ulupongdotcom

Payments from Neobux and Palmbux for the 2nd Time

2009-11-22T08:19:00.000-08:00

Just got my 2nd payment from Neobux and Palmbux. They were from last month but I sort of got lazy to post them because of my hectic job offline. Anyways, I'm posting them here to serve as proof that these PTC sites are still running and paying. Happy clicking for those who are still using and earning from them.

technorati tags: ptc, home jobs, home business, make money online

Another Payment Proof from PaidMailz

2009-10-22T06:49:00.000-07:00

I got paid by PaidMailz for the second time.

technorati tags: make money online, ptc, payment proof, home business, home jobs

Make Money with Palmbux - Payment Proof from Palmbux

2009-08-28T08:26:00.000-07:00

I just got paid from Palmbux. They are guaranteed paying PTC program like Neobux. And according to many, they're also one of the few PTC sites that you can rely on in terms of investing your hard earned cash into buying referrals and upgrades. I'm seriously thinking of buying referrals from them next time. Here's the screenshot of my payment proof:

technorati tags: payment proof, ptc, make money online, home jobs, home business, work at home

Helpful Tips on Building a Referral Magnet Website for Your PTCs

2009-08-23T06:01:00.000-07:00

Okay. You’ve already joined all those PTC sites you deemed best paying. I’m not sure if you’ve also invested a lot of money in them too to upgrade and buy referrals. But for one thing, you’re also interested in getting free direct ones which a lot of PTC users have been doing since before. And so to help you out in your affiliate / referral pursuit you’ve decided to make a website / blog where you’ll lodge all of your referral links and banners. Unfortunately, after weeks or so, the site you made doesn’t convert to any referrals at all.

What seems to be the problem you may ask? Your site might not be optimized well enough to perform its intended task which is to get you referrals. Here’s a list to help you troubleshoot the problematic areas in your site for it to start getting you those referrals you badly need.

Site URL.

Although it’s not directly related to how your visitors behave inside your site, it plays an important role in your search engine presence. Choosing the appropriate URL for your site involves using relevant keywords to the topic or niche you’re into. Since you’re promoting PTC sites, you should use keywords relevant to that business (e.g. ptc, clix, bux, make money online, home business, home jobs, etc). The more relevant it is, the more people will find you through search engines when searching for related keywords like ptc or make money online perhaps.

Site Title.

It’s very much the same thing as your site URL. Use a relevant title. It helps your site’s presence in the search engines and the people visiting your site. Imagine someone looking for PTCs to join landing on a site titled “Chocolate Kiss”. The title has nothing to do with PTCs so this particular visitor could just leave immediately the same way he got into your site thinking that maybe it’s a wrong site he got into; unless he has all the time in the world to browse the site.

Site Content.

Here’s one important part you should look carefully into. Your site’s content. First off, it should contain content that’s mostly about PTCs. Don’t post lots of other stuffs that could just distract your visitor’s attention. In the same way, writing too much about other topics will also make your blog less authoritative about PTCs making it difficult to convince your visitors to sign up under you.

Talking about convincing, if you really want referrals for your PTC sites, your site must be able to convince your visitors to join up under you. This is where you need to focus if you really want results from your site. It’s all about capturing your visitor’s attention.

There’s a whole array of techniques site owner’s use to convert simple visits into what they want it to turn into such as subscription, participation, and (the usual) money. In your case you need your visitors to be your potential downline. What technique should you adapt?

Most PTC sites I’ve been into just post their banners across their sites then type huge bold sentences or paragraphs before it saying “trusted and paying, join now”, or “best ptc sites ever”. Well, if there’s one thing I could tell you, they’re really having trouble getting referrals that’s for sure. If there are PTC blogs or sites that make me want to click their PTC banners, it’s those sites that present good information first before asking me to join. I’m not saying truthful information but “good information” as in persuasive information that engages you and leads you to make that decision to join the site.

Most PTC sites I encounter don’t even have good English but they still manage to hook my attention to their PTC banners. That’s because they tell me the benefits that I’ll reap if I join these sites. They give me formulas and computations about how much I would earn if I put this much effort in this PTC site. In short, it’s giving your audience “positive” facts that will hook them more.

Another interesting technique is giving useful information that they could use when they’re already into PTCs. It’s like giving your readers blue prints which they could refer to from time to time to be successful when they’ve decided to join PTCs already. Give them tips, tricks, or updated news about the PTC industry and you’ll surely win them over.

Lastly, here’s an easy one you could use to write a magnetic content. Ever encountered these “Get Rich Quick” sites? Find one that you feel best grabs your attention. Copy their content then do some rewriting to fit your PTC sites in it. Don’t forget to remove their affiliate links, of course. Wallah, instant article!!! Of course you need to rewrite it in a way that it’s not as outrageous and too good to be true as they originally presented it.

Content Keywords.

Keywords, keywords… Put some more into your site’s content. It’s like incorporating those words about PTC into your site’s body. Place PTC relevant keywords in the beginning, middle, and end of your every article but don’t overstuff it. I would suggest using PTC terms and the words ‘PTC’ and ‘paid to click’ when writing your content since they will act as recurring keywords within your content. Always remember that these keywords will help you get more traffic from search engines.

Loading Time.

Your site must load fast enough to avoid having your visitors wait for the rest of eternity. Most of the time, some website owners just dump unnecessary banners, widgets, and java scripts into their site to make it look nice. Unfortunately, all those extra stuff they put in add up to the site’s loading time. The slower your site loads up, the less likely your visitors will stay and read what you have to offer. So, remove all the unnecessary features your site contains especially those that either loads for a long time or those that’s less responsive.

Organized Template.

How many times have you been to a site where you got lost trying to find the information you came for? Unfortunately, this is the case with a lot of websites. The actual content of the site is buried deep under the countless ad banners and widgets. It’s not that much of a problem for web savvy users, but you should always take into account those who aren’t. They could be your potential downline but you’ll lose that opportunity simply because they couldn’t find what they’re looking for.

Organizing your site involves removing the too much clutter found around your content. Place your content where your site’s visitors will immediately see it when your site loads. Additionally, place your site’s navigation where it can easily be seen. I’m always a firm believer that content should always come first before any of the site’s additional features. Always make it a point that your visitors will see first the content you have to offer; and that it’s easy to navigate your site if they wanted more information.

Clean.

Actually, this is optional but it always helps to look professional and presentable. Get a clean professional looking website to give your visitors the impression that the information you provide is worth looking into.

WHAT'S NEXT?

How to Make Money With Paid to Click Sites
How to Find the Best PTC Programs
How to Spot PTC Scams
How to Get Referrals for Your PTC Sites
Make Money with Trusted Paying Paid to Click Sites
Tips on Renting Referrals from PTC Sites

technorati tags: ptc, make money online, home jobs, home business

Payment Proof From Donkey Mails

2009-08-09T07:05:00.000-07:00

Here's another dollar from Donkey Mails. It ain't big but I'm happy that they're paying which means that I can go ahead with investing my earned cents into their site. Donkey Mails don't earn you much. The highest you'll get for every click would be around $0.001 while it's $0.0025 for every mail you read. If you're only into clicking and viewing ads, you'll only get 5 cents max per your daily activity. But if you don't mind getting bombarded by tons of spam emails you can opt for their paid to sign up programs which could make you a rough 1 dollar a day (you could earn bigger but most big offers require you to shell out some money too).

But what's good about Donkey Mails is that they offer low cost advertising. So if you're after that much needed free direct referrals, you can advertise your list of PTC sites or referral banners in their site. Here's my payment proof from them by the way:

technorati tags: ptc, paid to click, make money online, home jobs, home business, donkey mails

Making Money from Paidmailz and Neobux - My First Payment Proofs

2009-08-05T23:06:00.000-07:00

Well, it took some time before I reached the minimum cashout from Paidmailz and Neobux; and the good news is they do pay. My other PTCs are also reaching their minimum payouts too. I've been thinking of re-investing my earnings inside the PTCs instead of cashing it out but I need to be sure first if they pay before I invest any money in them. So it's going to be cashout first and then invest. Plus, I also have to show you guys that I'm also making money from these programs too :)

Paid Mailz

Neobux

technorati tags: ptc, paid to click, payment proof, make money online,

Tips on Renting Referrals from PTC Sites

2009-07-30T06:29:00.000-07:00

In the world of making money from PTCs, it’s a known fact that you won’t be making any big amount in a short period of time without any referrals under you.

Generally, there are two types of referrals. The first one is a referral that you acquire through your referral links and banners, otherwise called as direct referral. In a real world, there are plenty of them. If you are good at spreading your referral links and banners and convincing people, you’ll get lots of direct referrals in no time. Unfortunately, getting direct referrals is not an easy task for most.

The second one is called rented referral. They are the easiest referrals one could make, provided that you have money to spend. That’s because rented referrals can be acquired for a price. Most PTC sites get unreferred members (those that didn’t register under anyone). These members are sold or rented by PTCs in packs for a price. When bought / rented, they will earn for you with the clicks they make for 30 days. After that, they expire. You can either pay again to renew your referrals service so they’ll continue earning for you in the next 30, 60, or 90 days depending on the renewal periods available from your PTC. A referral for rent generally cost around 30 cents or less for one month (prices may be higher in some PTC sites that I haven’t joined yet, I’m not sure).

Although renting referrals is an easy way to get referrals working for you, it requires a bit of management and math to really profit from them. That’s because there are times when people purchase referrals and end up not getting the money they spent back even after the referrals expired. In effect, they are spending more than what they earn. If this is your case, better rethink your referral renting practice.

Here are some useful tips which you could use when renting referrals to avoid wasting money and start profiting from it:

1. As a rule of thumb, many high-earning PTC users don’t invest anything from their pockets when it comes to PTCs. They’d rather earn first what they need to invest in the site than spend their own cash and go scratching their heads when the site goes haywire the next day. Start from scratch. Then start spending once you’ve acquired the amount necessary to buy the smallest pack of referrals. It might be a slow start but you can brag about the fact that you started from scratch and made it big in a PTC site without investing any money except hard work and your time.

2. Rent referrals only from trusted sites. It’s a sad fact that there are PTC sites that sell bots instead of real people as referrals. If this happens, the bot will click minimally or stop altogether. Before doing any referral buying, make sure that the site can be trusted in terms of renting referrals. Neobux and Palmbux are proven PTCs that sell real members as referrals instead of bots.

3. You must be able to recycle your referrals. Recycling means replacing a referral for a new one, especially if it’s underperforming. Imagine buying 50 referrals and then having only 20 0r 10 of them clicking while the rest barely clicks at all. Why pay for the rest of them when they’re not doing you any good? If there’s no recycling of referrals available for you to do manually, better rethink buying referrals. It’ll be just a waste of money.

4. Once you’ve rented referrals already, don’t cashout all your funds when you reach the minimum payout. It’s best to save those funds for managing and maintaining your referrals. If you always leave your funds empty, next thing you know you’re out of referrals as you can’t renew nor buy new ones because you don’t have funds anymore.

5. Manage your referrals regularly. Have time to look at your rented referrals. Recycle the underperformers and keep the ones that regularly make you money. Recycling, by the way, costs also so if you’re out of funds because of cashing out all of it too early, you’ll be stuck with your underperforming referral until they expire. Recycling underperformers might cost you but it will only be a minimal amount which you could earn back if you get a replacement referral that clicks more ads. Use common sense when recycling underperformers. You might have a referral that used to click the maximum number of ads then suddenly stops clicking for three days. Don’t recycle them immediately just because of this. They could be on a vacation or having some momentary trouble and then return to their usual clicking later on. Always think that it’s hard to come by referrals that religiously click all the time.

6. Always make sure to renew your referrals that perform better for another month or two. Like I said earlier, it’s hard to come by good clickers especially during these times when rentable referrals get sold out fast in just a few minutes. So always make sure that they stay with you for a long time.

7. Save up for buying more referrals. This is to make more bucks faster.

8. Always click your ads. Don’t miss it. You’ll be wasting potential earnings if you miss out even a day.

9. If you can finally afford one, upgrade your account to get more out of your referrals and personal clicks.

10. Don’t forget to do some math all the time. Always make sure that you get back the amount you spent for your referrals and make profit also. Always remember that you need to grow in terms of earnings and not just merely survive inside any PTC program.

WHAT'S NEXT?

How to Make Money With Paid to Click Sites
How to Find the Best PTC Programs
How to Spot PTC Scams
How to Get Referrals for Your PTC Sites
Make Money with Trusted Paying Paid to Click Sites
Helpful Tips on Building a Referral Magnet Website for Your PTCs

technorati tags: referral, PTC, paid to click, home jobs, home business, make money online

Make Money with Trusted Paying Paid to Click Sites

2009-07-18T06:05:00.000-07:00

If you’re still looking for good paying PTC sites to join, here’s a list of PTCs that I’m currently using, they’re still trusted and paying for now but things always change. Anyways, I’ll still be updating this list in case things get worse. I hope my list and the corresponding details attached with each PTC will help you in deciding which sites to join, Good luck!!!

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Available ads: 4 to 5
Per Click: $0.01
Referral: $0.005 (standard) $0.01 (premium)
Minimum Cashout: $2 first until you reach $10
Payouts: Instant
Payment Processors: Paypal, Alertpay
Other info: Trusted and has been in the industry for a long time
Payment Proof1, Payment Proof2

Available ads: 5 to 7
Per Click: $0.001 - $0.02
Referral: $0.001 - $0.01
Minimum Cashout: $2 first until you reach $8
Payouts: Instant
Payment Processors: Paypal, Alertpay
Payment Proof1, Payment Proof2

Available ads: 4
Per Click: $0.0025 - $0.02
Referral: 10% referral earnings
Minimum Cashout: $1
Payouts: 30 days
Payment Processors: Paypal
Other info: Offers paid to read emails, earn 4 cents from their "daily clicks" program
Payment Proof1, Payment Proof2

Available ads: 8 and up
Per Click: $0.0025 - $0.01
Referral: 25% - 75% referral earnings
Minimum Cashout: $5
Payouts: 1st and 15th of a month
Payment Processors: Paypal, Alertpay
Other Info: Offers paid to read, paid emails, and paid to signup

Available ads: 5 to 10
Per Click: $0.01 - $0.015
Referral: $0.005 - $0.01
Minimum Cashout: $9
Payouts: 15 business days
Payment Processors: Paypal, Alertpay

Available ads: 10 to 15
Per Click: $0.005 - $0.01
Referral: $0.0025 - $0.005
Minimum Cashout: $7.99
Payouts: 45 business days
Payment Processors: Paypal, Alertpay

OTHER PAYING PTC SITES

Available ads: 4 to 5
Per Click: $0.005 - $0.01
Referral: $0.0005 - $0.001
Minimum Cashout: $7(standard) $5(upgraded)
Payouts: 30 days
Payment Processors: Paypal, Alertpay, Liberty Reserve
Other Info: 5 cent sign-up bonus

Available ads: 7 to 8
Per Click: $0.005 - $0.015
Referral: $0.005 - $0.015
Minimum Cashout: $4
Payouts: 1 to 10 days
Payment Processors: Paypal, Alertpay, Perfect Money, Liberty Reserve

Available ads: 5 to 10
Per Click: $0.0002 - $0.02
Referral: 30% referral earnings
Minimum Cashout: $1
Payouts: 2 weeks
Payment Processors: Paypal

Available ads: lots of ads
Per Click: $0.0001 - $0.01
Referral: 50% - 80% referral earnings
Minimum Cashout: $2
Payouts: 30 days
Payment Processors: Paypal, Alertpay
Other Info: Offers paid to surf, paid to read, paid emails, and paid to promote

Available ads: 15 and up
Per Click: $0.0001 - $0.005
Referral: 40% referral earnings
Minimum Cashout: $5.5
Payouts: 24 hours - 14 business days
Payment Processors: Paypal, Alertpay, Moneybookers
Other Info: Offers paid to click, read and sign up

Available ads: 10 and up
Per Click: $0.0001 - $0.01
Referral: 50% referral earnings
Minimum Cashout: $5
Payouts: Instant
Payment Processors: Paypal, Alertpay

Available ads: 3 to 4
Per Click: $0.01
Referral: $0.05
Minimum Cashout: $2 until you reach $10
Payouts: 72 hours to 7 business days
Payment Processors: Alertpay

Available ads: lots of ads
Per Click: $0.0001 - $0.01
Referral: 5% referral earnings
Minimum Cashout: no minimum (e-gold) $1 (other payment modes)
Payouts: 2 weeks
Payment Processors: Paypal, Alertpay, Liberty Reserve, Perfect Money, E-gold
Other Info: Offers many earning oppurtunities like paid to read and paid to signup
Payment Proof1

Available ads: 4 (Paid to Click), 2 (Paid to Read)
Per Click: $0.005, $0.01 - $0.06 (Paid to Read)
Referral: 20% referral earnings
Minimum Cashout: $2
Payment Processors: Paypal, Alertpay
Other Info: Offers many earning oppurtunities like paid to read, paid to click, paid to write, and paid to play

The PTC sites you see below are either subject to further testing or are simply very slow earners that I don’t bother giving any details at the moment but they are surely not scams yet.

This PTC list can change anytime depending on the sites’ performance. If they end up as scam, you won’t see them here anymore.

WHAT'S NEXT?

How to Make Money With Paid to Click Sites
How to Find the Best PTC Programs
How to Spot PTC Scams
How to Get Referrals for Your PTC Sites
Tips on Renting Referrals from PTC Sites
Helpful Tips on Building a Referral Magnet Website for Your PTCs

technorati tags: make money online, home jobs, home business, ptc, paid to click, trusted, paying

How to Get Referrals for Your PTC Sites

2009-07-11T05:24:00.000-07:00

The quickest way to make money from PTC programs is to have a bundle of quality referrals. In fact, most of your earnings will come from your referrals. What do we mean by quality referrals? They are your referrals who always click their ads. Referrals are also human, and human can be lazy sometimes. If they don’t click you can’t earn from them, as simple as that.

As easy as it may sound, it is one of the biggest challenge for most PTC users especially for newbies. Looking for referrals requires a lot of effort; but once you’ve done it correctly, all your hard work will payback as your earnings will increase when your downline starts building.

There are many ways to build a huge referral base; but you have to be patient, you have to be honest, and you have to believe in the program you're inviting others to join. Always make sure that you’re not telling them to join scam sites. In a way, credibility also helps make or break your efforts to get referrals.

Here are some popular and effective ways which you could use to get referrals:

1) Make a website or blog about PTC.

This is one of the most challenging but exceptionally reliable means of acquiring referrals. Write an article about your experiences with PTCs, your recommendations, or some tips that you could share to them. Then, use this opportunity to place your referral links or banners in the website you made. It works well because you only have to write it once but people looking for ways to earn online will see it again and again.

There are a lot of free blog or website platforms out there that are easy to setup which you could use to achieve this. You could start a blogspot blog (or maybe wordpress) like this one, start making squidoo lens, or maybe write for hubpages.

Making websites is challenging because often times you have to sell your ideas to your audience or visitors in an instant to get them into action. You have to be able to capture their attention and give them the information that they need. One helpful tip that I could share to you in this regard is to make catchy titles. “Lists” and “how to” titles are some of the best examples. If you want to learn more, try my article about writing a great blog post.

The more informative and convincing your blog / website is, the more probability of it generating referrals for you. Be sure to research and use keywords to help your search engine presence.

2) Purchase / rent referrals.

Purchasing un-referred members from PTC sites is a common practice. There are many PTC members who either did not sign up under anyone, or their referrer closed their account. These members then go on sale. You can buy or rent them for a price, usually ranging from $0.30-$2 per referral. These referrals usually expire after a month. After that, either you renew your rent so you could earn from them for another month; or they go on sale again. In most cases, you will only get members that have been active recently.

This method of gaining referrals is the easiest. If you have the capital, you can gain a lot of referrals in a short time. There is huge earning potential. As your downline grows, your earnings grow rapidly.

There is only one condition. Most sites will not guarantee that the members you buy will be active after you purchase them. You may pay for 50 referrals only to see a week later that 10 of them rarely or never click. So, basically this is an "at your own risk" method of getting referrals.

Another important note: You should not purchase referrals from a site that you do not completely trust. There is word spreading around the PTC community that some scam sites are selling bots (automated clickers) as referrals. If this happens, the bot will either click minimally or stop altogether. You should always be careful when investing your own money in a PTC site.

Also, you should do the math. When you purchase referrals, you should be able to make your money back before your referrals expire. Take into account how much you make off of referrals as well as how many ads the site has each day.

3) Be active in forums.

There are some forums about making money on the internet where you can share your knowledge and ideas about making money online through PTCs. Be active, involved and interested. Share your opportunity when appropriate and invite people to PM or email you for the link and more information. If you could offer them great help, they will trust you and the site you're recommending more.

You can also get direct referrals in other forums by editing your signature. If the forum rules allow, you can add a banner or a referral link about the PTC sites you are in on your signature and then every time you post a new message, everyone will see your links.

4) Participate in Referral Exchanges.

Referral exchanges occur in forums where you can trade referrals. What this means is that someone will sign up as your referral for a site you belong to if you sign up for one of theirs. For example, if you want to get referral for PalmBux, then you have to start a new thread in a forum like "I need Referral for PalmBux". Any one who hasn’t joined PalmBux yet, will reply to your thread. In exchange for his / her participation, he / she will provide link of his / her PTC site, which you should join also.

This method works very well because chances are; you will be getting a very active referral to make you money. The reason is because that person wants you to be active in their program, so they should be active in yours also. As long as you stay active they will too.

The drawback to this method is that you will probably want to set a limit to the number of sites you will join. You don't want to sign up for so many sites that you cannot stay active in all of them. So, in this way, there is a limit to how often you can do this.

There are a lot of forums about GPTs (Get Paid To) or PTCs where you can exchange links with members. You can start on these forums:

www.ptctalk.com
www.talkptc.com
www.getpaidforum.com
www.gptboycott.com
www.ptcdatabase.com

5) Join Traffic Exchange Sites and Downline Builder Sites.

Actually, I haven’t tried these personally but I’m getting a lot of buzz about these in PTC communities. The idea behind traffic exchange sites is to surf other people’s sites to earn credits which you’ll use to advertise your site for other people to surf and earn credits as well. In short, you get people to view your site, or referral link, in exchange for viewing their site or referral links too. “I see yours, you see mine”; get the idea?

I don’t think spending your hard earned credits on advertising your referral link or page for other people to surf is a good idea to gain referrals. You’ll just be wasting time as more people will just view your ad then jump to the next ad since they’re only after earning credits to get their own agendas pushed through using traffic.

The only way I see this method working is for you to build a page where you could advertise or sell your referral link or links much better than just showing the signup page for your PTC. As you will see when you start surfing, you only have a brief moment to capture the viewers’ attention and get them to visit your site and sign up. If you don't, they will surf right past your page. So, you need a page that will load fast and get the surfer to click. If you’ve made a blog or website about PTCs already; maybe you can use it instead of your individual referral links.

Regarding downline builders, it also works based on credit system. You earn credits through clicking or signing up programs, which you’ll spend on either getting others to view your program (through clicking), or getting others sign-up to your program. I believe you earn more from sign-ups as compared to clicks. The same goes for making people sign-up under you which will cost more as compared to just having them view your stuff.

In both methods, there’s a great chance that you’ll be acquiring lots of referrals. The only problem is there’s more potential for them to be inactive simply because they became a referral as a cost or side effect of their quest to achieve something else and not as their main goal or as a means to achieve their end.

6) Advertise on PTC sites.

It might not be new to you that most of PTC sites’ advertisers are their members as well. How many times have you seen PTC sites and their login pages whenever you click ads in one of your PTCs? These are usually the handwork of PTC members who wish to get referrals for their PTC site and rarely from the owner of the PTC site itself. Guess what? You can also use this method to advertise your stuff. Instead of cashing out your earnings, you can spend it on advertising instead.

This can be an effective tool, especially for new PTC sites. If you are using an old PTC site to advertise another old PTC site, everyone who clicks would most likely already be a member of that site. However, if you advertise a hot new PTC with few members, you can really benefit from this method.

Additionally, you could use the same method as the one stated in traffic exchange sites. Advertise your “highly sellable” page filled with your PTC referral links, or maybe your own blog or website about PTCs that also contains your referral links.

7) Tell your family and friends.

Most people don't think of this even though it’s so obvious. Chances are, they do not know about it. They may or may not want to participate, but it can't hurt to ask. Just make sure you don't exaggerate. Just tell it as it is: “they could earn extra income for very little effort”.

You can also invite your online friends in social networks to join, just don’t act too spammy or they might remove you from their friends list; or worst your account might get banned. Create MySpace, Facebook and Twitter pages with your referral links and banners in them. Be sure to add personality and content to your pages in order to keep visitors there longer. Once your pages are complete, link your friends and family to them to get the word spreading started.

The methods above are a guide for you on how to start getting those referrals. Though building your referral may take some time, rest assured using these methods will give you new sign-ups ready to pour in a lot of money. I am sure there are a lot of other ways to increase your downlines on any Paid-to-Click (PTC) programs. If you have other tips you use and want to share, just post a comment!

WHAT'S NEXT?

How to Make Money With Paid to Click Sites
How to Find the Best PTC Programs
How to Spot PTC Scams
Recommended PTC Sites
Tips on Renting Referrals from PTC Sites
Helpful Tips on Building a Referral Magnet Website for Your PTCs

technorati tags: make money online, home jobs, home business, paid to click, ptc

How to Spot PTC Scams

2009-07-04T22:54:00.000-07:00

Due to the roaring success of PTC programs, fraudulent PTC sites which are run by scamming people populate the internet. According to some, 99% of the PTC industry is a scam. I’d say that’s way too many. We can’t be completely sure how many of these programs are scams, but for someone to exaggerate it in such proportions is reason enough that scams are flagrant in the PTC business.

If there’s one thing for sure, PTC programs don’t last forever. Most of them last only a few months. They appear legit in the beginning then end up scamming their members when they disappear all of a sudden. They disappear because of two reasons: they were really setup to scam people; or the site admin can’t maintain the site anymore. Hence, knowing when a PTC site will eventually disappear is a valuable skill a PTC user should acquire.

How then can you avoid being scammed? Here is a list which could help you spot the most likely candidates of turning into scam.

1) First things first. Like what I’ve said in my previous article about how to find the best paid to click programs, check if the site is in any scam list. There are people who are dedicated on tracking these scamming sites and they make lists and PTC updates to warn people about the scams. For starters, google something like ptc scams or ptc scam list to find them. You could also check out GPT boycott and scam.com for the same matter. Check PTC forums. No, not those within the PTC itself, I mean those forums dedicated to talking about PTCs. Take PTCTalk and TalkPTC for example. They’re oozing with the latest about PTCs and their owners.

2) Joining PTC programs should be free. If it requires a fee to join it’s definitely a scam.

3) Check out the pay rates of the company. Legitimate sites typically pay $0.01 or $0.02 for a click. If the company advertises extravagant rates such as $1 to $10 per click, it is 100% scam.

4) Advertising rates must give justice to the rate per click. If the advertising price is too low in contrast to the value of your click, the site is not sustainable and will eventually have payment delays later on.

5) Verify the payout limit of the site. An ideal company should have a payout limit of $10 or less. Bigger payout limits mean longer clicking time for you before you could cash out. Most scammers use bigger payout limits to provide them ample time to collect more souls to fool and prepare for their escape plan.

6) Check what options the company provides for payouts. The usual ones are payment processors like Paypal and Alertpay. Try to avoid the cheques because you can never be too sure if it will come or not. You only have their words as guarantee. Also, check if the site is Paypal verified. Any site which doesn't pass the tough guidelines of Paypal has always the risk of turning scam.

7) When do you get paid? Although there are exceptions, when it’s more than 30 days, it could turn out a scam. Reason for this is that they can’t afford to pay you instantly so they hold your payment request until they accumulate the amount from advertisers or from their own members. When there are constant delays, it just means that the site is either running into money problems (which could just disappear all of a sudden) or is simply a scam. Either way, you’ll still end up losing your end of the bargain.

8) They must have a forum or a support contact info. Make sure that the company has a dedicated helpline that responds to your queries all the time. If they don’t have one, it’s a scam. If they don’t reply to your queries, it’s also a scam.

9) A site must have its FAQ and terms of service at least. No FAQ or TOS means scam. Don’t forget to read their TOS also. Sometimes, scam sites make loopholes in their rules and guidelines to fool you better. Some sites pay their upgraded members only, others don’t pay some countries, while others use this “profit sharing model” where the earnings you incurred is only a representation and your actual earnings is much smaller. Stay away from sites with weird and tricky rules.

10) Check whether the company is properly registered. Use domain look up services in the net. First, take a look at whois information. There you will see the name, e-mail and other information about the administrator. A PTC that uses PrivacyProtect.org or somehow hides info cannot be trusted. Take the name and do a search in forums for a good or bad reference. To find whois info, go to whois.domaintools.com and paste the name of the site.

11) Site that goes on and off and often have maintenance issues can be suspected as scam.

12) Never trust a site that runs under a free domain or a sub domain or free host. No money to pay host equals no money to pay you. Generally they are free for one or three months, so the PTC disappears after this time.

13) Generally, PTC sites with referral earnings equal to or below 50% will last longer. Sites that offer more or even 100% earnings from your referral clicks often end up bankrupt after a few months. There are exceptions of course but always be careful with sites like these as they might just disappear anytime.

14) They should not run the “admin sponsored” or “self promotion” ads forever. A site can survive only if they get external advertisers. If a PTC is always running more admin sponsored ads against external advertisers, it’s always a sign that they might close anytime due to lack of incoming revenue from external source.

WHAT'S NEXT?

How to Make Money With Paid to Click Sites
How to Find the Best PTC Programs
How to Get Referrals for Your PTC Sites
Recommended PTC Sites
Tips on Renting Referrals from PTC Sites
Helpful Tips on Building a Referral Magnet Website for Your PTCs

technorati tags: make money online, home jobs, home business, paid to click, ptc, scam

How to Find the Best PTC Programs –Tips on Looking for Profitable PTCs

2009-06-28T08:07:00.000-07:00

Spotting the best PTC sites isn't hard if you know what to look for. Let me start off by saying that even the once best PTC site can start having trouble. Some of them can become scams over night and some can just run out of money. So in the PTC world you must always be on your toes and constantly be on the look out for signs that your PTC site is going through hard times. Make sure you never spend too much money in any one site. Trust me when I say; even if a site looks like it will always be around, don't go spending too much at once. Some people sign-up to a PTC site and start upgrading their membership, buying tons of referrals, and changing all their referral strategies to get more out of their new site in an instant. Before they knew it, poof, the site’s nowhere to be found along with their cash.

This isn't the way to go. There’s such a strategy called “testing the water”. Always give it some time and earn a little before you spend too much time or money. Remember, it has to stick around long enough for you to get your money back.

How then do you find a profitable PTC site?

Simply Googling for best PTC sites and settling for the first or so results won’t do you any good. That’s because there’s as many scam PTC sites as there are scamming people who’re only into creating web pages like these to get referrals and nothing more. They write a few lines about how great they’re doing in PTCs and then paste all their referral banners afterwards. Believing them immediately would most likely get you scammed in an instant.

On the same note, there are of course legitimate and reliable PTCs out there but their profitability are simply subject to your demographics, and membership (standard or upgraded). In short, the amount of money you’ll get from them in exchange for your effort is still in question. They might prove profitable for users coming from the west (Europe, North America), but for the others it could prove otherwise.

Now, here are THIRTEEN tips that I’ve mustered from reading a lot of PTC related articles and my own experience on how to spot PTC sites that could reward you better for your clicking efforts.

1) Find a PTC site. It’s always the first step. Remember the Googling for best PTC sites earlier? You can use it but never join up instantly unless you’ve read and followed the rest of these tips.

2) How does the site look? Most of the time, it takes effort and, sometimes, money to come up with a good looking and user friendly site. The more presentable and well laid out a site is, the more its owners invested their effort in it; meaning they’ll more likely stay for a longer time to recover their initial investment and to profit from it. If it looks like a piece of shit and they make it difficult for you to navigate their site; plus it always go haywire when a lot of users flood it, that site must’ve cost like dog shit too. The owners certainly don’t care that much about the site to address its short comings therefore they could just runaway as easily as they’ve setup the site.

3) Verify. Google keywords like best ptc sites, legit ptc, high paying ptc etc. Look at the sites from the results and check if the site you’ve chosen were also on their list. Although these guys who made these lists of candidate PTCs are probably scammers as well, they would never pay any amount of shit to a site that looks and feels scammy at the beginning right? What’s the use of their referral banners if they wouldn’t earn from the referrals they recruit? Think about it.

4) Check if they’re on the scam list. Visit scam.com or GPT Boycott to see if they’re on the watch list. Try Googling for keywords like ptc scam, ptc scam list, gpt scam etc then check if your site at hand appears a lot of times in the scam lists. You could also try searching for the site name + scam and see if there are people who are angry enough to accuse them of being scammers. It’s always best to hear horror stories from other people to know what you’ll be dealing with if you decide to signup. But always evaluate the horror stories if they are valid enough to be called an actual scamming. Alternatively, you can do a whois look up of the PTC site’s domain name, if you know how. I’ve heard a lot of scammer trackers use this to bust a scammer who’s planning to scam once again. Unfortunately, I can’t provide you with any useful “how to” about it for the moment.

5) Check what they have to offer. How much is your click worth? How many ads are there waiting for you? Do they have referral system? Do you earn from your referral’s clicks too? What are the other earning opportunities in there for you besides clicking ads? Usually you can find this information on the front page to attract more members. If they’re hiding it, then it must be not worth showing at all. If you can’t find any of these info in their site, maybe they don’t want you in their program, LOL. Just leave.

6) No referral system means, you won’t be able to earn big time from the site. Check how much you can earn from your referrals. Some PTCs pay you beyond your first level referral, that’s “A” okay. See how much you’ll earn from your referrals clicks. Less than 50 percent will earn you slow but experienced PTC users all agree that the PTC program will more likely last longer.

7) Most PTC programs today offer other means of income besides paid to click. There are paid to sign up, paid to read, paid to surf, and a lot of jackpots and lottery contests. Personally, I don’t spend much time in the others except for paid to read and paid to click but more features means more income opportunity. Just avoid too much of paid to signup. I’m currently suffering from excessive spam lately because of that (about 200 to 300 spam messages a day).

8) Explore the site’s TOS and FAQs. I never really read all that’s written there since they’re almost identical with the other PTC sites in saying that “they can curb their own rules anytime without any prior notice”. Just find that payment section and read. How much does it cost to cash out? What are their payment processors? How long do they process your cash out request?

9) No payment processor? No deal. Don’t sign up. (Unless it’s clixsense, which might turn out a scam later on, who knows? I’ll update you just in case.) It’s a scary thought when you’ve invested a lot and they promise you payment in check that never comes.

10) Cashing out must never be a problem. If it costs a lot to cash out like 50 to100 dollars (sometimes as ridiculous as $1000), they’re probably trying to keep you in their program as a “clicking slave” which they’ll dispose of after they’ve acquired their much needed profit. If it requires you to be an upgraded member to cash out, they might have some reason why they don’t want to grant that privilege to those who don’t want to invest more in their program but always beware as it’s also very very scammy in nature.

11) Sometimes they’ll tell you that it would take more than a month to receive your payment after you made your request. That’s funny if they have payment processors like paypal or alertpay. It should be done within a week after you made the request. If other PTCs can do it instantly, why can’t they? Sites like this are very problematic, it’s either they can’t afford to pay you or they have no intention of paying you at all because after a month they’ll be on their way to another scamming spree using your hard earned cash to fool more people.

12) Try to look for payment proofs from them. You’ll find it in their forum section (if they have one) or maybe try searching for their site name + payment proof and see if there’s going to be any results at all. More actual payment proof from different people means they’re actually paying.

13) Now here’s the meat of the “profitability” part and you can actually verify it for sure only after you’ve been a member for some time. How much do you actually earn for your click and how many ads are actually available for you? Based on my experience, most of these PTC sites give you tons of ads on your first signup, perhaps all because of their promise; “not less than ten ads”, or “many ads to click”, whatever. But the painful part will come on the following more days. Your clickable ads will lessen gradually or instantly shrink down to just 3 or 4 (sometimes none at all). The same goes to your 1 cent ads. The ads you’ll be clicking next will just earn you a quarter of a cent, or worst, a hundredth of a cent.

Just imagine 3 to 4 ads for just a tenth of a cent each, how’s that for your click’s earnings a day? If you encounter sites like this, just forget them. You’ll just be clicking for eternity there yet barely getting near that one dollar mark. And don’t ever consider referring people either. If they’ll just be earning the same amount, you’ll just be dragging more souls to that hell to suffer with you because you’ll need a million of them to get your dollar for sure.

There are also sites that give you tons of ads, literally (like 140 something or more). But the catch is, each just cost a tenth of a cent down to a hundredth. Imagine breaking a penny into small pieces. You’ll get one itsy bitsy piece of that per click, LOL. So if you click those tons and tons of ads, you’re just going to make the same amount as clicking four one cent ads from a better PTC site. I’d rather spend my time clicking those ads for an hour or so to something better like making more websites for adsense which could earn me more. Or better yet, search for free tutorials on how to make a reasonable income from adsense and learn from it.

What I’m trying to say here is look for sites that give better value to your click and has appropriate number ads for you to click on.

ADDITIONAL TIPS

Before hitting on those signup buttons, here’s my two CENTS about joining and investing on Paid to Click sites that just might help you along the way, I hope.

1) Don’t spend more than what you’ve earned from them. Upgrade your account only when you’ve earned that cost to upgrade from their program. The same applies to renting referrals. This way, even though it’s a slow start, you won’t go berserk mad when they suddenly disappear because you only invested them a few of your time and nothing from your pocket.

2) Always make sure you earn more than you spend. Don’t go upgrading your membership or renting lots of referrals without making sure first that everything you’ve spent will earn you more. Your goal is to grow and not to merely survive. Calculate and find a strategy that will get you just that.

3) Always put in mind that a PTC site might be paying and booming today but it’ll be gone sometime later because of mismanagement or eclipsing returns. Always check the buzz about them and never invest more than what you can afford.

4) Don’t promote sites that piss you off because of their performance. You’ll just add to the aggravation by adding more people who’ll also get pissed using their program.

I know I’ve missed some points about spotting the best PTC sites around. In case you have a few to share or perhaps some corrections about what I’ve been babbling about, please feel free to drop it in the comments.

WHAT'S NEXT?

How to Make Money With Paid to Click Sites
How to Spot PTC Scams
How to Get Referrals for Your PTC Sites
Recommended PTC Sites
Tips on Renting Referrals from PTC Sites
Helpful Tips on Building a Referral Magnet Website for Your PTCs

technorati tags: make money online, home jobs, home business, work at home, paid to click

How To Make Money With Paid To Click Sites – Useful Tips To Start Earning From PTC Programs

2009-06-26T08:45:00.000-07:00

Basically, there’s really nothing special about making money from PTC sites. From the name itself, all you have to do is to just click and you’ll make money out of it. But beyond just simple clicking and viewing of ads for a period of time, there’s a whole array of technique used to maximize your earning potential from PTC sites. Like it or not, most of these techniques have been proven effective by PTC users who have been milking the industry earlier than you and me. Here, I will detail tried and tested ways for you to start earning something decent out of these Paid To Click programs.

First and foremost, like every trade known to man, you’ll need patience and perseverance. Nothing comes from work without effort but waste. Again and again, setbacks will come your way; and if you give up early in the game, then you’ll just be wasting your time. In the same manner, doing things repetitively without any clear direction is another waste of time. Before subjecting yourself to any form of endeavor, you need to have some strategy on how to make things go your way and not the reverse. In PTC business, patience plus smart work equals success.

REQUIREMENTS

Computer + internet connection = It’s an internet business therefore you need to have a medium where you can access the internet, preferably the one at home. Why? There are many PTC sites that are quite strict about IP addresses. Accessing the internet from places with shared IPs may disqualify you into joining a PTC site or viewing an ad simply because there could be another PTC user who has just recently used that IP address you’re using.

Email = You need to have one. Signup for one if you don’t have. Most PTC users recommend Gmail because of its reliable spam detection capability. I’m using Yahoo mail and, currently, everything works fine.

Payment Processors = You’ll need a payment processor to receive your earnings. Although there are some PTC sites offering check payments, Clixsense is the only one I find trustworthy since they have been in the business for a very long time and have a good payment track record. The others, well, it’s really easy to fake it and make a run of your hard earned cash.

The most common payment processors used in the PTC industry are Paypal and Alertpay. If you don’t have one, you can signup below:

LET’S GET STARTED

1) Find reliable PTC sites and register for free. If it requires a fee to signup, that’s definitely a scam. (Bookmark your Paid to Click Programs, so you won't forget the PTC you had already joined)

Some points to consider when joining PTC:

Make sure that the site will not scam you (at least not anytime soon). If you’re unsure about them, do some searches in Google first if they’re actually paying all their members.
Join at least 10 PTCs. I’ll explain why later.
I have a list of reliable and paying PTCs which you can signup to so you don’t have to undergo that tedious validation process.

2) Log in to your account and start earning cash by clicking/viewing/surfing advertisements (use Internet Explorer or Firefox browser in viewing ads. Most PTCs are compatible with Internet Explorer and Firefox).

3) Make the clicking and viewing of ads a daily habit (1-2 hours per day).

START EARNING

Like I said earlier, you need to start with at least 10 PTCs. This is simply because you’ll earn more in a day clicking their ads combined as compared to just sticking to a few. Most veteran PTC users use something around 20 or more programs to really get things going. You’ll start out with ten just to get a hang of things. You can add more to your list of PTCs when you’re confident enough that you can handle them.

With 10 PTCs at hand, you can earn something around 50 cents a day. Of course it all depends on the PTC sites you’ve joined. You need to look for those that have a considerable number of ads for standard members (not upgraded) and with better pay per click, starting at .005 (half a cent) up to .02 per click (higher than this and it’s most probably a scam, if lower then you have to evaluate more if their number of ads could make up for the low value of your clicks).

Let’s do some math and see what you can possibly come up with.

Let's say you have joined 20 PTC programs then those 20 PTC programs will have an average of 5 advertisements for you to view per day (usually more but it can vary).

And most PTC will pay you $0.01 per ad you view.

Therefore 20 PTC programs x 5 ads = 100 ads.

So you will be getting 100 x $0.01= $1.00/day. In a month you can make $30 on your own. I know it's not enough but that's a guaranteed extra income for you!

To save time viewing all the ads you’ll be clicking, you can open as many PTC programs as your internet connection can handle simultaneously in tabs. If you’re still using IE6, better upgrade to avoid too much clutter in your desktop. In case you didn’t know, tabbed browsers have been the standard in internet browsing lately.

REFERRALS

Although the number of PTC programs you’re into can definitely help on your quest to make money online, the true secret to making it big in PTC business is your downline of referrals. The more referrals you have, the faster you’ll be making money. That’s because in PTC business, you get paid a percentage when someone signs up under your referral link, you’ll also get paid for every clicks they make. What’s more is that your referrals could recruit their own referrals too which will also help you earn more.

Again let’s do some math. Let’s say you have 4 referrals in each of your 20 PTC programs. And they click the same 5 advertisements that you do.

If let’s say the average percentage you’ll get from your referral’s click in all PTC programs is 50%, you’ll get $0.025 from one of them (half of $0.05).

That’s $0.10 in 4 of your referrals from one PTC program ($0.025 X 4).

$2 a day in all your 20 PTCs ($0.10 X 20) and $60 a month ($2 X 30).

Now add that $60 to the $30 you made from your clicks. That’s a rough $90 for a month of clicking ads and recruiting referrals.

That ain’t bad, right?

Now, let’s say you have 10 referrals in each of your 20 PTCs.

The equation:
($0.025 x 10) x 20 = $5 per day
$5 x 30 = $150 a month
You’ll earn $180 a month along with your monthly clicks.

That’s just your first level of referral. There’s also such a thing as 2nd, 3rd, and so on levels in your referral system depending on your PTC program’s incentives. What’s more is that some PTCs offer even higher percentages sometimes up to a 100% of your referral’s click. Take note also that you can earn more than $0.05 a day in some PTC programs.

Now, how do you recruit referrals you may ask? More than just asking your online buddies to sign up under the referral link which your PTC program will provide you, there are other ways to get people online who are seeking ways to earn extra money to signup under your referral code. You can try posting your referral links in forums or using them as your forum signature. You could also try answering questions related to PTCs in Yahoo Answers, and then offer your referral link afterwards. Also, you could set up a blog, or a website dedicated entirely to your quest in earning from PTCs.

Alternatively, if you’re not really good at recruiting referrals, why don’t you just buy them? Some PTCs offer un-referred users (those who didn’t sign up under anyone) for sale.

HELPFUL TIPS

1. Some PTC have cheat protection measures. Make sure that you read their rules and guidelines about these. If you’re paying attention, you’ll notice these cheat protection in action through links that says “Don’t Click Here”. Sometimes they ask questions with choices. All of these just to make sure that they provide “high quality traffic” to their advertisers.

2. Open 6 or more tabs (depending on the capacity of your internet speed).This can help speed up your clicking activity for each PTC site by simultaneously opening them and viewing their ads.

3. Protect your computer, use a good antivirus program. You don’t know when you’ll be hit by malwares from malicious people using these income generating opportunities.

4. To boost your earnings, work on how to recruit more people as your referral to click for you. The more referrals the more dollars will come to you.

5. Be extra careful when joining a site. Research well if it’s a scam or not. Some scammers change their site’s name and continue earning without paying its members.

6. Keep clicking! After your downline gets big enough, you may feel you don't need to click anymore as your downline is doing all the work! But remember, you have an upline that is counting on your clicking every day and you should pay it forward. Also, some PTC programs cancel all your earnings on the next day (that include your earnings from your referrals) after the day of your clicking inactivity.

7. Never give up! It takes time and effort to really make good and stable money from PTC programs. Like they said; “Rome wasn’t built in a day”. Just hang in there.

WHAT'S NEXT?

How to Find the Best PTC Programs
How to Spot PTC Scams
How to Get Referrals for Your PTC Sites
Recommended PTC Sites
Tips on Renting Referrals from PTC Sites
Helpful Tips on Building a Referral Magnet Website for Your PTCs

technorati tags: PTC, make money online, work at home, home jobs, home business

Make Money Working from Home with Paid to Click Sites

2009-06-21T06:23:00.001-07:00

Earning money online is difficult especially for those people who live outside US and don’t have a credit card. That’s why I want to tell you how to make good money online without having a credit card or giving away any of your personal data. If you want to make money online but do not like writing articles or blogging then Paid To Click sites might be your option. Paid To Click programs have proven to be good earners for everyone from any country in the world!

Paid to Click (PTC) sites, as they are commonly called, are incentive based advertising websites. Advertisers pay the site for real visitors and the PTC site pays its members to click on their ads and view them for 10 to 30 seconds. Most likely these sites pay 0.02-0.005$ per click and there are approximately 10-50 advertisements to click every day, sometimes it’s more. They don't require any special skills or knowledge to work with. All you need to do is spend a few minutes a day clicking on ads.

Members can join for free and there is no cost ever to get paid. You just click the ads, wait for the timer and go to the next ad. Once you have accumulated the minimum payout (usually five or ten dollars) you can request a payment. You will need either Paypal or Alertpay account for this.

Many people say that making money from PTC programs is scam because they just can’t make enough. If all you’ll be doing is to click the ads that are allotted to you then, it will definitely be hard to earn something decent out of all the pennies from viewing the ads. Though PTC programs are not prolific income generators as compared to PPC programs like Google Adsense, a lot of people around the world make substantial income not just from clicking and viewing the ads but by also referring people under their account.

PTC sites don’t only pay you for the clicks you make but they also pay you for the clicks made by your referrals. The more referrals you have, the more money you make and the faster you make it. How do you make referrals you may ask? They will give you a link to sign people up; with which you can post in forums, in your blog, in Facebook or Myspace, and in several other places where you could post free content. Most PTC sites will also allow you to buy referrals for a certain period of time. You could also invite your friends and acquaintances to sign-up under your user account. Usually referral commissions are 50-100%, this means, if you have 20 referrals, you get 50%-100% of all they make (their click activities, their referral generation, and sometimes their cashouts as well). To make it even more interesting, they will pay you for the activities of the referral of your referrals sometimes reaching up to 8 levels deep (the referral of your referral of your referral of your referral and so on up to the 8th level – get the idea?).

Most PTC sites use more than paid to click programs as an income opportunity. Many of these websites also have “paid to sign up”. This is where you sign up into tier programs and you get paid ten cents or more for that. You can use this program to add to your income generation.

Before joining any PTC sites though, be very careful of the scams. Always check the legitimacy of the business before signing up. Website administrators started to scam people, especially international members, because they consider international traffic as cheap and low-rate. Almost all legitimate PTC sites offer free membership. If you come across any site that seeks membership fees, they should be fraudulent. Legitimate sites typically pay $0.01 or $0.02 for a click. If the company advertises extravagant rates such as $10 or $100 per click, it's 100% scam.

Nothing else can be easier then clicking ads, everyone can do it (except for those who have dismembered ones). And if you can attract more people, you will rake in good cash. This is just my introductory article for making money online with PTCs. If you’re still having second thoughts about joining them, you’re always free to come back anytime to watch out for my more in depth articles about them which are soon to follow. For the mean time, here’s the list of PTC sites that I highly recommend. If you feel like giving Paid To Click a try, please feel free to click one of them and be my referral. :)

My Recommended PTC Sites

Click here to see the list of paying and trusted PTC sites that I'm currently using along with some helpful details which could help you decide if they might also be the PTC site you're looking for.

TRUSTED PAYING PAID TO CLICK SITES

WHAT'S NEXT?

How To Make Money With Paid To Click Sites
How to Find the Best PTC Programs
How to Spot PTC Scams
How to Get Referrals for Your PTC Sites
Tips on Renting Referrals from PTC Sites

technorati tags: make money online, work at home, home jobs, home business, paid to click

Guaranteed Ways to Make Money Online

2009-06-18T02:47:00.000-07:00

Money has always been an issue for many people and you’re not alone. Many people aren’t aware of the many solutions that they can do to possibly earn more money online. The idea of making money online is attractive to many, primarily because of the benefits it offers. Two main incentives are motivational factors here: The lucrative potential of the internet as well as the personal freedom that comes with working without a fixed schedule or geographic location. One doesn’t need to suffer through monotonous day jobs which offer poor returns for the time invested. Even if you’re not looking to work full-time at home, the internet offers a viable source of money which can help to supplement your regular income.

If you've always dreamed of working from home online to earn a good income, there's never been a better time than now. More and more people are starting home businesses than ever before. Many companies are providing home jobs where their employees are able to work at home as well. With the internet, opportunities are endless. If you're ready to start a home business or find the best home jobs possible, here are 11 home business or home jobs ideas to get you started.

1. Set up a Blog or Website

One of the best ways to make money online is to create a website or blog which allows you to earn money from the display of advertisements or the sale of products and services. There are many different types of money making blogs which will help you to make money and you’ll need to pick a model that suits your interests, schedule and skill levels. Check my post about making money through blogging to give you a better idea about how you can earn from blogs.

2. Get-Paid-to Websites

There are hundreds of websites out there which you pay you to read emails, do surveys, sign up for trial subscriptions, click advertisements, and surf the web. You don’t need to have your own website or any personal skills to start earning. Be careful though as a lot of these “Get Paid To” sites (GPTs) are scams. Research the website you’re thinking of signing-up to before hand. Scam.com is a forum you should visit to learn if the get-paid-to website you’re interested in actually pays its members.

There are also several Web 2.0 or social media websites out there that will pay you to participate in their community. This collection of social media websites usually operate via a revenue-sharing system, which allows you to earn a share of the overall ad revenue. How much you earn depends on how much your submitted article, video or image is viewed.

3. Affiliate Marketing

This involves promoting a specific product or service and earning commissions whenever the referred user makes a purchase based on your recommendations. Affiliate marketing is a big and profitable industry that covers a wide spectrum of topics and fields. If you’ve got an interest in gardening, you can make money promoting gardening related items and courses. In terms of fashion wear, you can earn commissions by recommending people to clothing or t-shirt companies with affiliate programs.

The amount of money you make depends on what you are selling. Again, affiliate marketing is best done with websites or blogs where you can promote the products you’re selling although there are techniques where setting up a website is not necessary to start earning.

4. Get Paid to Write Articles

If you’re focusing on writing, you can still make some money by registering for websites which will pay for your content. Although at first writing articles online may be hard to accumulate over 1,000 views, it really pays after you are committed. At first you may not have as much views, but after a while, you will make some friends and will slowly build up a community. That thousandths mark will be easier the next day. Article writing can pay from one to five dollars per thousandths view depending on the site’s pay. Article writing just takes effort and commitment, if you have that, you can start earning.

5. Offer Your Expertise Online

These days, you can do more than just sell your old books via Amazon and your old Coach handbags via eBay—now you can sell your professional capabilities in a marketplace. If you have a skill such as web design, programming or copywriting you can offer your services online in exchange for money. You can use online market places to find freelance jobs or perhaps to offer your services.

6. Find a Virtual Job

Do data encoding jobs, medical transcriptions, and several other telecommuting jobs. Online jobs in the new economy may also include virtual assistants, gold farmers, online life coaching and support for open source software.

Most of these virtual jobs involve direct communication through electronic mediums like internet telephony, instant messengers and emails; which means that all you need to get started is a home computer with a steady internet connection.

7. Sell Stuffs Online

You can sell your old things at E-bay, or maybe your own products like T-shirts and other merchandise. Products you can sell include your website templates, sound clips, your art works (if you’re an artist), or even your own ebook. Also you could do some online trading where you’ll buy products at a low price then sell it at a relatively higher price (with added value, of course).

8. Start an Online Business

Starting your own online business or company allows you to make money off the provision of specific services or products you may have. There are two ways to do this. One, you can start a website from scratch and sell your own products or services. Two, you can sign up with a company that provides you with an already-proven home business setup including a website, sales presentations, products to offer, etc. With either type of home business idea, your main task will be promotion.

It isn’t difficult to start a business if you have enough resources. It’s all about hiring the right people and having enough knowledge and connections within a specific industry. You should do some in depth research before you decide to settle on a specific niche for your business.

9. Try out Domaining

This is the business of buying, selling, developing and making money from domain names. A domainer purchases many domain names and sells them to interested buyers. This is similar to real estate investing offline and domainers also make money by developing websites and reselling it to a buyer. This practice is known as site flipping and can make you a tidy sum of money if you know how to build an attractive and profitable website.

10. Join the Forex Market

Although joining the Forex Market may sound a bit risky at first, it is always recommended to do some research. Then it is safe say it is easy to earn from exchanging foreign currencies.

11. Upload Files

Many new uploading databases are offering incentives for each thousandths of downloads (files) and views (photos and videos). Ranging from $5 to $10 per thousandths download / views, this type of revenue making program is more beneficial for those who owns websites that offer free downloads (warez-like content) and pornography (for vids and photos).

technorati tags: make money online, work at home, home based jobs, home business

Get Traffic from FriendFeed

2008-08-03T02:14:00.001-07:00

I’ve been using FriendFeed for sometime now. (I can’t track when exactly.) But it is only today that I’m planning to use it for promoting my content and, perhaps, getting more networks. According to a few well known personalities in blogging and socialmedia (I won’t be giving names but I think some of you know who the heck these people are who takes FriendFeed as the holy grail of their blog traffic), FriendFeed can give your blogs and socialmedia profiles better exposure and following hence converting to traffic, which I can’t be sure if monetizable or not. Besides the potential to promote my blogs better, I think I’m giving FriendFeed a try because it enables me to follow people and see their select online activities that they chose to share with FriendFeed, which I can look at and see if it has any use for me. Also it provides a nifty search function which enables me to search through community exchanges which Google can barely provide.

FriendFeed, basically, for those who aren’t aware of it, is a social aggregator that sucks in all your activities across different socialmedia services. People can then see what you’re up to online through these collected services and decide if they subscribe and follow your feed. Also called “lifestreaming”, there have been a bunch of other sites that provide the same service of which BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog are examples. What separates FriendFeed is that it provides better functionality than the rest, which enables you to manipulate a chaotic flood of noise into a filtered and organized content that’s more digestible.

Similar to other socialmedia sites out there, to get better exposure in FriendFeed’s system, you need to follow people and have followers as well. You need to have an active feed so that you won’t get buried by other’s feed. It’s often not difficult to get a constantly active feed since your activities from other sites, such as twitter or digg, will count inside friendfeed too, although you might want to do actual activity inside so that other users won’t brand you as a “poser”.

Ultimately, I’m writing this short FriendFeed article to get my profile some exposure. To see how much of a slacker online I’ve been lately, you can visit my FriendFeed profile. And maybe follow my feed so that I could also reciprocate. Additionally, I’m also looking at the possibility of having digg and stumble campaigns inside, although I’m not very optimistic that it will yield favorable results. Another benefit that I could think of from using FriendFeed is that I’ll be able to be updated with these people who’ve been inviting me in Twitter without necessarily joining Twitter. (I’m having second thoughts about this whole “microblogging phenomenon” because I see it as just another attention demanding tool that I have to struggle with.) It’s all just experimentation stage between me and Friendfeed for now. Hopefully, it’s going to be a worthwhile experience.

I know I haven’t covered FriendFeed enough to enlighten those who are new to it. I just don’t want to make any tips and/or recommendations to something that I haven’t tried and tested to a certain extent. If you want to know more about it, here’s a detailed guide on how to use FriendFeed. Alternatively, if you like to know more about how FriendFeed can enhance your web experience, here’s an article about FriendFeed’s great features.

technorati tags: friendfeed, socialmedia, traffic

Get More Comments, Technoratti Love, and StumbleUpon Exposure with these Links

2008-07-23T11:45:00.000-07:00

Recently, I just installed the SezWho script for Entrecard. The adoption of this new entrecard program is basically to give my commenters, especially the entrecard users, a way to get some precious credits while commenting here. I’ll be ranking your comments, of course. I think using SezWho on your blog (through entrecard) will guarantee that you’ll get a comment or two for your blog (depends on how interesting your post is). I’m saying “a comment or two” because it’s not really the best way to get comments for your blog. If you really want to get comments, you have to focus on strategies and proven methods to make your readers speak up. I have a post just for that: How to Get Comments on Your New Blog.

One thing I don’t like about SezWho comment rating tool though is that it doesn’t provide any way for blogspot users to manipulate where exactly the ratings will nest in their blog. And it certainly affects how my blog template looks. Yes, you can customize how your stars and your profile size appear, but that’s just it. You can also manipulate its overall look through a long list of CSS codes which I have no idea where to start. I wish they can offer more ways for us to manipulate this tool much better. But if nothing changes within a month or two, I guess it’ll be bye-bye SezWho. For those who are not aware of it yet, here’s entrecard’s post about the SezWho and Entrecard Partnership.

Next in line is a blog carnival on recommendations for new and experienced bloggers about how they could increase the amount of visitors to their blogs with no financial investments. It’s Bringing More Traffic to Your Blog - July 18, 2008 - 6th Ed. There are about 43 articles for you to learn from about getting more traffic to your blog and an article from yours truly is one of it.

About the Technorati love, here’s Link Back Project. It’s basically a viral link train of the sort but it’s a whole blog dedicated for it (well, not so much now). You’ll get lots of backlinks to your blog when you participate which could fuel your Technorati ranking and authority. I’m just not sure about Alexa and Google; but theoretically all those incoming links should be able to make some significant changes in your blog stats, seriously. For more info about it just check out the project.

And then, here’s another Digg tool. It’s TINC. What it does is basically to show you who are digging your submissions and whose submissions you’re digging too. All you have to do is type your digg username in the search box provided and press enter. Results, which also include your latest ten submissions, will appear instantly. If you’re one of those who like to clean up their friends list if they’re digging your submissions or not, this tool is for you. But more than that, there’s another use for it which I’ll mention next.

You’ll be using TINC to integrate your Digg campaign to your StumbleUpon activity. Basically, what you’ll do is to find your digg friends in SU (StumbleUpon) then befriend them and/or vice versa. After that, use TINC to view your digg username’s results which you’ll then send to your SU friends via the send function of your SU toolbar. Your SU friends can then digg your post by clicking on the link from your TINC page and then head to your actual post and stumble it. It’s advisable to do this after you’ve submitted your/others’ content to Digg. Also, be sure to send it to your friends who know how Digg-TINC-StumbleUpon method works. Do you find my instructions hard to follow, maybe it’s best to get it straight from where I originally got the concept: Stumble Upon Digg Traffic.

technorati tags: technorati, stumbleupon, digg, comments

Naruto Shippuden – The Five Types of Blogging Chakra

2008-07-20T03:09:00.000-07:00

In Naruto, ninjas were able to perform amazing feats that are beyond human because of their chakra. It’s something like a chi, or spiritual energy which ninjas can tap into to do special techniques. According to the story, a chakra is the resulting form of energy produced when Physical and Spiritual energies are mixed together within the body. Then to use it, Hand Seals are performed. This allows the user to expel it out the body in the form of an attack, and requires different Hand Seals for different attacks. Everyone is born with their chakra; but no body is born with the knowledge to use it to perform special attacks; except for a select few who can wield it through instinct or sheer will alone. To be able to use it, one should undergo rigorous and intensive ninja training.

Not all ninjas share the same type of chakra. There are five different types of chakra: Fire, Water, Earth, Wind, and Lighting. It’s like an affinity to the elements sort of thing. When you have the Fire type, you’ll be able to manipulate the fire element and everything associated with it with ease. The same goes with water type and the water element; and so on and so forth. Here comes the interesting part. Although subject to one’s ideas about blogging, I’d like to believe that your blogging energies share the same type of affinities as the chakras used in Naruto. Your blogging chakra separates you from the others and at the same time helps you execute blogging techniques that keep your blog alive. It’s very much debatable or discreditable depending on your discretion; but let’s just assume. What if it’s so?

The Five Types of Blogging Chakra:

Fire type – This chakra is associated with the fire element, hot, burning, and spreads easily. Bloggers using this type of energy are fond of creating conflagrations in the blogging world, also termed as “VIRAL”. They like their ideas to be the center of attention or at least gather up as much attention as possible so that it spreads and makes its mark. Bloggers who have fire type chakras have a very dominant character and/or likes to initiate things. They often spend their blogging time crafting ideas that will get people to participate thus resulting to popularity and more profit. Their schemes involve contests, memes, viral link trains, viral social media campaigns and other programs that require mass participation and link building. These bloggers can be seen at the forefront of the marketing and promotional end of the blogosphere. Although effective at making buzzes, they often run short at making in-depth analysis and evaluation of the things they’ve started.

Water type – Water is associated with calmness, free flowing force and change. Bloggers with this type of energy are resourceful and knowledgeable at what they do. They have an analytical sense of things and are gifted with the ability to purge deep into a subject matter like water that can carve canyons and polish rocks. They blog with direction and often excel in their niche. They don’t easily catch attention but are always found meandering here and there. They can easily adapt to change because they know their way around most of the time. Their power lies in observation, analysis, and quick intuition or feel of things. These types of bloggers are better at tweaking things and using their tools to their advantage. They make better SEO and SMO experts. They are great in terms of information but can easily be drowned out by hype and new things.

Earth type – Earth chakra can’t only be found in soil but includes everything that grows and walks on it such as the flora and fauna. Bloggers with earth chakra can be categorized as good writers as they have a very unique and colorful content. They have the ability to inspire other people to start new things. They can also be informative but not as specific and complete as the water types. Although not as detailed, they seem to impress and enchant people because of the richness of their descriptions and the way they talk to them. People can easily relate to them and are always approachable. They are humble and they fuel their blogs with their desire to maintain connection with their followers/friends and share their achievements. They make perfect nurturers of start-up bloggers and most bloggers find their blogs filled with opportunities such as guest posting, rewards, and contests where it’s always a win-win situation for all the participants (unlike the fire types which conducts competition in the very real sense of the term).

Wind type – Always playful and violent at times, that’s the rule of their game. The wind element can be as pleasant as summer breeze and as destructive as a storm. You can see lots of these wind type bloggers doing tech, humor and celebrity blogs. They are quick at catching buzzes and gossips that they are newsy at times. They appear less committed to their blogs but many of them are serious about it (it’s just hard to understand them). They like things to have a touch of humor or something fresh all the time which makes it light and easy to understand. They are not fund of making analysis and quick observations always pass as good information. They are good journalists and comedians. They are also good at making judgments based on popular sentiments. Bloggers with wind type chakra draw their powers from quick conversations and scoop information. They can manipulate the information they produce to make or break others. Often, they can be found dwelling among the top ranks of social bookmarking communities.

Lightning type – The most difficult type of chakra to possess. It’s fast like the wind and searing like fire. They are electrifying in some sense. They are highly unstable and it’s hard to predict a pattern out of them as they appear random at times. They’re always updated like the wind types when it comes to the new things about blogging, especially social medias. They appear newsy too but the only difference is that they are more willing to try what they’re looking into. They are keen to bite all forms of opportunity and will experiment all the time to come up with a result that’s somewhat viral in nature which resembles that of the fire types. They are hard workers but they value quantity over quality. They are good at making experiments and gathering information in a short period of time but their problem is they spread themselves too thinly in what they do resulting in poor quality. A lot of spammers and blog spams in social bookmarking sites are lightning types; they are remarkable at gaming things and doing black hat techniques because of their bold determination and quick thinking. The best lightning types are effective at making huge improvements in their stats in a short period of time. Common characteristics of lightning types are having many domains and multiple accounts in several social media sites.

Most ninjas in Naruto can only control one type of chakra but some possess two types of it while the legendary ones can possess more than two. In the blogging world, I think we’re capable of possessing up to three types but, more often than not, there’s always that dominant chakra that will really stand out above the rest. I’m also in a position to believe that the more experience you acquire in blogging, the better you are able to manipulate several of your chakras to your advantage hence better blogging techniques.

Admittedly, I see myself as a water type but not a lot of you know that I’m also maintaining other blogs where I use other types of chakra as well. Sometimes, I could see myself using wind chakra as I’m trying to keep myself updated with several things but I guess it’s not that significant to make me a wind type. How about you? What type/s of chakra do you think you possess?

If you find this post interesting, how about reading another of my post related to this: Naruto Games.

technorati tags: naruto, shippuden, chakra, blogging

How to Generate StumbleUpon Traffic to Your Site

2008-07-16T04:01:00.000-07:00

Today I’m setting my eyes on StumbleUpon. I’ve been using it ever since I started this blog; but it hasn’t turned out any spectacular changes to my stats yet. One reason, perhaps, is my lack of activity in using it. But one thing I’m sure of is that it has the potential to benefit your site with lots of traffic if taken seriously. I’ve been receiving a trickle of visits from it (you can see it in my referral widget in the sidebar) by simply submitting my content and a few reviews and thumbs up of my favorite digests in my Google Reader. What more if I actively use it just like in Digg? For one thing I was able to get traffic via Digg whenever I submit my content and then employ the techniques I’ve been blabbing about sometime ago. It’s not great traffic like I said but it is steady traffic nonetheless.

A lot of articles have been published over the net about StumbleUpon traffic, and all of them agree on one thing; Digg traffic is nothing compared to StumbleUpon. I haven’t been a witness of that but the data they’ve gathered and the observations they were pointing out all make sense. StumbleUpon traffic lasts longer. StumbleUpon visitors browse more. StumbleUpon traffic has more potential to be converted into subscribers and more backlinks. Of course, how this traffic will react depends on how you present your content and appearance to them. The less crappy your content the more it will be appreciated, a given fact for every social media sites out there.

I think StumbleUpon presents a better platform for bloggers to market their content effectively without being too brutal about it like in Digg. I mean, if you want some good results from Digg, you have to spoon feed all your friends with requests to digg your submission before you can get it. In StumbleUpon, I think it doesn’t work too much like that. Also, SEO articles considered spam in Digg are well received and praised in StumbleUpon. To better understand what I’m talking about, we need to make a certain perspective on how StumbleUpon’s system works. After reading several resources about StumbleUpon, I came up with these:

1) StumbleUpon is not so much of a timely news site like Digg and Reddit. So even if your content is old as long as people can still appreciate it, it’s still going to be stumbled.
2) As long as people are still thumbing up your submission, even after it became popular, it still has the potential to make a comeback or generate further traffic at least.
3) StumbleUpon community is diverse, so more or less you’ll get people who’ll vote for your content besides your friends.
4) Votes and reviews count as recommendations for your submission. The more you receive the better exposure your submission will receive within the community.
5) Unique, useful, and appealing content gets more votes than ordinary ones.
6) Stumblers usually stumble through their toolbar which is affected in part by their network’s stumbles.
7) Top stumblers have more weight in their votes compared to the rest.

From here you’ll have a better view on how to strategize your way on making StumbleUpon traffic. I’m not sure if you’re seeing it the same way I do but for me everything boils down to your network and content, very much like Digg. The only difference is that there’re more opportunities for you to get exposure rather than in a one way system of voting.

How to get better exposure hence traffic from StumbleUpon?

There are four areas that you must focus on in order for your content to get better reception from Stumblers; the first impression, your content, your network, and your activity.

1) First Impression – Stumblers tend to look more than they read. So always make sure that you have a nice web design that doesn’t look too amateurish. Secondly, it shouldn’t be filled with all sorts of ads which is an eyesore for most web-savvy users. Always organize your layout so that your ads, widgets, and other web design features don’t intrude with the reading experience. Additionally, your site should load fast enough. Nobody wants to wait to see what you have to offer when they could get far better content by just skipping your eternally loading page. Another thing to give better emphasis is your headlines or post titles. I guess when it comes to social media sites; a catchy title is always catchy. Cleverly put titles that are good link baits work well in capturing attention.

2) Your Content – Well crafted content which shows how much effort has been placed in producing it are very much appreciated in SU. Write clearly and avoid too much rambling. Create articles with unique insights where people can learn something. Resource list and how to articles always get positive reactions. I have an article which deals about creating a great blog post to help you write one. Alternatively, contests and free stuffs, videos, humor, and bizarre things are also well received in SU.

3) Your Network – Basically, even how great your content is, it will have little exposure unless you have an effective network to back it up. Add friends to your profile. Of course, don’t just befriend people randomly. You can only have a maximum of 200 friends in SU so be careful about it. Get those people who share the same interest as yours. It will ensure that you get better response from them. You can start by befriending your fellow bloggers who are already in SU. Also, try looking at the reviews in SU of articles that you liked. You can access it through your toolbar (if you have one). Try befriending those who made their reviews or those who just voted. Whenever you submit your post to SU, you can send it to your SU friends to give it more votes and reviews (the send function is found in your toolbar as well). Of course, you don’t have to do this all the time because the more you do it the more it’ll be considered as spamming.

4) Your Activity – This will affect your authority as a stumbler and the exposure of your stumbles as well. When you’re active at stumbling and making reviews, more stumblers will recognize you and, perhaps, decide to follow you inside SU. Another benefit of being an active stumbler, although still improbable, is that it affects the weight of your stumbles. It’s like climbing the ladder to being a top stumbler, but of course that’s a very long way ahead. Ultimately, being active in SU will give you a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t inside the system which can be considered an edge when submitting your stuff. It’s like learning the right balance of these and those to get this and that.

These are the things that got me into rethinking my usage and traffic strategy in StumbleUpon. You can either believe me or not, but I believe it will not hurt you to give StumbleUpon a try. It’s a great tool to increase your traffic and could also help in your blog’s seo. The only factor that you need to add is your part as an active stumbler. By the way, if you’re looking for an SU friend who’d stumble your submission, you can start by befriending me. Here’s my SU profile: http://nepspeed82.stumbleupon.com/

Finally, here are some articles which you could read to help you incorporate StumbleUpon to your blogging:

The Beginner’s Guide to Getting Massive Traffic from StumbleUpon
A Comprehensive Guide to StumbleUpon: How to Build Massive Traffic to Your Website
How to Use StumbleUpon for Your Business: The Definitive Guide
A Definitive StumbleUpon Guide: Driving Traffic To Websites
StumbleUpon Optimization: Leveraging Photo Stumbles for More Web Traffic
UnOfficial StumbleUpon guide on how to get traffic

technorati tags: stumbleupon, boost traffic, social media

10 Simple Steps to Increase Your RSS Subscribers

2008-07-11T00:55:00.000-07:00

1) Write quality content – People will not subscribe if all they’ll find in your blog are rants, the food you ate and more of your rants. Provide useful information that they could use for whatever it is they’re doing. The more they find your voice helpful, the more they will subscribe.

2) Write interesting content – Similarly, people will also subscribe if they could relate to your content and find it unique and interesting. People don’t only flock on useful things. They also tend to gather on things that appeal to them even if it’s not as useful.

3) Make catchy headlines – This is your article’s introduction. It’s the first impression that they’ll make of your post before they read it. If your titles are boring, that would instantly affect how they’ll receive the following lines of words you make. What do you think make girls buy glossy magazines just by looking at its cover? The same should also apply to your blog. Just convert buying into subscribing.

4) Make it easy to read – Make sure that your posts are easy on the eyes. Don’t publish research articles and blocks upon blocks of words that will intimidate the usual internet user suffering from attention deficit disorder. Use bullets to enumerate ideas. Use subheadings to break your train of thought in parts. And most importantly, use white spaces effectively. Don’t make one huge block of paragraph that’s hardly pleasing and difficult to read. It’s all about making it easy for the brain to digest your information quickly.

5) Get a clean and organized template – Imagine a non web-savvy internet user searching for answers in Google landing in your messy blog. How do you think he’ll browse what you have to offer and subscribe to your blog if you don’t have any links to your previous posts or it is buried 100 feet below your pile of useless widgets? Before anything else, your blog must serve its primary function which is to “SERVE YOUR CONTENT” and not to forecast your city’s weather or watch your neon ads. Emphasize your content, subscribe widgets, search box, categories, archives and anything else that will point to what your blog has to offer. Throw the rest away, or put them someplace where they can’t distract your potential subscribers.

6) Post regularly – Don’t write just when you feel like it. Also, don’t write like there’s no tomorrow (unless you’re a huge blogging institution). Determine your posting frequency like once or twice a day, thrice or twice a week, but never once a month. People hate it when you’re slacking; they also hate it when you’re too hyperactive that they can’t keep up with you. Just get the right blend. By posting regularly, the more people will know what they could expect from you. You’ll be keeping your current readers plus you’ll be pulling in new ones.

7) Stick to your niche – Keep posting relevant articles about your theme or topic. Your readers are expecting you to write more about it. By writing more about it, the more you become an expert on that field which leads to better posts which will lead further to more subscribers.

8) Make it easy to subscribe – Place your subscribe buttons where people can see them immediately. Offer email subscription for those who are not using feed readers. Additionally, ask your readers to subscribe to your blog through messages at the end of every post that tells them to consider subscribing to your updates. I’m not using it yet but I’m beginning to believe that they really work.

9) Tell the rest of the blogosphere about your blog – Tell more people about your blog not just your circle of friends. Make “useful” comments in other blogs to pull in readers from that blog. Join social bookmarking sites like Digg, Stumbleupon, Delicious, Reddit, Mixx, etc and submit your posts. Join forums and use your blog url as your footer signature. Submit your rss feed to rss directories. Submit your blog to blog directories. It’s all about exposing your blog to a greater audience.

10) Use entrecard – I’m not sure if everyone will agree with me but by using entrecard you’re guaranteed to get your blog exposed to a lot of bloggers. And if you do the rest of the outlined tips from 1 to 8, it’s not impossible to convert a dropper into a subscriber. Just do your regular drops, and make “insightful comments” on the blogs you find interesting or relevant to your niche.

11) This is an extra tip which you might consider taking if you really want to boost your rss readers. Join blogcatalog and look for groups with threads that involve feed exchanges. Participate in the discussion and you’ll be guaranteed 20 or more new subscribers in a day. Of course, we all know that this is only for short term gratification. But it always depends on how you present your content to these people. If you’re proving yourself worth their attention, then by all means, why can’t they be your long term subscribers?

This post is my entry for

technorati tags: rss, subscribe, blog tips, group project

What It Takes to Create a Not so Killer but Highly Participated Blog Contest

2008-07-08T02:35:00.000-07:00

These days, a lot of blogs are holding contests. It’s a trend that bloggers are quick to adopt because of the benefits they could get out of it. That’s because a blog contest is a powerful marketing tool to get blogs better exposure. Get more traffic, backlinks, readers, Technorati ranking, etc; it’s all about increasing blog stats to improve your blog’s authority.

What’s a blog contest?

A blog contest is just your usual online contest that is conducted by blogs to build publicity, recognition, and/or networks. A blog contest cannot be a contest without prizes. These prizes range from entrecard credits to real cash, gadgets, advertising spots, reviews, and other valuable online merchandise and services you could think of. Getting entries to win usually requires a participant to do some things that will benefit the contest host and his/her blog.

How do you benefit from holding blog contests?

Your blog can benefit from a contest in a lot of ways depending on your contest’s rules/mechanics and how well you promoted it; but generally, these are the areas where you’ll see much improvement and what most contest runners hope to improve after conducting it:

More backlinks
Increased Google, Technorati, and Alexa rankings
More readers (subscribers and return visits)
More traffic

How to Setup a Blog Contest?

Running a contest is not as easy as it looks. It requires a lot of effort to coordinate with everyone you want to get involved from its conception to the handing-over of prizes to the winners. If you’re planning of running one, here’s a guide which could help you.

There are 4 aspects to keep in mind when you decide to run a blog contest:

Your goals
The prizes
The game mechanics
Promotion

Goals

You don’t just hold a contest with nothing in mind. Think first of what you hope to achieve after conducting the contest, which will determine the competition’s success. It could be increasing your RSS subscribers, increasing your backlinks, increasing your stats, and any blog related increase you have in mind. Once you have your goals, you can then make better decisions around the competition format, prizes, promotion etc.

Prizes

Generally, the bigger your prizes are, the more buzz you’ll potentially make but it all depends on how much you’re willing to spend for your contest and how many sponsors you’ll get. If you’re not very experienced when it comes to marketing your ideas or is fairly new to blogging, it’s best to keep your prizes simple but useful.

Don’t give prizes that your contestants have no use for or you’ll end up with few or no participants at all. The best prizes are those relevant to your niche to hook up contestants that will better appreciate them. For many blogger contestants, entrecard credits are always a way to go, but you have to put the non-entrecarders into consideration as well. Cash is often the best form of prize but always try to come up with a considerably better value since a mere $10 will brand your contest as cheap. Regarding blogging tools, e-books, services, and other products; it’s best to put their monetary value as well so everyone will see how much they’re worth.

Besides the prizes for winners, a contest will get better reception if it has incentives for all the participants. Something like a free e-book, 10ec, or a linkback in the form of daily or weekly round up of participants for every contestant can be a start.

Before going all out with your prizes, always remember that giving away big ones is not a sure way to get your competition successful without knowing what sort of and how many response you might get. Also, if there’s shipping involved for the delivery of your prize, consider also the geographic constraints of such a medium. Try offering a prize equivalent like a PayPal deposit to encourage others to participate.

Rules of the game

Like said earlier, the mechanics on how to enter your competition always depend on what your goals are for holding one. You could require participants to comment in your post, subscribe to your feed through email, favorite your blog in Technorati, write about your contest, Stumble, or Digg before they could join your competition. It all depends on you. But more often than not, your participants are also as busy (or lazy) as you in their blogging careers, and if you make it hard for everyone to enter your competition, you’ll get less response from them. Keeping your contest requirements simple and quick will ensure more participation from your potential contestants.

From what I’ve been reading lately, contests that require people to write about it and its sponsors are getting less and less popularity unless it’s conducted by popular blogs with prizes that’s highly sought after. In most contests that I’ve seen so far, usually, the time consuming requirements to enter end up as optional means to get more entries to better a contestant’s odds of winning. Maybe it’s a better contest model that’s why more people do it, don’t you think?

Make your rules easy for you too. When you get a lot of entries that require you to sift through them all, moderate them, judge them etc. It can take a lot of time. Sometimes you might give them too many options to get entries that it becomes difficult for you to track their activities down. Think about things first like if there’s any way for you to automate processes or find others to help you with the logistics. Make it easy for both you and your contestants so everyone will benefit from it.
Another idea which you might want to incorporate in your contest is making it work around a certain theme or concept. Most of the successful and popular contests used unique ideas that presented something new or challenging to their readers. It adds a particular viral quality to your contest which let those participating spread the word in some way.

A reasonable time frame in which your contest will run is also important for your contest to be successful. Running a competition for a very long time often loses its momentum and presents problems especially to those who joined first. People believe that the longer your contest run, the more participants it will get. It’s wrong simply because there’s no guarantee that you’ll be getting interested parties to your contest through time alone. If you set the deadline to more than a month, within two to three weeks, your contest will start to get stale. What’s more is that your participants will start forgetting about your contest losing its element of fun and excitement. The ideal timeframe for you to conduct your contest, I believe, is within two to three weeks only; enough for the word to spread, for participants to join, and for sponsors to get their money’s worth.

Finally, write your rules clearly. Enumerate them and spell out the parameters to be qualified in the draw. It’s difficult when your contestants can’t understand what you want them to do. Inform them also about what they can expect from your contest if your winners will be picked subjectively (best submissions), or randomly (through some randomizer tool).

Promotion

For a contest to be successful, it needs many participants. And you’re in no way to get as many when you’re not promoting your contest effectively. Another purpose of your contest promotion is to pull in as many sponsors as possible to provide more and better prizes. Of course, it’s always up to you if you would require the help of sponsors or not.

If you’re interested in getting sponsors, try contacting your fellow bloggers first if they would be interested in becoming your contest sponsors. Tell them what’s in store for them if they become your sponsors like a free review, lots of backlinks, a month long spot in your ad spaces, etc. There’s no one who’ll better understand and relate to what you’re going through than them.

If your contest is really big or if it’s really promising (depends on how you see it), you can try contacting companies if they are willing to be sponsors. You have to put extra effort here in selling your blog’s nice stats and what your blog and your contest can offer to them. If you’re lucky, maybe you’ll get some of them to answer your plea.

When looking for sponsors, it’s best to conduct the search early on before you announce the call for contestants itself so that you can plan ahead how you’d run the contest based on the prizes you’ve managed to collect. You can start by making a post about your desire to find sponsors to grab the attention of those interested to offer their hand but you have no contact to. You can also try entrecard’s messaging system, as I’ve received countless offers of being a contest sponsor through it. And then there’s the traditional email, forums, and IM. Then there’s a tip I got from a blog contest article where “you can publish your request on sites like ProfNet” to find suitable sponsors for your contest.

To get more participants for your blog, you have to promote your contest to as many venues as possible. Start by promoting it in social media sites like Digg, Stumble Upon, Twitter, BlogCatalog, etc. Invite your blogger contacts if they could join or help you spread the word, or try posting in forums, and commenting in other blogs. If your contest mechanics were made in such a way that your contest will be promoted easily across the blogosphere, then expect your call for participants to spread fast enough.

If you’ve noticed also, there are blogs and sites dedicated to announcing ongoing contests across the blogosphere. All you need to do is submit your contest to them. Sites like Contest Blogger, The Prize Blog, A.B.C. - About Blog Contests, and A Contest Blog are just a few examples. Please note that some contest submission sites require fees to get your contest listed or be featured.

Some bloggers resort to modifying their entrecard effectively to announce their ongoing contests. They create their 125 x 125 ads to do the announcing of their ongoing contest by including their best prize in big letters for everyone to see. Then they do frequent rounds of relentless dropping and relentless buying of advertising slots as well. Sometimes, also, they match it with changing their landing pages to the contest post they made. Others maximize what entrecard can offer by frequenting the entrecard forums and announce their contest there once a day.

These efforts you made to link back to your contest to promote it will not only get you your much needed participants but could also serve as backlinks that could help you in improving your rankings. So, don’t hesitate to make lots of them.

Other things to consider

When you’re expecting huge submissions for your contest, always make sure that you employ some form of system or methodology to track down your contestants activity. There’s nothing that could ruin your competition than having your contestants boycott you for being unfair just because you were unable to account for all of their submissions to enter the contest effectively.

Always correct the mistakes when you see one. Even how minimal it may appear, it has the potential to cause troubles in the flow of the contest especially if it accumulates.

Send your prizes as soon as possible. Don’t make your winners wait for half a year before they get their prize.

Live up to your word. If your deadline is after three weeks and the draw date on the next day, then make sure that when it comes your contestants will be able to see the results of your draws not later than two days after the draw date. Don’t change the rules all the time especially after the contest has already been started. That’s part of keeping up to your word. You should have overseen things right before you launched your contest.

Lastly, don’t raise your hopes up too much. Although there have been successful contests, there have also been failures. Don’t expect your blog to perform better afterwards. Although they have the capacity, running contests is not the only and perfect way to increase your blog’s stats and RSS feed count. Nonetheless, blog contests bring more fun and personality to your site and help build friendly relationships with your readers.

Oh yeah, one more thing. In case you're not that interested in holding contests yet, how about joining two of my recently sponsored contests:

There's also another contest which I could've promoted along with these two but, unfortunately, this post didn't quite make it in time before its deadline. Anyways, here's it's link: Blog Me The Money's Summer Kickoff Contest.

technorati tags: blog contest, blog promotion, blog tips

Quick Links for Better Blogging

2008-07-03T08:57:00.000-07:00

I haven’t finished my next post yet so I came up with these quick useful links which you could try. I hope you like it.

Comment Hunt – A Shareminer like customized Google search that helps you find High Page Rank DoFollow Blogs to get some quick links using blog comments.

A blogging and traffic tips carnival - July 2, 2008 – A carnival about blogging tips and generating more traffic. My post is included in the list. :)

Internet Marketing Carnival - Edition 6 – Another carnival about internet marketing and SEO. Same as the above. :) :)

Pinay Mommy’s Birthday Bash – Join Pinay Mommy’s Contest and get lots of entrecard credits and cash prizes.

Graham’s Entre-Digg – Graham Langdon, the founder of Entrecard, gives all entrecarders an opportunity to promote their blogs in entrecard. Hop in the “digg-train” and get more exposure from digg.

technorati tags: quick, links, blogging

Life is Colorful with $3,000 Worth of Prizes and 6000 ECs in Colourful Blog Anniversary Contest

2008-07-02T00:26:00.000-07:00

I know this post is long overdue because Life is Colourful invited me to join this contest about 15 to 20 days ago (I can’t remember exactly as I’ve already deleted the message). Anyways, I guess it’s not yet too late to join since the deadline for submission of entries will still be on the 14th of July.

Life is Colourful is a blog about making money online with very diverse topics about blogging ranging from affiliate marketing, article writing, blogging tips, health, to life. Lately, they’ve decided to hold a contest as part of their blog’s first anniversary with prizes worth $3,000 and 6000 entrecard credits. That’s one hefty amount of prize if you ask me. It’s still the 2nd of July so you still have some more time to join if you’re interested.

Here’s the list of prizes Life is Colourful promises to give its contest winners:

Colourful Blog Anniversary Contest - Win Over $3000 in Cash and Prizes
Blogging Tools & Products, Webmaster Resources, Memberships

- A product to help you making money: Super Affiliate Blogger and Wordpress Adsense Theme by Easywordpress ($194 value - 2 x $97)
- Two-year subscription to GoStats Pro [One of the web’s leading traffic stats providers] by GoStats ($180 value - 2 x $90)
- Five One-Year VIP Memberships to CreateBanner.com by Xavier Media ($175 value - 5 x $35)
- 100,000 [One hundred thousand] Tnx points by Tnx.net ($125 value)
- Two One-Hour Consultation Sessions by TheUniversiryKid ($100 value - 2 x $50)
- "Building An Internet Business From Scratch - Making $1,000 After 24 Hours" DVD by Marcus Hochstadt ($100 value)
- Two copies of Direct Response Templates for Salesletters and Salesstickies by Carl "Kidblogger" ($74 - 2 x $37)
- Two Copies of "TO DO List Software" by Fruitfultime ($60 value - 2 x $30)
- One 30 minutes of blog consultation by The Net Fool ($40 value)
- Blog Bundle Pack 2 [Specially designed for Bloggers] by 1 Cool File ($20 value)

Cash Prizes

- $30 cash prize by Capitalist Guide ($30 value)
- $25 cash prize by Autoline Reviews ($25 value)
- $25 cash prize by Health and Fitness Center ($25 value)
- $20 cash prize by Leisa Watkins ($20 value)
- $20 cash prize by Travel Tips ($20 value)
- $20 cash prize by New Homes Section ($20 value)
- $20 cash prize by Social Networking Sites ($20 value)
- $20 cash prize by Quality Vista ($20 value)

All prizes shall be given through Paypal

Books and eBooks

- Three copies of "Work Smart, Get Rich!" eBook Donated by The Net Fool ($45 value - 3 x $15)
- Autographed Copy of "The 5 Lessons a Millionaire Taught Me About Life and Wealth" book by Leisa Watkins

Each participant of this contest will get dollar eBook from TheUniversiryKid along with his consultation time.

Advertising Space

- Four 3-months textlink at Life is Colourful ($360 value - 4 x $90)
- Four 3-months textlink at Finance Blog ($180 value - 4 x $45)
- One Greenland Country Ad Space at Buy a Nation ($125 value)
- Full Set of Advertising Space by Roman Dock ($125 value)
Two 125 x 125 ($20 value - 2 x $10)
Three 468x60 ($30 value - 3 x $10)
Five Textlinks ($50 value - 5 x $10)
One Full Review ($25 value)
- Four 3-months 125 x 125 banner slots at Article Rewrite ($120 value)
- Ten Featured Links at Piggy Web Directory ($100 value)
- Ten Textlinks worth $10 bid each at BYDY Link Bid Directory ($100 value)
- Four Express Link Submissions Forever at Mad Mouse Directory ($51.80 value - 4 x $12.95)
- Two Featured Link Submissions for One year at Mad Mouse Directory ($49.90 value - 2 x $24.95)
- One 125 x 125 at Winning the Web by Gyutae Park ($50 value)
- One Full Blog Review at Life is Colourful ($50 value)
- Five Featured Links at Directories.bz ($50 value) * These apply to directory submissions only, Flippable.
- Three Featured Links for Six Months at Massive Net Links Directory ($30 value)
- Three Featured Links for Six Months at Internet Stromer Directory ($30 value)
- Three Featured Links for Six Months at Internet Ahead Directory ($30 value)
- One 125 x 125 at Blogging Fingers ($30 value)
- One 125 x 125 at New Homes Section ($30 value)
- One 125 x 125 at Sueblimely ($30 value)
- One 125 x 125 at Life is Colourful ($30 value)
- One Full Blog Review at Finance Blog ($30 value) * These apply to Finance service reviews, Flippable.
- One 125 x 125 at Dot Com Mogul ($25 value)
- Two 125 x 125 at Vincent ($20 value)
- One Full Blog Review at Lightnings Blog World (value $20)
- One 125 x 125 at The WWW Blog ($15 value)

Entrecard Credits

- 2500 Entrecard Credits by Life is Colourful
- 2000 Entrecard Credits by Sueblimely
- 1000 Entrecard Credits by Lightning Blog World
- 500 Entrecard Credits by Vincent

Total: 6,000

I’m really after the ECs and advertising space that’s why I joined. How about you? What do you want to win? Join now if you haven’t yet. This is also an opportunity to improve some aspects of your blog. Hmmm, this gave me an idea for my next post.

For more details about joining the contest you can visit Colourful Blog Anniversary Contest.

technorati tags: colorful, contest, prizes

Track your Blog Performance, Make Friends, and Make Money Online with SocialSpark

2008-06-28T09:14:00.000-07:00

I recently joined SocialSpark because of all the buzz about it in every blog I go, pretty much like with Entrecard back in January. SocialSpark and Pay Per Post are sister companies both owned by Izea; but a lot of bloggers are saying that it’s a lot easier to get your blog approved in SocialSpark compared to Pay Per Post. One interesting feature that SocialSpark boasts is its integration of social networking to the usual sponsored post program. SocialSpark also promises about creating unity between advertisers and bloggers. This I have yet to see; maybe when there will be more advertisers and competition of being first among bloggers isn’t that much of an issue. If you’re one of the small bloggers and has an interest in earning bucks every now and then through paid posts, give SocialSpark a try and see if it works for you.

Here's their code of ethics:
-100% Audit-able In-Post Disclosure
-100% Transparency
-100% Real Opinions
-100% Search Engine Friendly

Make Friends

SocialSpark gives you the ability to make friends with like minded bloggers who have also participated in their program. You can view their profile pages, rate them via a prop (thumbs up) or a drop (thumbs down), send them private messages or leave a comment in their profiles, and make friend requests to get in touch with them or just boast that you’ve made hundreds of networks inside SocialSpark.

Make Money

Generally you could earn something in between $5 to $30 from SocialSpark depending on the how much the advertiser can offer. The price fluctuates from time to time depending on the number of bloggers who will participate for that opportunity and, perhaps, the overall rank of your blog (traffic, pageviews, Alexa, Google, and ROI). Also there will be some offers where you won’t be qualified to take based on your blog’s ranking and reach.

There are two ways to earn money in SocialSpark: via blog sponsorship and sponsored posts. In blog sponsorship, the advertiser pays you an amount of money for each day that their ad shows up in your blog. I haven’t personally seen how it actually worked but they provide a screenshot of how it’s supposed to look like in your blog. Imagine Adbrite interstitials, I guess that’s how it feels like. Once you’ve opted to try blog sponsorships, you can choose how many days an ad shows up in your blog.

The other one is through sponsored posts. You are paid for writing a post about a particular product. The advertisers often require that you write words not less than a particular amount or you won’t be paid at all. Sometimes, they would also require screenshots or images along with your post. This post you’re reading is a sponsored post.

Although you won’t earn anything from this feature, I think it’s better to include it because it was designed to help bloggers avoid “blogger’s block” by giving them ideas to write about. There’s this feature called sparks. They are free opportunities placed by both bloggers and advertisers and are taken without pay. Sparks are a great way to interact with other bloggers and begin to create a community within SocialSpark.

View Analytics

SocialSpark utilizes IZEA’s own RealRank. It enables both advertisers and bloggers to view the specs of each blog right on the SocialSpark website. Izea’s Analytics include information such as page views, visitors, RealRank average, Alexa rank, and Google PageRank. You can use the analytics to check your blog’s performance, and at the same time a competitor’s performance as well.

Entrecard Purging

2008-06-27T07:24:00.000-07:00

Today, I received an email about entrecard purging all accounts from its system who are using quick drop pages. What's a quick drop page, you may ask? Entrecard defined it as following:

Quick drop pages are single pages with your Entrecard widget, made to load quickly and display your widget and not much else. Many quick drop pages have just a widget, and maybe an ad or some other type of widget.

If you have a quick drop page, remove it now or suffer being removed from entrecard. This is just a quick reminder for everyone using entrecard. Check the email you registered to Entrecard or Entrecard's blog for more information about this.

technorati tags: entrecard, quick drop, purging

Increase Your Subscriber Count and More by Joining Blog Carnivals

2008-06-25T08:33:00.000-07:00

I’ve been joining blog carnivals recently, and right now my article is being featured in one: How to Make Money Doing What You Love Carnival. Do you know why? Blog Carnivals have the power to help your blog in many ways. It will give your blog exposure to more audience, new subscribers, traffic, that much needed deep link to one of your articles, and increased ranking in both Google and Technorati. Of course, how it will affect your blog depends on how much time and effort you invest in it. To learn exactly how to get more from blog carnivals, just read on.

What’s a blog carnival?

To those who haven’t heard of the term yet, a blog carnival is a particular kind of blog community where permalinks (or links) to posts of blogs are submitted, collected, and published at a specific date. The posts submitted are usually based on a certain topic or theme. The host of a carnival publishes the collected links with its title, author and description in his/her blog on the specified date of its publishing (usually the deadline of submissions). To get a better idea of what a blog carnival is really about, take a look at blog carnival’s FAQs.

How to join blog carnivals?

Blog carnivals don’t require registration. All you need is a link to the post that you have published already and an email where you’ll receive a form that says you’ve submitted a post to this carnival and the details of the said carnival.

blog carnival email receipt

The only thing you have to do is fill-up the information needed for your link to be published properly.

blog carnival form

One thing to remember also is to submit your desired post/s to the appropriate carnival to avoid having your submission declined. From what I’ve read, since I’m fairly new to this thing, there are some carnivals that are strict about their submission policies and stuff so there will be times when your submissions will be revoked for some valid reasons. But I believe there will be more carnivals that’ll gladly accept your submissions, so don’t lose heart.

You can browse for the right carnival for your blog posts in Blog Carnival. Alternatively, if you’re lucky to spot one, some blogs announce a call for submissions to their upcoming carnival edition. Usually, they provide a link to where you can submit your posts. If not, you can still find it in Blog Carnival through patient browsing of their numerous carnivals, which you could sort by categories and date of editions by the way.

Benefits from joining a blog carnival

One way backlinks – Blog carnivals are made of compiled lists of link submissions from different bloggers; so, definitely, once it’s published, a backlink to your article (or should I call deep link) will be there. One way backlinks, most importantly deep links, will greatly benefit your blog in terms of search engine, Technorati, and Alexa rankings.

Boost in rankings – a backlink coming from one carnival is like a touch of gold for you simply because search engines, Technorati, and Alexa rank your blog based on the number of quality sites linking to it, the higher the PR the better. Now, most of these guys holding and hosting carnivals have decent PRs too. What do you think will happen if you’ve made lots of submissions to different carnivals?

Traffic – I’d like to say “boost your traffic” but basically it all depends on the marketing and popularity of the carnival plus your post headline’s catchiness which will determine how much traffic your blog will receive. Most definitely, though, you’ll be guaranteed traffic even how small it is once your link comes up in the carnival. To guarantee the carnival’s success, help promote it by submitting it to social media sites, e-mailing your friends and contacts about it, and promoting it in your blog as well.

One interesting aspect about blog carnivals is that, like other blog posts, they are indexed by search engines. Now, depending on their link popularity and keyword optimization, they will show up in search results every now and then. What this means is that they can still provide traffic even after they were published. However, it will not be as many as the week it was published.

More subscribers – Generally, traffic coming from the carnival are those who got curious about your submission and decided to take a peek at what you have to offer. If they like what they found in your blog, then it’s guaranteed that they will subscribe or get back every now and then to check on your blog. To take advantage of this traffic, make it easy for them to subscribe and always make quality posts as much as possible.

Tips on maximizing your benefits from your submission

1) Submit to the right carnival. It should be obvious that if your post is about blogging, submit it to blogging related carnivals. Submitting it to cooking carnivals will not get it posted. Also, the more appropriate the carnival to your post, the more its audience will find your blog interesting.

2) Submit to carnivals at least once a week. Your steady submissions will give you better traffic from all of the carnivals you’ve participated in and better rankings because of them also. Take advantage of this free marketing tool to expose your unknown blog to a wider set of audience.

3) Submit your best or pillar articles. It’s always up to you, but if you want to get better impression and acceptance from other people, it’s normal to always put your best foot forward. By submitting your masterpieces, they will get a better idea of what kind of content they can expect from you and what you’re interested in blogging about.

4) Get one catchy title. You should have done this early on when you published your post, but in case you haven’t it’s best to change it in a way that other people will more likely click it. You might not see its text field in the submission form early on, but after providing your permalink it will appear containing your post’s original title. You can manipulate it from here. Of course, your choices of catchy words should revolve around what your post is all about. Don’t make up “über” titles that’re completely different from what’s originally provided. Like in well-known social-bookmarking sites like digg, reddit, and stumbleupon, people will get mad at you if you do that.

5) Provide a short summary for your post. Hosts always include the summary of the post you’re submitting along with your link. This summary will provide your potential readers what you could offer in your post. It’s always better to provide one so you can use it to market your post effectively.

6) Get your posts in early. I got the idea from this article; “Best Practices for Driving Traffic with Blog Carnivals”. Usually, carnival hosts will post in the order that they receive the submissions. This will give you a fair advantage since the earlier your submission goes in, the higher your link will be positioned in the list, and thus more people would possibly pay attention and click it. Alternatively, hosts will be more likely to read and review ( and give a thumbs up) your post if it's in early as compared to the posts they receive an hour before the carnival deadline.

7) Promote the blog carnival. It’s a lesser known rule of thumb in blogging to promote those sites that link to you except spam. Why? Because the more these sites or pages get popular, the more PR juice and visitors you could get from it. Blog carnivals are one of those sites. You can start by sending it to digg, stumbleupon, reddit, delicious, and several other social bookmarking sites. Post about it in your blog. E-mail it to your contacts and friends. It all depends on where you can promote it effectively.

8) Make it easy to subscribe to your blog. Turn your visitors into regular readers by placing your subscribe button where they can immediately see it. You can also optimize your theme where they can see your best posts to better convince them to subscribe to your blog.

That’s it. Blog carnivals can do a lot to your blog, especially if you’re a beginner or interested in making more traffic. Only, you need to be focused and serious about it and, of course, pay attention to these tips and/or learn your way to better blog carnival submissions.

technorati tags: blog carnival, blogging, tips