Banking On The Blog

If, like mine, your blog runs on coffee, I invite you to check out an organization called Coffee Kids. This non-profit helps people in coffee-producing countries to improve the quality of their lives and build more financially viable communities.

Founded by coffee roaster Bill Fishbein in 1988, Coffee Kids creates education, health-care and micro-enterprise programs for coffee farmers and their families in Latin America (Central America and Mexico so far, and now also Peru).

CK is one of only a handful of organizations to which I regularly donate, so I really believe in what they’re doing. (By the way, if you’re in the U.S. you can get a tax deduction for your contribution.)

Click here or on the banner to learn more about Coffee Kids.

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Sooner or later in your blogging career you’re going to come across the term “PLR.” PLR means “private label rights” and it refers to articles and other content that you can buy ready-made to put on your blog (or elsewhere, as in an ebook).

Generally, when you buy a PLR article, you are also purchasing the right to edit or rewrite it, and to put you name on it as the author.

Used correctly, this is a relatively painless way to get content for your blog and leave you more time for marketing and promoting your blog. In fact, Rob Benwell, the author of Blogging To The Bank, is a great fan of PLR material.

As with most things on the Web, though, PLR can be–and has been–seriously abused. Here are three tips that will help you avoid the landmines and make the best use of PLR content:

1. Rewrite! Change at least 25% of the PLR article to make it uniquely yours–50% to 75% is even better. After all, 200 other webmasters might have bought the same article and be planning to use it. Search engines frown on duplicate content.
2. Use PLR content sparingly. For every PLR article on your blog, you should have at least 5 or 6 completely original posts that you wrote yourself from scratch (remember, every original post does not need to be a full-length article; sometimes a couple of sentences is sufficient).
3. Buy good PLR content. Not all PLR providers are equal in terms of the writing quality of their stuff. Some care enough about their customers to purchase articles only from established, professional writers. Others either don’t know good writing from bad or just don’t care. Remember that it’s your blog and your reputation at stake.

Free Report

I’ve found a great free report that covers all the tricks of using PLR content not only to enhance your blogging, but also to make money by putting that content to work in other creative ways. As a bonus, it also includes a section on earning easy income by writing short reports (like 7 to 14 pages!).

To download the report, just right-click on the link and save to your computer.

Right click here to download PLR Secrets

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Making money on the Internet, working from home, being an independent contractor–they’re really all related, aren’t they? They all play into the big dream that most everyone seems to share these days: breaking out of the office/store/cubicle world and being independent both financially and career-wise.

I’ve looked at many freelance work exchange sites, and I think this relatively new up-and-comer is far and away the best of them. It’s called Go Freelance and it maintains a huge and constantly updated database of real, paying freelance jobs available online and throughout the world.

Yes, they have tons of writing, editing, graphics and programming type jobs just waiting to be claimed by anyone with the requisite skills or experience. But they also have financial work and other types of “non-creative” (for lack of a better word) jobs that often are not thought of as being in the freelancer’s realm.

The cost for joining Go Freelance and being able to tap into all those jobs is very reasonable, and you can even try it out for just a couple of bucks.

Click here to learn more.

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I used Google’s Blog Search to see what other bloggers were saying about Blogging To The Bank 2.0. Here’s how one blog starts out:

Benwell makes an astonishing occupation explaining in simple stairway how anyone can do money blogging. The information in Blogging to the Depository Financial Institution 2.0 have helped me larn more than about blogging and what it can make for my business.

Clearly, someone has bought themselves one of those godawful programs that takes an article and creates hundreds or thousands of new articles–each one “unique”–by running through it substituting supposed synonyms for every other word. That’s how you end up with mess like this.

The first sentence of that mutilated passage above must originally have read something like, “Benwell does an amazing job describing in simple steps how anyone can make money blogging.” In other words, the ur-sentence–before someone fed it through their dumb computer program–was actually good English.

Here’s some more … just a little more. Trust me, it goes on like this for a good 400 or more words.

Affiliate selling have go a batch tougher as advertisement costs maintain going up. One can easily travel bust using wage per chink hunt engine selling land sites such as as Google AdWords and Yahoo. When these costs acquire too high you necessitate a solution. How can you happen an easy and low cost manner to advance your merchandises with out a website? …

… Rob Benwell, the writer of Blogging to the Depository Financial Institution 2.0, cognizes what it is like to nearly travel bust advertisement other people’s products. …

… He also explicates why you should do certain you have your ain blog and which hosting company you should utilize if you are just starting out. He have got laid out the most successful measure by measure design for long term blogging success like, how you can tap into the hottest new niches that have small or no nice competition and which cardinal phrases to aim to bring forth the most money in as fast a clip as possible. …

… Mr. Benwell offers a 100% hazard free guarantee. If you make not see a net income within the adjacent 8 hebdomads he will personally return you be for the book.

Come to think of it, promising a “hazard free guarantee” might be more persuasive than the usual boring “risk free guarantee.” Risk free just sounds like I’ll get my money back if I don’t like the book; hazard free sounds like I’ll also be protected against paper cuts and falling off roofs while reading it.

So here’s what really burns me about this piece of junk: It managed to grab third position in Google Blog Search’s results for the term “blogging to the bank.” Third out of 4,868!

At least I learned a new word. A hebdomad is a group of seven, especially a group of days. In other words (plain everyday English): a week.

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As I’ve said, I think that the new version of Rob Benwell’s Blogging To The Bank is a much more practical and even more honest book than his first one. That’s mainly because I think its methods will have staying power as far as continuing to pull in profits from creating monetized blogs.

Nevertheless, the handful of blogs that I set up using his old methods are still drawing a small but steady stream of cash for me. For example, the following three Blogspot sites continue to produce affiliate sales for me, as well as some AdSense income:

• Spanish Courses
• Learn Spanish
• Free Spanish Lessons

I remember that at one point, Google/Blogger’s automated “splog” (spam blog) sniffer flagged a couple of these for deletion. I sent an email requesting a human review, and after someone had looked them over, the blogs were allowed to remain.

The lesson, good yesterday and good today, is that you can use your blogs to sell things, and even be fairly aggressive about it. But give your visitors some real meat, too. With the blogs listed above, I tried to provide some genuine content–and I’m sure that’s what saved them from becoming victims of the chopping block.

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If you need a couple more reasons to get your hands on Blogging To The Bank 2.0 right now, consider these: Article Assistance, Blog Announcer Pro. Those are two bonus software jewels that Benwell throws into the package when you download BTTB2.

Now, you probably know that some information sellers like to cram their offers with dozens or even hundreds of bonus “gifts” to entice you to buy their product. It often turns out that the bonuses are, to put it bluntly, crap. That’s not the case here.

These programs can help you automate two of the more tedious blogging-related tasks, freeing your time to create content, which of course should be at the heart of your efforts.

Article Announcer equips you to blast your articles to dozens of article directory sites at the push of a button. Writing and submitting articles in your particular niche–with a link back to your site, of course–is one of the top free ways to get traffic.

Since getting my copy of BTTB2 a few days ago, and then creating this blog, I’ve already made use of Blog Announcer. Basically, it gives you a one-button mechanism for letting the world–or at least the world of blog directories–know of your blog’s existence. You just fill in the basic information about your site, such as title, URL and your contact information, and then it goes to work submitting that information on auto-pilot. Neat.

Now I should note that there’s a third piece of software in the BTTB2 package, one which Benwell probably should have left out, to be blunt. It’s called Blog Hunter and I think it’s supposed to find Blogspot blogs that have been deleted by Google for alleged spamming. Since some of these blogs still have traffic coming to them, the idea (according to Benwell) is to start up new blogs by re-using the deleted names. Blammo! Built-in traffic.

Unfortunately, Blog Hunter doesn’t work–at least it didn’t for me, and other reviewers say it doesn’t work for them either. It simply crawls a bunch of pages and then comes to a stop, flashing an error message. According to what I’ve read elsewhere, this is because Google changed some indexing algorithm, effectively rendering this software inoperable.

There are several other bonus files (non-software) in the BTTB2 bundle, which I’ll talk about at a later time.

Despite the Blog Hunter dud, the two working pieces of software that Benwell supplies–Blog Announcer Pro and Article Assistance–really make BTTB2 a useful package as well as an educative one.

I hope this helps you if you are trying to decide to purchase Blogging To The Bank 2.0. Please leave a comment if you have any thoughts about the software in Benwell’s package, or about automated blogging-related software in general.

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WordPress is great, and it’s the blogging platform that Rob Benwell appears to endorse. Now can someone tell me if it is possible to clone a WordPress blog?

You see, I really like the look of my Banking On The Blog site. It’s clean and streamlined, and has that stripped-for-action look to it.

Yep, I’m proud of this baby.

Took some time to set up, though, what with all the installing of plug-ins, tweaking template code and so on. As I go on to grow Stephen’s Blog World by creating additional sites on other topics, I would like to be able to simply cookie-cutter everything except the content.

Yes, I know I can copy and paste the code from this blog’s templates into new W0rdPress blogs. But what about the plug-ins, widgets and such that I’ve added. Is there a way to avoid having to install the same ones afresh every time?

Anyone? Anyone?

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I want this blog to be a conversation among people who are wanting to experiment with the methods that Rob Benwell outlines in Blogging To The Bank 2.0.   Use the commenting feature to give me feedback.  Give your own short review of BTTB2, or tell us about your personal successes or failures in the world of monetized blogging.

Talk to me.

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Although our main focus here is on how to make money blogging, I promised to talk some about the other methods I am using to create multiple streams of online income. One of those is selling books.

There are 5 main ways that I know of to sell books over the Internet. I made a Squidoo lens about it here, which you really should check out.

In sum, the 5 avenues to selling books online are:

1. Selling physical books through Amazon, eBay, etc.
2. Publishing and selling your own ebook over the web
3. Republishing public domain books on the web and selling advertising in them
4. Selling individual book pages on eBay
5. Earning bookselling commissions on Amazon

As noted on Squidoo, I have tried and had some degree of success with numbers 1, 3, 4 and 5. I’ll be blogging further about all of these, but I want to specifically say a bit here about the method I am currently working at the most: selling individual book pages on eBay.

Basically, you flip through old books and magazines looking for pictures or advertisements that you can remove and offer for sale individually on eBay.

It’s crucial that you learn the subjects that will actually sell well. Otherwise you can waste a lot of time (and money, in the form of eBay listing fees) trying to sell pages no one wants.

With the right subject, people will go wild bidding for a single page from some old book that you might have paid three or four bucks for. Calculate the profits if that book has 20 or 30 such pages in it.

Avril Harper, a hugely successful eBay seller based in the United Kingdom, turned me on to the profit potential of selling individual book and magazine pages. She produced an ebook which is really the bible on doing this: Make Money Tearing Up Old Books and Magazines and Selling Them On eBay. That’s the place that anyone interested in trying their hand at should start.

More on selling books online … to come.

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A brief time out from our discussion of blogging for pay:  This news item caught my eye because 1) it is bizarre (as in, makes me scratch my head and go “Huh?”), and 2) it originates in North Carolina, where I currently reside.  The gist: A man named Chris Knight is accused by Viacom International of copyright infringement for posting a YouTube video that Viacom made by infringing upon his very own copyright.  Webpronews has the scoop.

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