Want to start a blog and not coming up with enough ideas? Take a look at the blogs listed on Blogger Stories. You may just get some fresh ideas.

But beware, you may also get caught up reading the blogs and before you realize it, half the day is over.

There are tons of ways to get ideas for blog posts. When you see something that catches your attention, do yourself a favor and write it down in a notebook. Call it your “Blog Ideas” notebook. The next time you’re out of ideas, you can go back to your handy dandy notebook and use one of thoese ideas.

Technorati Tags: ideas for blogs, blogger stories, blog ideas

Popularity: 11% [?]

Recently, Marc Galeazzi bought a money making blog called One Man’s Goal for $10,000. His move has been met with some skepticism by other bloggers on the wisdom of spending such a large sum of money for a “money making blog”.

Frank over at OpTempo tries to give Marc some advice.

Here are the blog stats for One Man’s Goal - so you can decide for yourself if it’s money well spent.

Traffic
4/5/08-4/10/08 - 1,135

Alexa - 83,114
Technorati - 16,847
Earnings (As quoted by Bryan for past month) $1,150
Posts - 230
Comments - 3,535
Rss feed - 616 (This is low because Bryan only recently coverted to feedburner) Real Est. - 1000, but will will use the 616.
Inbound links - Google - 165 Yahoo - 7,226
Page Rank -4
45n5 ranking - 50
Aweber Newsletter Subscribers- 396

Based on one month’s earning, the blog sold for about 10x monthly earnings. But we don’t know if those earnings are consistent. You usually value a blog based on the stability of past earnings and projections of future earnings. Other factors like the number of readers and the size of the email list can come into play as well. Personally, I don’t care about 45n5 ranking, Alexa ranking or the number of posts and comments.

Will Marc succeed? I don’t know but I think that he will put everything he has into it because of the amount of money he has invested into it.

I wish him luck. The “make money online” blogging niche is really crowded and you have to really stand out and be able to carve out your own piece of the pie.

Technorati Tags: one man’s goal, marc galeazzi, blog valuation, buying a blog, money making blogs

Popularity: 29% [?]

What do fancy sports cars and make money bloggers have in common?

Well, ever since John Chow put up his blog with a photo of a fancy car in the header, there have been numerous copycats. Surprising? No. After all, people like to copy those that have found success.

Here’s John Chow’s blog header…

and a few admirers copycats…

Now let’s have a bit of fun and go down memory lane.

Here’s the evolution of the cars on John Chow’s blog.

circa November 2006

we like blue better than red!

maybe TWO blue cars are better than one.

Seen a make money online blog with a car in the header lately? Let me know….

Technorati Tags: john chow, make money blogs, headers with cars

Popularity: 44% [?]

There is an article in the NYT that highlights the fact that blogging may be hazardous to your health. The article mentioned Russell Shaw who is a blogger who suffered a fatal heart attack recently. Another blogger mentioned was Marc Orchant who also had a heart attack.

This story should be a wake up call for those who are trying to make money online through blogging. While you’re at it, be sure to ask yourself what you’re doing it for and whether it is worth all your sweat and tears. Truth be told, it’s not as easy making money through blogging as some may have you believe. It does take a LOT of hard work.

Be sure to take care of the important things first - family, health, etc. Keep things in perspective!

image credit: Vicky’s Pics (Flickr)

Technorati Tags: blogging and your health, priorities

Popularity: 46% [?]

If you don’t have a way for readers to subscribe to your email list, you are losing a lot of repeat traffic. Think about it, how many blogs do you visit on a daily basis? There are too many blogs to keep up with - yes, even the good ones. Sometimes I visit a blog that I find interesting and I will check it frequently for a while until they start going off topic and I lose interest. However if I sign up for their email notification list and I get a “friendly email reminder” that a particularly interesting post has been written chances are I will go and visit that blog again.

Previously, I have written about capturing all your blog readers. Having an email subscription system is one of the ways to keep in touch with your readers. Of course, if you’re into social networking, there’s also Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc. Pick your poison.

Sidenote: By the way, if you use Twitter, Tweetscan is a great search engine specifically for Twitter.

My favorite autoresponder is Aweber. With Aweber, they claim you’ll get great deliverability (how does one check?). But the features I like are the ability to set up different sub-lists and transfer subscribers from one list to another based on certain actions. Suppose you’re selling your own product and you collect a list of prospects.

Now if someone on the prospects list buys your product, you can have them automatically switched to your customer list. This saves a lot of manual work.

Another feature that I like is the ability to do a split test on your email list. If you have a list of 6000 people, you can create a 3 way split-test message and you can partition it evenly (2000/2000/2000) or in any proportion that you like. This is a good way to test message titles (think direct marketing) and also message styles.

For those of you who are crazy about tracking, the reporting options are fantastic. You can keep a tabs on the daily trends of new leads, unverified vs. verified leads, countries, states, area codes, follow up status, etc. This is particularly useful if you want to keep a tab on how many people subscribe to your blog after a post that really appeals to your audience.

At $19.95 a month (if you have less than 10,000 people on your list) Aweber is unbeatable value!

Technorati Tags: autoresponders, Aweber, email list, followup

Popularity: 48% [?]

If you are interested in promoting eBay as an affiliate, you should know that they are no longer using CJ as the affiliate platform. They have their own in-house affiliate program now called eBay Partner Network.

This is something you should really consider if you’re interested in promoting a brand that’s recognizable worldwide.

Be sure to read the terms and conditions before you join. Specifically, you’re not allowed to do direct linking from a PPC search engine ad to an eBay landing page. Going through your own site first is okay. Maybe you can check out BANS if you aren’t already using it. That’s a great way to construct highly targeted landing pages for this purpose.

The compensation is based on a tiered structure and you’re paid based on a percentage of the winning bid (promote high ticket items!) or the number of active new members recruited.

Technorati Tags: eBay partner network, affiliate program

Popularity: 53% [?]

Do you know how long your website or blog takes to load for users with different internet connection speeds? The reason this is important is because not everyone is using broadband although it is becoming increasingly widespread. If your site takes forever to load, the chances of the visitor clicking on the back button is higher and you’re going to lose a lot of traffic that way.

Fortunately, there are tools available online that lets you check how fast or slow your site loads. Most of these tools are free. One example of such a tool is from websiteoptimization.com.

It tells you how fast your site loads depending on what type of connection your visitor has. It also gives you suggestions on how you can improve your load time.

Try to keep the load time less than 3 seconds. The main culprit of slow load times is usually images. Try as to use images in JPG or PNG formats. These formats usually take up the smallest amount of memory. If you have Photoshop, you can save the images in different formats and compare the file sizes. You can also set the amount of compression to use.

If you’re using third party widgets on your blog, these could also slow down your load times. You might have noticed that I have removed the Blog Catalog widget from my sidebar because I found that it was taking a long time to load up.

Remember, the faster your site loads, the more visitors you’ll retain and more visitors mean more money!

Technorati Tags: website load time, compress images, image files

Popularity: 56% [?]

I received 9 comments from the little contest I ran to help send me to SOBCON 2008. What I did was to send a message to blog owners on EC that I thought would be interested to win 500 EC credits easily.

Moral of the story - not everyone checks their EC inbox for messages or they just don’t care enough to win some easy credits.

Anyway, there were 9 entries so I used random.org to generate a random number between 1 and 9.

And the winner is …. (drumroll, please)

Congratulations, to http://mywebmarketing.info/.

You’ll wake up to 500 more EC credits.

To everyone who participated, thank you!

Technorati Tags: SOBCON 2008, contest winner, Entrecard credits

Popularity: 69% [?]

I had a chance recently to interview Fabien, an aspiring teen blogger who owns SmallFishBigMoney.com.

Here’s what we talked about:

First of all, you grew up in the Seychelles, right? What was it like there?

Fabien: Seychelles is a very great place to live in, I have very fond memories of family and friends from when I was there and I go back there frequently for holiday. Most of my family are currently still there so that’s just another reason for me to go back often, but the country is not doing too well economically and it recently experienced a devaluation in currency, I left there 4 years ago to come to Australia as a result of the economy not looking very promising and as a result of escalating levels of political tension in the country.

When did you get started blogging? What got you to start?

Fabien: I started blogging in October 2007; it was a combination of things which got me started. I had wanted to immerse myself in a web venture for a while, but I was unsure of how to do so at the time, so I decided to check out how I can begin a business venture online.

I started searching for terms relating to making money online and I eventually discovered popular sites like ProBlogger, DoshDosh and John Chow. These sites obviously had a great impact and influence on me, that’s when I decided to start a blog – Small Fish Big Money Dot Com (http://smallfishbigmoney.com). My blog focuses on business, entrepreneurship, better writing skills and the elements of web design. I also blog about about technology, software and personal development.

You’re still in school right? How do you balance your time between school, friends, activities, family and blogging?

Fabien: Finding the right balance in life is always important, as I pointed out in this article Finding And Maintaining The Right Balance In Life, it is very important to prioritise important tasks, complete them and ensure that they are done properly, but efficiently. People sometimes spend three days doing one thing, when they could have accomplished their goal in the space of 2 or 3 hours.

My motto is prioritising and completing tasks in a given space of time. By doing this you allow yourself the time to go and participate in school activities, have more socialising time and live your life as opposed to sitting in front of a computer for half of it. I sometimes talk about “Relaxing And Taking Breaks Often” and in another post I asked, “When Do You Write Your Best Posts?”, because blogging at various times of the day definitely impacts on the success of a blog post, whether it will be linked to or not, etc.

A lot of bloggers sometimes run out of ideas for creative posts. What’s your advice for them?

Fabien: If you are in a niche that is too narrow, you won’t have enough content to give your opinion about, similarly if you are in a niche that is too crowded, your content may be the same as 50 other blogs out there. The key to continually getting ideas for posts is to ensure your blog is about quite a wide range of topics, in addition to this you should not restrict yourself to blogging about four or five topics … if something interests you, talk about it, the thing is, if you are interested in it, your readers may very well be too.

Do you use Social media to help you get more traffic? If so, which ones?

Fabien: In the blogosphere, social media is very popular. Do I use it to help me get more traffic? Of course! If you have this outlet that puts you in touch with literally millions of people worldwide…use it! If you Stumble an average article, you can get 200 hits to your blog by the very next day … if you Digg a great article, your server could go down, you could pick up 100 extra RSS subscribers (for your blog … the possibilities are endless.

Social media is very powerful, it cannot be underestimated under any circumstances and I believe it will be sticking around for quite some time. My advice to bloggers out there is, get acquainted with it. Go and sign up for popular sites like StumbleUpon, Digg and Reddit to name a few.

At the moment I am not using as many social media sites as I would like to be using. I use services like MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, Mixx, StumbleUpon and Sphinn. It is without a doubt that this list will be expanding in 2008 to add to an always expanding blog readership.

What are some of your goals for the blog?

Fabien: In 2008 I know that Small Fish Big Money will experience massive growth. It has already proved it’s worth as a valuable site for information. But we will be expanding the site to provide our readers with even more information about online business development, branding, entrepreneurship, marketing and so many more topics.

My goals for 2008 are clear, solid and fundamentally sound. Build a strong RSS readership, skyrocket my Technorati authority and get into the Alexa 100,000. These goals are very bold, but they will not be completed without the hard work, commitment and dedication I put into my blog to share knowledge with my readers. I am always dishing out valuable tips, so I highly recommend subscribing via RSS.

Thanks for the interview, Fabien!

(Note: If you’re a blogger who is interested in being featured in an interview here, please drop me a line at hock AT moneymakingblogs DOT com)

Technorati Tags: SmallFishBigMoney, Fabien, teen blogger, blogger interview

Popularity: 74% [?]

How can you help send me to SOBCON 2008? Simple.

Click HERE.

If you decide to support me, please comment on this post and I will choose a random commenter to win 500 Entrecard credits.

This contest ends on March 15th and the winner will be picked randomly after that.

Technorati Tags: SOBCON 2008, win Entrecard credits

Popularity: 72% [?]