Blogging Sueblimely

I have recently been researching the online money making business.  I have always been sceptical of so called get rich schemes and hate those never ending one page, badly designed, garish, splash pages for MLM, PPC and worthless digital products. I wanted to look past these to see if there was anything worthwhile. After days of research, to my surprise, I found a couple of programs that took my fancy. I took the plunge and money is slowly but surely starting to come in but more about that another day.

I am going to share some of my findings but some warnings first. Please be careful before spending any money and view the fine print. I got caught by a training program that seemed to cost a mere $1 a month only to find this was the first month only: $29 per month thereafter. (I was able to cancel my subscription easily after only spending the $1 and I did know this before I signed up). Although I am only going to recommend programs I have had success with, you have to be prepared to do some learning and put in some work.

When researching I ignored the forementioned splash pages, as the overhype and overmarketing makes me cringe and I am sure they are bad for my mental health.  I decided to do my research through social networking, review and scam buster sites.

Cautious as usual I did not want a lot of links to sites Google may not take too kindly to on this post so please find my reports on my subdomain

Some of  links I mention are my affiliate links but I only add them so that you can connect with me, I make no money from you doing so unless you decide to join up yourself, rather than being a free member. All of the programs I mention to date are free to join, at least at the basic level. I am cautious when it comes to spending money on such things as I would be mortified if I fell for the hype and got caught in scams. I also refuse to join programs that require me to send out multitudes of spammy, scammy emails to get referrals. However, my specially set up gmail address is full of these from others, a result of my research.   I suggest if you decide to dabble then you too set up a separate gmail account.

Move over Entrecard, make way for CMF Ads (Changing Marketing Forever) and make money at the same time as promoting your blog. Not only can you earn credits on CMF Ads by advertising on your blog, and use these credits to advertise on other blogs, you can buy and sell credits from CMF too: a credit costs $0.25. Member blogs are manually checked to ensure quality.

How does CMF Ads work?

You can see the CMF Ad slots in my sidebar – there are various combinations to choose from, ranging from one Ad spot to a 4 in one block. The Ad widget runs in iframes so as not to slow your page load time.

You set your own price for the cost of advertising on your own site; so there is no being priced out of the market, as with Entrecard. You can change your price to suit your current situation. Ads, which last for a month, are rotating so you can accept multiple ads at a time. I currently have 5 ads running between the two ad spots, at a cost of 3 credits each. If you have more than one blog then you can manage these all from the one account.

Dropping in on other sites is not necessary as you get to know other members through the CMF forums. These have proved to be very friendly and helpful. although I am not surprised considering the bloggers who have spent a great deal of time to set the service up: coming up with the idea to begin with, coding the site, refining and testing it. I was fortunate to have been accepted as a beta tester, although, to my knowledge, everything was running smoothly even at that stage.

The forums, as well as providing help and support on CMF, allow you to join groups to promote your other social networking profiles (Stumbleupon and Twitter so far). A post of the week competition, decided on by a poll of members, allows you to submit your posts to gain some extra recognition. A blog critique forum will give you feedback on your site. The Marketplace section allows you to offer services in exchange for buying an ad on someone’s site or to offer/request guest posts, site design or paid blogging jobs.

CMF Ads Control Panel:

| CP Home | Find Ads | Manage Ads | Ad Stats | Balance | Buy Credits |

Statistics show you the number of page views and how many clicks have been made on the ads on your own site and how many have been produced by your ad on other sites. Individual profile pages show a rank and the number of unique visitors to a site over time. These tools help you to place your ads to the best effect and a categorization system allow you to target your ads to a selected audience.

Who created CMF Ads?

So who are the people behind CMF Ads? – Three bloggers who were heavily involved with Entrecard..

Firstly, Ben Barden, a banana loving, Dr Evil look alike with diabolical vision, who has been an honorary Aussie for the last year or so. We will be sorry to lose you back to England, Ben. He is the author of Ben Barden (not surprisingly), Top Ten Blog Tips, Zen Working and the developer of Injader. If you are not familiar with Injader, it is a CMS system, which provides blogging features like WordPress with the extra CMS features of a Joomla/Drupal type system (without the steep learning curve}.

Joining Ben is turnip and Stan. Turnip of Turnip of Power is a wonderful source of knowledge with tutorials and balanced reviews on blogging, advertising networks and the best social networking practices (he puts the latter into practice well himself too). I did not know Stan until I joined CMF, where is he very helpful in the forums- nothing to do with his blogging ability rather his blog topic Fantasy Baseball – I am not a baseball fan.

Joining Up

If you join up (by registering with the forums) please let me know here – I have some credits available for advertising and if I advertise on your site then you will gain credits yourself.

The amount of money being made by blogging is is increasing according to the analysis I made of ProBlogger’s survey figures in yesterday’s post. Did Bloggers Make More Money in 2008?

Why could this be?

1. We are getting more knowledgeable about making money online, thanks to bloggers such as Darren Rowse and others, plus various new training programs and schemes.
2. The huge increase in numbers of those blogging about how to earn money online makes it hard to remain totally ignorant about it.
3. The more commonly ads are seen on blogs the more acceptable they become and yet more bloggers take part.
4. An increase in the amount of ad networks and affiliate programs targeting bloggers?
5. Bloggers plugging these affiliate programs on their blogs and via other networks to earn money from signing up others.
6. An increase in social networking among bloggers, who learn about money making methods from others?
7. More advanced blogging software that allows for easier additions of ads through widgets.
8. Knowing there is money to be made by blogging has attracted more of those who enter into it for this reason alone. and more businesses are starting blogs to plug their own products.
9. Buying online is more accepted overall. With the increase in online stores, auctions sites such as ebay and retail outlets with online buying it has become very normal to purchase online. We are less afraid of giving out our credit card numbers and companies such as Paypal feed this sense of security.
10. The more that are interested in making money by blogging the more profitable it becomes for those offering training and peripheral services.

I have not made any money from blog advertising, although I have started earning from creating websites using WordPress as a CMS system rather than other Content Management Systems.Then again I have not put any effort into seriously trying to make money via this blog so it is not surprising. I research the subject but all the get rich quick schemes tend to put me off. However, the results of Darren’s survey and all the reasons why it should now be more profitable than a couple of years ago are encouraging. If you have but dabbled in making money online in the past more effort may well pay dividends.

Problogger has released the results of its 2008 survey on how much money bloggers make. It makes interesting viewing. Although figures were also shown for 2006 and 2007, I wanted a clearer picture of how the 3 years compared; not only to work out if there were any increases but to compare like with like – i.e. comparing those likely to answer surveys via ProBlogger from one year to the next..

The results of my comparisons can be seen below and represent the amounts earned by the survey participants in October 2006, 2007 and 2008 expressed as a percentage of the total participating. The figures do not include those who make no money from blogging.

How much money bloggers made October 2006-2008 Chart 1

The charts below gives a clearer, simpler picture.

How much money bloggers made October 2006-2008 Chart 2

How much money bloggers made October 2006-2008 Chart 3

No surprise is that the majority of bloggers earn under $10 a month, although I suspect this is from lack of real effort and the use of Adsense only. Adsense is well known, easy to set up and the option to include it is even inbuilt into Blogger blogspot. Making money is likely not a main priority for these bloggers.

What surprised me was that 408 respondents (10%) earned over $15,000 in 2008, up from 7% in 2006. This represents a third of those earning over $500 a month. ProBlogger is likely to attract responses from other high money making bloggers. If I conducted such a survey on this blog I am sure the picture would be different.

As you can see there is a general increase in the amounts made since 2006 and only a portion of this would be accounted for by inflation. Why could this be? I have my own theories but will post these separately tomorrow.

My figures were taken from Problogger’s survey results at How Much Money Do Bloggers Make Blogging?

With the holiday season upon us and many travelling for holidays or to see family, (longer holidays in the Southern Hemisphere of course), internet access is not always available. I enjoy such a forced break from the net to catch up on some reading, including some of the downloaded ebooks I have not had chance to look at. Here are a few of the more worthwhile free ebooks and reports I have come across relating to blogging.

The Roadmap To Become A Blogger from the team at Become a Blogger – superstar blogger, Yaro Starak, and internationally reknowned author, Gideon Shalwick, was released for download on 1st December.

Yaro Starak’s Blog Profits Blueprint is a 50+ page report particularly useful for beginner to intermediate level bloggers wanting to monetize their blogs

Caroline Middlebrook is offering the 49 lessons of her “The Bloggers Bible” for free by email instalment – if you do not want to wait for the emails you can purchase the book for download. Her How to Develop Money-Making Niche Sites with WordPress ebook is available for free download as is her Traffic Rush Home Study Course, teaching how to start driving a rush of StumbleUpon traffic to your website.

From Alex Sysoef comes Profitable Blogging For Newbies.

Jake Humphrey’s Authority Black Book 2.0, 2009 version to teach you “Social Marketing Tactics That Generate Traffic Instantly”

Marketing guru Seth Godin has a treasure chest of ebooks on offer, available via his Squidoo ebook page. These include, until Dec 30th, The Bootstrappers Bible.

Mashable comes up trumps once again with the following resources (:including some that I have already mentioned)

• 20 Free Ebooks and Whitepapers for Better Web Design
• Top 10 Free E-books For Bloggers

The March 2008 edition of Bloghology provides some insights into how other bloggers have succeeded, although the site was temporarily down when I visited..

Rapidshare – downloads of all sorts of resources including blogging. Rapidshare itself is not searchable but you can use the RapidShare search engine to find what you want. I will not mention ebooks I found that were on torrent sites. Whatever your views are on downloading TV shows and movies, you will likely agree with me that if a blogger is trying to make a few bucks by writing and selling an ebook then we should buy it and not illegally download it. I am not certain if Rapidshare contains such ebooks but it might.

If you are interested in purchasing books:

• ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett, which is always sold out in bookshops I have visited, but it is available on Amazon UK as a hardcopy (not in stock at Amazon US at present) and, for Aussies, Dymocks online in hardcopy and via download. Review by Freelance Switch. Darren says, in a comment to one of his posts, that the book is now available in some libraries too.
• The newly released The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging Amazon
• Do a search for blogging on Amazon and you will find many more including the Dummies range on Blogging and Wordress.

PS Have you noticed a recent increase of popup forms on blogs offering free resources – ebook downloads, newsletters or I have maybe been visiting sites that I would not normally go to? These are appearing as you first enter the site and require your email address and sometimes to sign up for newsletters or email feeds. I find the popups intrusive although I do not object to having to sign up for a newsletter to download something that is being given away free, this seems a fair deal. You will find a few of these popups on some of the sites referred to above!

Please let me know if you have read other good ebooks on blogging related matters.

If you need a break from blogging totally try the following sources for free fiction or hobby ebooks – Project Gutenberg and Scribd Literature for downloads, the getfreebooks blog for information on where to find books or do a search via the pdf geni search engine.

Happy reading!