I’m not going to lie to you. I blog to make money. I’m sure all of you out there have the same intent as me. The question is, how can you make money with your blog? What are the options?

I run 8 different blogs which I would say are all pretty successful. Each blog uses a different combination of income sources. Overall, Google Adsense has been the largest source of income. Here is my list of the best money maker programs that I use. Just keep in mind that each blog different. This is not by any means a definitive list, it’s simply an average of what I’ve seen with my blogs.

1. Google Adsense - The largest money maker I’ve used. What I’ve found is that the type of traffic you generate makes a huge difference in CTR. Organic traffic is golden.

2. Chitika - A real up and comer in terms of money making ability for me. I’ve only used it for 6 months, but at this rate, it has a chance to challenge Adsense for the top honors. It has a nice ability to target ads manually so that you know exactly which ad will appear.

3. Amazon Affiliate - The name alone sells itself. Most people are familiar with the site and feel safe purchasing from them. The Amazon affiliate program doesn’t generate a consistent amount of money, but income spikes can be very substantial.

4. Shopzilla - Very similar to Chitika. Ads can be targeted down to a specific product. Very blog friendly.

5. Private advertisers - Not much made off private advertisers but there was enough to make it worth mentioning.

Hope this list helps anyone out there interested in making some money with their blogs.

What are your sources of revenue? Our readers (myself included) would be interested to know!

I believe comments are one of the main driving forces that made blogging so popular. The ability for the reader to interact with the blog was a huge step in it’s development.

With the many different ways that WordPress allows you to handle comments, how do you like to configure yours?

Do you allow comments? ( I hope so!)
Do you require registration?
Do you require activation?
Do you require moderation?

I obviously allow comments here. I require no registration, activation or moderation on your comments. I like to make it as easy as possible for you to drop a message here. At the same time, this requires me to weed through tons of spam messages a day, but it’s all worth it to me! See how much I love you folks? :)

Let me know what you do!

Before you submit your post to social media sites, get your blog ready. Not only do we want a high hit count, we want a very low bounce rate and high subscriber rate. REPEAT VISITORS! Start with these few simple steps to make your day of fame worth while.

Speed! Make sure your site is fast and ready to handle the load. If your site is too slow, you can almost guarantee they will leave. Is your blog ready to handle 10,000 visitors? I wrote a post about simple things you can do to speed up WordPress. I highly recommend at least installing the WP Super Cache from the article. Do that before you submit it to the social media sites.

Minimize the ads. Too many will deter the visitor and many will ‘Stumble’ onto another blog. With the initial social media burst, you want to work on getting your visitor to subscribe or bookmark your blog. The money making part will come as you build a nice reader base.

Make it easy for them to subscribe. Again, we want repeat visitors from the initial burst. Add subscribe buttons, Digg buttons, bookmark options, link options. Don’t over crowd the page with buttons, but make it easy and accessible. Remind them to Digg your article. Just a little nudge to wake up the visitors who are day dreaming while they browse.

Verify all your links work. Nothing is worse than a dead link on your site. You finally got 10k visitors from Stumbleupon, and you finally got them to browse around your site. Don’t let them hit a bad link and think it’s a dead end. Check them all!

Got more easy tips for the social media onslaught? Share it with us!

Almost every hosting provider out there claims they have 99.9% uptime. That’s a huge promise to claim. There are only 525,600 minutes in a year. If your hosting provider is down for just 9 hours in the year, their 99.9% uptime goes down the drain. Has your provider been down for more than that this past year? I know mine has.

That may not sound like a long time, but if your site gets heavy traffic and those search engines are in the process of crawling your site, then 9 hours can be an eternity. Google may report broken links (not good), and your visitors may think you are not a serious site (not good).

I know we all spend a lot of time on our own sites, looking, checking and proofing the content. But are you on it 24 hours a day to verify that the site is up. What if it goes down without you knowing. You’ll probably never know!

Here’s a few tools to keep your hosting provider in check. They all automatically check your site to make sure it’s up and running, so you don’t have to worry about it.

Host-Tracker - The free version allows you to monitor up tp 2 URLs with 30 minute intervals.

Mon.itor.us - Free website monitoring with stats. For easy website checking, all you need to sign up for is the External Monitoring.

Montastic - A free and simple too to check your site. You really can get it all setup in less than a mintue. Allows for email alerts when your site is down.

Site Uptime - Offers free monitoring of 1 site, which will check your site every 30 minutes. $5 per month gets you up to 3 sites and checks them every 15 minutes.

If you don’t read blog posts from begining to end, and you simply skim through them, then stop here. Just jump down to the page a bit and continue your skimming. You know you were going to do that anyways. I would have done the same thing.

Most people skim through blogs, they don’t really read them. All the hard work you put into your posts will probably go unread by most people. Sorry to break the news. What should you do to make sure the readers and the skimmers leave with your entire message in their brains?

There are a few tips and tricks to make sure skimmers read the real important points of your posts. Most of them tricks; on the eyes. Human eyes get bored easily so they start to look for different things on the page. A whole post of just plain ole text will get skimmed pretty quickly. Adding variations to the text or post will draw the eyes to those areas, and hopefully will get read.

Try these tips in your blog. I’ve has success with them in the past and it’s actually increased my visitor’s average time on site.

Use lists - If you skimmed or read this blog, you probably stopped at this list at some point. Please leave a comment below and let me know how you made it here (reading vs. skimming). Be honest, I’m sure everyone here would be interested in the percentage.

Use Bold, Italics, Underline - Also attention getters in a post. The eye natually pauses and usually reads the sentence that contains the BOLD, Italic or Underline.

Use pictures - We love pictures. So do skimmers. Put a pretty one next to your bullet points and the eyes will follow.

Get to the point within the first 2 sentences - If the first 2 sentences don’t give a good intro to the rest of the paragraph, the skimmer will have jumped to the next paragraph.

Write a killer first sentence - This is the hardest one to do, but if done properly, you may be able to get the skimmer so engaged, that they might actually read your post.

First impressions are so important when it comes to your blog (it’s important in life too, but I know nothing about that topic). So what do you need in your blog to make a great first impression? A badass template, with some killer graphics, awesome pictures, and catchy domain name right… NOPE! Your first impression can begin way before your site is even visited.

Open up Google and perform a search. I typed in “the beatles” and it returned the usual 10 results on the first page. Take a look at the 10 results and tell me what you see first. Ahhhhhh!. Links with the page titles of all 10 sites that are returned! There’s your first impression of the site, and you haven’t even clicked on the link yet. And see how they give you a preview of what to expect when you go to the site? Some titles are better at enticing the reader to come to their site than others. Some are more general and not helpful at all. Make sure your titles are written like a big OPEN sign, telling the reader what you have to offer on the page, and tell them to come on in!

Aside from a first impression, page titles are one of the most important factors when it comes to search engine optimization. Get your keywords in your title because search engines rely heavily on a good title for page ranking. Organic traffic from search engines are some of the best traffic you can get on your site, so get more of it!

With so much weight put on page titles, why would you ignore them? Here are a few guidelines I like to follow when creating my titles.

Take your time thinking of a good title - You spend so much time on your post, don’t let the title be an after thought. You want to make a good impression right? You want to get more hits right? Do your title justice, give it some thought and planning.

Include your keywords - As I mentioned earlier, search engines rely heavily on page titles. Make sure to include some keywords there. It’s valuable real estate for SEO. Don’t waste it.

Describe your post - Don’t leave the reader guessing what to expect when they enter your site.Give them a general idea of what they will be reading. We are too impatient on internet. We want to find what we want, and we want to find it fast. Help the reader figure out if your site is where they want to go and they will thank you with their clicks.

Use something catchy - Try to set yourself apart from the other links on the Google search page. But… don’t use gimmicks to trick them to visit your site. No need to title your site ‘Free Beatles Autographs” when you can’t really offer it for free. That will only annoy the visitor. Needless to say, they won’t stay on your site very long and they will not return.

The debate can go on forever. There are pros and cons to each argument. If your links open in a new window, you risk annoying your visitors enough where they won’t return. If they open in the same window, you risk losing your visitor because they may not be able to find their way back. If you open in a new tab, the visitor may not know about tabs, and may not even find it.

With PressedbyAmbie.com, we have links open only in the same window. No pop-ups, no new tabs. We do have the risk that our visitors might not be able to find their way back to our site. But… we really did not want to risk annoying any of our loyal visitors who already know how to find their way back here. So, if you’re new here, BOOKMARK us now! Then you’ll always be able to find us.

How do you handle links on your site? We’d be interested to know!

I had been meaning to organize my filing drawer for years now. What a mess it has been. Picture a stack of envelopes pushed into a drawer and shaken vigorously.

I finally got my butt up and began the dreaded chore. I started by putting all my bills into a BILLS folder, all my receipts when into a RECEIPTS folder, and all of my contracts went into a CONTRACTS folder. I then tagged each document with a post-it note. Each bill got a post-it with ‘bill’ written on it. Each receipt got a post-it with ‘receipt’ written on it. Once I was done, each document was in a folder and also had a post-it stuck to it. How’s that for organized?

I know what you’re thinking. This guy is nuts and is wasting his time with these silly post-it notes that aren’t very helpful. Well sadly enoough, most people follow this exact silly behavior with their blogs. No, really, they do! WordPress provides Categories and Tags to organized your blogs. Most bloggers don’t understand the intended use of these 2 items enough to use fully harness it’s power. I’m here to help you.

Think of Categories as the manila folders (BILLS, RECEIPTS, TAXES, etc) and think of Tags as the
post-it notes. Put all your bills in the ‘Bills’ folder but put a different tag on the post-it note. Maybe some of the tags will say: ‘Phone’, ‘Water’, ‘Alimony’, etc. Do the same with your blog posts. All your posts should go in a Category, and each post should also be tagged with words that help complement the category name.

Tags are very helpful for a many reasons:

• They help with site navigation and can be used in a very similar style as the common ‘Related Posts’ links you see in blogs.
• When used properly, it can almost replace the Search function on your site.
• They help with SEO, allowing you load additional keywords into your blog. You also get an archive section for your posts organized by tags; again, nice for SEO.

Simple enough? Go through your blog and see how many times you’ve done any of this silliness. I bet you’re guilty of it too.

Now we get to the fun part of this whole blogging thing. Let’s get your WordPress setup so that search engines will have an easy time indexing your site. This is my favorite part of blogging, aside from blogging itself.

Let me start by reminding you that there are so many different ways to accomplish this. This is intended to show you the easy way to get rolling with a WordPress install that search engines will like. You can obviously get obsessed with the whole SEO thing, and do every tip known to man. That’s great, but you’ll also have less time to do more important things, such as BLOG! Don’t forget, this is WordPress, Made Easy…

1. CONTENT! - I’m sure you’ve heard the saying “Content is King”. Well, you better believe it! I cannot stress this point enough. It really should be items #1 thru #9 and the rest fall into item #10. If you only provided good content and skipped the rest of the steps, you’d be better off than only skipping this part. Serious!
2. Page Title - Your page title is one of the most important on-page factors that affect your rank. This is very valuable real estate on your site. Don’t waste it with the default WordPress titling scheme. I use the All-In-One SEO plug in. See our other post on using page titles effectively to land a great first impression and maximize organic traffic.
3. Optimize your Permalinks - Your URL is a nice place to load keywords. Make it readable to search engines. We’ve written a whole post on customizing your permalink structure. Just do it.
4. Optimize Internal Links - In almost every post I write, I look for opportunities to link to other posts in my site. Doing this helps create a flow to your site and helps evenly distribute traffic to your posts. Think of it as detour signs for your site traffic. Help direct your visitors to posts you think are important. Search engines also follow these road signs and index what they find along the way.

Akismet: The best comment spam protection for WordPress. Comes pre-installed with WordPress 2.0 or higher. All you need to do it get an API key and enter it in the plugin. See our article on the Akismet plugin. Must have? YES! Well, you already have it, just activate it.

All-In-One SEO: A very simple plugin that allows you to customize meta tags, page titles, keywords, descriptions and a lot more! Settings can be set globally, and edited per post as well! Must have? YES!

Login Lockdown: Helps to secure your admin page by locking an IP out after X number of failed login attempts. Stop brute for attacks with this nifty plugin. Must have? YES!

Sem-Google-Analytics: If you’re using Google Analytics, this plugin will allow you to very easily enter your Analytics tracking code into your site. Activate the plugin, paste your tracking code, and you’re done! Must have? YES!

WP Super Cache: Speed up your site with this simple to use plugin. Pages get cached into html files for super fast access. Must have? YES!