche is one which will be profitable. What you are looking for is a range of keywords related to your niche which have bids over $1.

Lastly check out Clickbank, just ensure that there are affiliate programs related to your niche.

If its your first blog, beware of highly competitive niches like ringtones, dating, make money, work at home. Highly competitive niches are very hard to break into.

Content

Content is one, if not the most important aspect of a blog. After all, people arriving at your blog expect to be able to read something interesting, which leaves them more knowledgeable than when they arrived.

Make sure you write articles with the purpose of helping your readers. Posts which are no more that a sales pitch generate way less income than those written to really help the reader.

Make sure that all your posts are original content. Do not copy other posts, do not place articles from article directories in your blog. Legal issues aside, duplicate content is discounted by search engines and readers get turned off by re-hashed material. Write in your own words, from your own perspective, be yourself as it is your uniqueness which will make readers return to read more.

Start by writing 10 articles which will act as the core of your blog. These should be significant articles, more than 500 words based, on key topics related to your blog’s theme.

Once the key articles are written, make a habit of writing one post per day for at least 30 days then after that, at least one post per week. This is will give sustainable but slow growth. Many professional bloggers will write 2 -3 posts per day for the whole year.

Your first target should be to get 1000 posts up as quickly as possible.

How To Get Traffic

With a new blog set yourself a target of getting 100 visitors per day, then 500, then 1,000 and so on. There will be times when you traffic plateaus, this is quite normal just keep adding content, links, submitting articles and buying advertising the traffic will begin to grow again.

One of the advantages of a blog over more traditional sites is that the blog platform usually has a number of solid ways of generating traffic already built into it. The content is regularly updated, something that search engines prefer, they have RSS feeds, they ping other sites which they have linked to etc etc.

However, just having a blog and writing great content won’t drive traffic to your site. You still need to go out and market it.

Paid advertising is an obvious starter. Either using search engine pay per click (like Google Adwords) or by buying links on websites with a similar theme. Both of these are effective. I prefer to use Google Adwords, just because it gives the flexibility of targeting keywords, banners or sites all in one package. Adwords tends to be a bit more expensive than other options but the quality of the traffic is usually pretty good.

Publishing RSS feeds is an excellent marketing tool. They are already built into the major blog platforms. I do recommend the free Feedburner service which makes a single feed available in multiple formats, allows you to add additional features to your feed and provides tracking information about the number of people who subscribe to your feed. As your feed readership grows, it will also act as another revenue stream further down the track when advertising is sold in it.

Blog carnivals are an excellent way of establishing a new blog. They not only have the potential to provide visitors, they also will generate links back to the blog, which in turn will improve search engine rankings.

Article marketing and Press releases are still effective marketing tools. With article marketing you write an article of around 300 words then publish it on an article directory. Submission is free and you are allowed to put a “Bio line” at the bottom which links back to your blog. This generates another back link and with the top article directories having high traffic, if your article is interesting you will generate some traffic back to your blog.

Press releases work similar to article marketing except the writing is usually not so long and in a press release format.

Join as many social networks as possible. For each one, make sure your RSS feed is being displayed and build up a good number of friends. This will increase the readership base of your blog.

Frequency of posting also has an effect on blog traffic. For most blog platforms, when you submit a new post, it pings a whole bunch of feed aggregators, alerts Google and updates all the RSS readers watching the site. When this happens your fresh post goes to the top of pages to be read by your audience. The more times you do this, the more readers will click back to your blog to get more information. A daily posting regime is recommended if you want any significant traffic from your posting frequency.

Making Money With Your Blog

In general, the more targeted traffic you can get to your blog the more money you will make. A blog is a bit like an advertising hoarding. The more eyes that see the advertising space each day, the more the owner can charge to rent the space.

Its a good idea to “claim” your blog at Technorati , to place an Alexa widget on your site and actively work to grow your RSS readers. All of these help increase the perceived value of your site in the eyes of advertisers. The higher you can drive each of these metrics the more you can charge for advertising.

A number of the advertising options below won’t be effective until your blog has been established. Don’t worry about that. The income will flow once you get a decent traffic volume.

Here is a list of money making options for your blog. These have all performed well for me. All of these are free to join.

Google Adsense

One of the easiest ways of making money your blog. Once your blog is older than say 3 months and has a reasonable depth of content apply to join this free program. Adsense provides a range of Ad formats all of which are very simple to implement by including a small piece of code in your HTML. Once installed the ads are served automatically.

Text Link Ads

Once your blog has a page rank of 3 or higher then apply to the Text-Link-Ads program. As the name implies they sell text-links on your site and pay you half of the sales price. This is ongoing income which is independent of the ebb and flow of traffic to your site.

Affiliate Programs

These can be quite lucrative and will potentially bring in more money than the other two options mentioned so far. There are a wide range of affiliate programs available. They work like this. You advertise a product on your site, sending an interested reader to a merchant’s site. When the reader buys the product you get a sales commission. Sales commissions are usually paid monthly.

Affiliate marketing seems to work best when the merchant’s link is included as part of a review or testimonial. Devote a whole post to the merchants product, or a range of products which are similar and have affiliate programs too. The results can be very good.

ReviewMe - Paid Per Post

With this program you are paid to write a review of a particular product or service. Paid posts will pay anything from $20 upwards. The price of the review is dependent upon the traffic and readership of the blog. Some posts are valued at $400 which is good money if you can get it !

The purpose of this post is to provide an over-view of how to make money blogging. I can highly recommend the following to any new blogger:

Read the free report “Blog Profits Blueprint” from Yaro Starak. Yaro is an super successful blogger who offers a mentoring program second to none. The report is free and presents in more depth, a step by step guide for blogging success.

My recommended host is Hostgator. We use currently use three hosts and have used others in the past. In terms of price, performance and most importantly site up-time, Hostgator has always been the best performer. If you choose Hostgator as your host and sign-up through the link provided I will set-up your blog for free.

With the standard WordPress build the comments after each post have an Html tag called “nofollow”. This tells Google not to transfer page rank to the author of the comment.

The feature was originally implemented to stop comment spam. The downside is that the links don’t really “count” for a Google viewpoint so there is less of an incentive for people to stop by and comment.

With good spam tools in place the majority of comment spam is dealt to so there isn’t really a problem with removing the nofollow from comments and allowing the link to count once again.

With WordPress this is very simple. Just install the DoFollow plugin and you are all set.

On our home business ideas blog we have implemented this and the results have been very encouraging.

Having installed the plugin its time to tell the world about it so other blog owners will visit and hopefully leave a comment. The easiest way to do so is to drop by Courtney Tuttle’s D-List and also Nicusor Cheles Personal Blog and let them know you have removed no-follow. They will add you to the list in very short order.

From there it just a matter of enjoying the regular an valuable comments left by your fellow bloggers. Your blog will be much more interesting to your visitors, will be updated much more regularly and you will have a new source of traffic for absolutely no cost.