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Copyright 2005 Randy Charles Morin
Part of the KBCafe Blog Network.
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In the last month, I've written 800 words in 4 ReviewMe paid reviews and I made $60. I could write another 6 campaign reviews, as they allow 10 per month. Assuming I could get the same pay per review dollars, that's $150 per month or $1800 per year. Now consider that their are several pay per post services, sign-up for them all and you have an awesome part-time job. You could easily write 30 reviews per month and make $5400 or who knows. Some of the paid reviews I wrote paid me as much as $125. Now add some AdSense to your blog and who knows, you might actually be able to quite the 9 to 5. I think I'll spend some time checking out the other pay per post services to discover just how profitable paid blogging can be.
On the downside, a friend of mine with a very good blog, was rejected by ReviewMe. He was using a standard Wordpress template with great technical writing, so his blog looked like a splog created from those article buying services. I think it's really important to customize the look of your blog before you submit it, so that it doesn't look like just another splog.
The following is a paid review.
Frontier Labels, Inc. has a website for ordering Labels and Stickers. They have candel labels, coffee bag labels, vitamin bottle labels, wine labels, beer bottle labels, bumper stickers, tea tin labels, paint labels and much, much more. Check out their homepage for a sampling of what they can do. From quarter inch labels to full page labels and everything in between. It's very easy to order your own labels thru their website and you can get them shipped in 1 business day express shipping or 5 days regular shipping. They'll give you an instant quote online (excludes shipping) and you can even chat with one of their team members for instant online help. They use an HP Indigo press and AB Graphics converting machine. Because this is a digital process, their is no cost per color or plate charges or setup fees. They have volume pricing which apply equally to single and multiple item orders. They support both Google Checkout and PayPal, and once you've order your first time, you can reuse your account to make ordering even faster. Check out their portfolio of sample labels. Ten percent of company profits are donated to help make a difference in their community. What a great idea!
ReviewMe, the paid blogging service, allows you to do 10 campaigns per month. If you have a few blogs that cover most of the ReviewMe categories, then you can at least make an extra $100+ per month by writting 2000 words. That's $1200 annually. I suspect that adding other paid blogging services can mean a substantial little bonus. I haven't tried the other paid blogging services. I'm thinking about getting some blogs going for my wife, so she can make some extra coin as well. For that matter, I'm sure my niece (in college) would appreciate this as well.
ClixTrac is a free impression and click tracking service. I only know about it, because one of my advertisers uses it. Today, I noticed that their banners were timing out, which in turn caused my own website to load very slowly. I'm not too impressed. It's been several hours now and I've had to pull the advertising. Now, I'm gonna have to explain this to the client.
Today, I decided to sign up for Shopping.com Partner Program. They have an API that I can use to place CPC ads on my website. I'll report back later with a full review. The sign-up was not easy. I got an error try to sign-up with IE7. The error happens every time I try to sign-up. I switched to Firefox and all was well. I'm gonna guess their Web developers don't test their stuff on the most popular browser. Not a good sign. I was quickly approved.
https://partners.shopping.com/app
Update: The website is extremely slow (several minutes per page). I found a widget where you can place products on your webpages via keywords. But it's impossible to get the code because the website is so slow that my sessions appear to timeout before the code is generated. This is royally sucking!
Update: I give up! The website is broken. The pages take minutes to refresh and before I can get the widget code, my session times-out and I have to start all over.
dnScoop values KBCafe at $224,664. Not bad for a hobby site :-)
Today, I completed my Sitemap Validator. It validates two versions of the sitemap XML, both indexes and sitemaps and it also iteratively validates all the sitemaps within a sitemap index.
Today, I wrote a ReviewMe blog entry on iBt4iM. I expect to get some negative feedback, which you'll likely find in the comments of that blog entry. When the money gets approved, I'll write a further review. It took me 30 minutes to write the 200 required words, although I suspect I could've done it in 15 minutes if I wasn't so anal.
This campaign paid $25 and others are also available in the $6-$7.50 range. I suspect ReviewMe keeps half and I'll confirm that in my next blog entry. In all honesty, this is free beer money. Instead of massaging your Facebook profile all night, you can earn yourself $10-20 for an hour or two of work. It's not a fountain of wealth, but it's there for the taking.
I had previous received an email about available ReviewMe campaigns, but I didn't have the patience at the time to figure out what they were doing. Today, I got a second email and looked into it to find a small silver mine where bloggers can earn some good coin by blogging for $. There was one campaign paying $25, which I accepted and will take 10 minutes to write a post about on iBt4iM later today. I'll respond with my thoughts on how I felt about the experience. Of course, somebody will comment that they are shocked that I'd do this. For me, it's all about the experience and helping other bloggers discover these silver mines. Not to mention, it's $25 (I bet I only get half) for a few minutes of work.
Reblinks now allows you to generate a sitemap and text URL list based on Yahoo's Site Explorer data. It's free!
P/E or Price/Earnings is one of the key variables in determining the price of a company or stock. So, how does this variable measure when it comes to a website. You have AdSense, maybe BlogAds or FeedBurner ads running on your blog. Can't we just plug in a P/E ratio and determine the value of your blog. Why not? Almost any company is worth at least 5 times its annual earnings. Remember, I said earnings, not revenues, so you have to minus off your $15/m cost of hosting your blog. Then depending on growth of your blog, you can multiply your earnings by 5 to find a minimal value for your blog. For blogs that are still growing earnings at least 10% per year, the multiplier might be as high as 10. For blogs that are growing earnings at least 50% per year, then your multiplier is at least 20. For blogs that are more than doubling their earnings year-over-year, then you should use a monthly multiplier. For instance, if your blog is growing earnings 10% most months, then multiply your last months earnings by 100. Where you are still growing at higher rates, then the factor becomes increasingly higher, but increasingly inaccurate. Everything I mention here presumes you actually own your domain and content and should apply equally to blogs, forums and websites.
On the back of other horrific experiences with BlogAds, today I noticed that the management site has completely collapsed. Now, when someone click the advertise here link on my blogs, they are presented with a Bad Gateway error (shown below). I've decided to remove most of my BlogAds widgets and likely FeedBurner as well. Both ad platforms seem to be degrading very quickly.
The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
For the last few days, I've been in a frustrating email exchange with the Google AdSense support team. When I tried to convert my account to Google Accounts, it failed. They told me I had to convert my existing AdWords account to Google Accounts first. I did this, but nothing changed. They then told me I had to remove my AdWords account from my Google Accounts, as this was causing a problem. I told them they were the ones that told me to do this in the first place. They replied again, this time informing me I had two AdWords accounts using my Google Accounts and I had to delete the second one. WTF? I'm beginning to wonder if Google's excessive growth has led them to hiring some real winners. Three emails, three different stories and now I'm having more problems than when I started.
Today and yesterday, when I try to log into AdSense, I get this circular redirect problem. Anybody else struggling with this? It appears the Google process for converting AdSense to Google accounts is broken. I'm already signed in with a Google account and since it's not an AdSense account, I get this circular redirect. Also, I tried to attach my Google account to my AdSense and that failed also.
Update: YouTube failed to convert the file. Wow! Google's got some bugs to work on.
I'm simply amazed how many typos I find when read AdWords copy text. I guess the AdWords automatic spellchecking wouldn't work in the case of a proper name. I found this on nhl.com. It's a CPM ad, so they are paying even if the ad doesn't perform.
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