The short answer is Yes, you can make money blogging and no, making money blogging is not a scam.  It is, however, a lot of hard work! 

You will see site after site that will tell you that you can just put up a blog, sign up for Google Adsense, sign up for the Amazon affiliate program and load those to your blog and you will be in the money in no time.  It just doesn’t work that way.  If you are not prepared to do a ton of work to find the right topic, then find the right keywords, find the right blogging platform, write tons of articles or build websites related to your blog, (hundreds of them), you will not be in the money anytime soon. 

You can make money blogging if you pick high paying keywords to write topics around.  Making money blogging sites are not scams in themselves.  They just make it seem like you are going to make a lot of money fast with very little work.  It’s just not true.

There are many full time bloggers on the internet who are making a living but they are using automated software to build tons of blogs that have their adsense codes and Amazon codes and Kontera codes on the sites.  They have others build several blogs per day for them on specific keyword topics that payout large sums of money per click.  That’s a great idea but just try to get on the first page of Google when you see what the competiton is.

If you want to make a few bucks for fun, then give it a whirl.  Most of my success with Adsense has not come from my blogs but from my websites.  I’m not an expert enough to know why my exact blog urls still can’t be found on the first 10 pages of Google, except for one while my websites are on the first page of Google.  I have built the blogs in conjunction with my websites.  I think one of the reasons for the success is that I redirected a domain name that I purchased and pointed it to my blogger site which then pushed it to the first page.  That is just my theory and I have no proof of it, but my blogs on blogger do not get on the first pages of google with the blogspot.com at the end of the domain name.

I am really just a blogging Newbie when it comes to making money in a sense, even though I’ve been blogging for several years now.  I have made from just under $100 to several hundred dollars per month from the same six websites pretty regularly, but have only made money on two blogger blogs with great keyword phrases. 

If you decide you want to start blogging to make money, you will have to Google the experts on blogging, but once again, when they tell you that you will make a fortune, take a look at the size of their mailing list and at the number of blogs they have published before you get all excited about all of the money you are going to make.  Making money blogging is not necessarily a scam but some of the sites that you will pay money for to find out how to blog can be so beware of your choices. 

It’s pretty simple.  Put up a blog through wwwdotbloggerdotcom if you are brand new.  Choose a topic of interest.  Find some great keywords (words that describe your topic) using both short and long tail keywords, ie.  golf, golf clubs, Tiger Woods Golf Clubs, Tiger Woods Favorite Golf Clubs, etc.  (you get the idea) and write an article about it.  You can even sign up to write for Worldvillage.  You will have much more success much more quickly by doing revenue sharing with a website like Worldvillage who has a high page rank then waiting for months to have your blogger blog move up in the ranks.  Worldvillage is not a scam and welcomes writers on all types of topics.  Check them out if you want to make money blogging. 

Next time you’re on eBay, take a look at how many PowerSellers there are, you are sure to find quite a few. Now think about this. Every single one of one of them must be making at least $1,000 per month, because that is the requirement eBay has set for becoming a PowerSeller. Silver PowerSellers make at least $3,000 each month, while Gold Sellers make more than $10,000, and the Platinum level is $25,000. The highest rank you can have is Titanium PowerSeller, and to qualify you must make at least $150,000 in sales every month!

Have you ever read an article about eBay talking about the insane incomes people make? It’s not unusual to hear of people earning thousands of dollars or more per month on eBay.

Next time you’re on eBay, take a look at how many PowerSellers there are, you are sure to find quite a few. Now think about this. Every single one of one of them must be making at least $1,000 per month, because that is the requirement eBay has set for becoming a PowerSeller. Silver PowerSellers make at least $3,000 each month, while Gold Sellers make more than $10,000, and the Platinum level is $25,000. The highest rank you can have is Titanium PowerSeller, and to qualify you must make at least $150,000 in sales every month!

The fact that these people exist gives you an idea of the income possibilities. Many of them never intended to set up a business on eBay. They simply started selling some things, and then never stopped. There are plenty of people who have full-time jobs just selling on eBay, and many have been doing it for years now. Just imagine that. Sitting at home behind the computer a couple hours a day and earning a full time income for it. Once you purchase the product, most everything else is pure profit for these people. There is no need to pay for a building, employees, or anything else. There are multi-million dollar businesses that make less in actual profit than some eBay PowerSellers do.

Then again not everyone wants to do this full time. Some people actually like there jobs. But even if you don’t want to quit your job and make a go at it, you can still use eBay to earn a very nice second income. You can package orders during the week and then take them to the post office on the weekends or any other time your available. There are not many things you could be doing with your spare time that have anywhere near this kind of earning potential.

Further more, eBay doesn’t care who you are, where you live, or what you look like. Some Power Sellers are very old and some very young. Some live in the middle of nowhere where selling on eBay is one of the few alternatives to farming or being poor. eBay tears down the barriers to earning that the real world constantly puts up. There’s no job interview and no commuting involved – if you can post things, you can do it.

Let me put it this way, if you know where to get something reasonably cheap that you could sell, then you can sell it on eBay. And since you can always get discounts for bulk at wholesale, that’s not exactly difficult. Buy a large lot of something in demand for cheap, sell it on eBay, and now you’re making money, with no set-up costs.

If you want to feel out the water before you decide to actually buy anything, then just sell things that you have lying around the house. Search through that cupboard of stuff you never use, and you’ll probably find you’ve got a few hundred dollars’ worth of stuff lying around in there! This is the power of eBay: there is always someone who wants what you’re selling, whatever it might be, and since they’ve come looking for you, you don’t even need to do anything to get them to buy it.

So you want to get started on eBay? Well, that’s great! Head on over and give it a try. You won’t be disappointed.

Read the rest of this article here: Sending Large Files

If you travel for business, this can be a huge problem, as you may need to be sending large files all the time. Now that videos are becoming more popular online, you may have a hard time sending these out as well. Photos and videos are getting larger and longer, thanks to advances in digital photography, and sometimes, there is no way to share these without displaying them publicly online. For privacy reasons, many people don’t like to do this.

When you are sending large files, you have to find a source other than your email to do so. There are many sites that will help you with this, and some are geared towards business use. Others, you will find, can be used to send just about anything. Some will save the information on their server for a period of time, allowing the recipient a few days to a week to pick up the file on their own computer. After that time period, the file then disappears.

You do have a lot of choices today for sending large files, though at one time, this was unheard of online. People are beginning to rely on the Internet more and more for personal and business communications, and the Internet is trying to keep up. When choosing a site for sending large files, you have a lot to consider. Price is a factor, as well as the size of the files that particular site can handle. If your file is too large, there may be no one who can handle the information. You may then have to chop it up into smaller pieces and send it that way.

If you find that you are sending large files online quite often for business purposes, your company may be able to come up with another solution. They may subscribe to such a service, or perhaps find a way to get around the problem all together. For the time being, know there are ways of sending large files that are relatively painless, and these sites are available for business or personal reasons if you find yourself in a pinch.

Here are some companies you may want to research for sending large files:

Dropload

LeapFILE

Megaupload

mytempdir.com

Streamload MediaMax

SendThisfile

TransferBigFiles.com

YouSendIt

zUpload

Another method of sending large files, which is quite obvious, is to burn the file onto a CD and post via mail. This method of delivery is not online, of course, but if your recipient can wait a couple of days, it is a very practical method of sending large files to others.

There is one other method, but it requires you to have web space on a webhosting server, basic HTML / Web Design skills and knowledge of uploading files via FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to your server and an FTP application (I prefer to use CuteFTP, but you can download some FTP software applications for free, simply by doing a search for “FREE FTP Software” on the search engines!), or some kind of file management utility (e.g. “File Manager” if you are hosting your site on a server that uses cPanel)

Essentially all you do then is:

- Compress the file using a compression utility like Winzip.

- Upload the file to your server via FTP. (Tip: for security purposes, create and save the file to a subfolder)

- Create a simple web page and add a hyperlink to your “zipped” file. For example, if your domain name is “yourdomainname.com”, your subfolder is called “subfolder” and your file is called “insertfilenamehere.zip”, then your download URL would be http://www.yourdomainname.com/subfolder/insertfilenamehere.zip

- Forward the above download URL to your client or the person your are sending large files to.

- All they have to do is click on the link, save the file to their hard drive, then extract it using winzip or another similar utility and … voil! your large file has been transmitted!

Here’s another useful tip for uploading large files to your server if you have cPanel installed and use Windows XP:

Instead of using FTP software (it can take a long time to transfer large files), do the following:

- Open the folder that contains the contents you want to upload to your server.

- Select all the files (Control + A)

- Right-click mouse button, select one of the highlighted folders (select a folder, not a file for this step) and choose “Send To > Compressed (zipped) Folder option on the right-click menu. (Use this in-built feature, NOT WINZIP or another Zip program)

- If a dialog box pops up asking you if you want to make this feature your default file compressing utility, click “No”

- All the folder contents including the folder itself will be compressed into a Zip file.

- Login to your CPanel hosting account and select “File Manager”.

- Navigate through the file directory and drill down until you find the folder you want to install the contents into, then select Upload Files

- Locate the zipped folder in your hard drive containing the files you want to upload to your server using the “Browse” button, then click “Upload” when ready.

- Once the file has been uploaded, select the folder and click “Extract Contents” the zipped file will uncompress inside your server.

- Delete the “zipped” folder.

You should find that this significantly reduces your file transfer time.

A new publisher comes online — often a blogger — and puts up a few ad units. He makes a few bucks, enough to pay for his morning low-fat soy frappuccino and feels pretty good about himself. He then becomes interested in what AdSense can do and discovers that when used correctly, it can buy him a lot more than the occasional cup of coffee.

So he changes his ad units and blends them onto the page. He plays with keywords and gets better ads. And when he checks his stats, he starts to see his profits rising by several hundred percent.

At that point everything changes. Suddenly he wants to know everything there is to know about AdSense… and he wants to work on it all the time, tweaking and adjusting until he has the sort of site that generates massive incomes.

There’s nothing wrong that. Enthusiasm is a good thing and when it comes to AdSense I’ve got heaps of it too. But sometimes you can be too enthusiastic and when that over-enthusiasm turns to obsession, you can start tripping yourself up.

You can check your stats every day — or every hour — if you want, but if you act on what you see more than once a week, you’re going to make bad decisions.

You can put other types of ads on your site like Chitika’s eMiniMalls or Kontera’s word links but if you stuff so many ads onto your site that you make the ads look obtrusive instead of recommended, you’re going to hit your profits.

You can update your site as often as you want to keep users coming back, but if you swap quality of content for quantity of content, you’re going to get fewer readers and damage your Smart Pricing.

You can build content around ads — and target ads that pay the most — but if you don’t deliver information your readers want, they won’t come back and they won’t click the ads.

And you can spend all your time in front of the computer playing with HTML and printing stats graphs, but if you don’t take the time to cash the check and enjoy spending it… well, what’s the point?

You should be enthusiastic about AdSense; it has the power to deliver a fantastic lifestyle. But as you’re optimizing your site and building your publishing business, it’s also important to keep things in perspective and take your time to do it properly. You’ll earn more and have more fun too!

That’s a pretty small number. I think it worked out at around 2-3 percent of the site’s viewers, and this was a site aimed at professionals.

The question that went through my mind was: What is the difference between the top-earning publishers and the bulk of people who were earning less than $1,000 a month?

I’m sure that every one of the people on that site knew the basic principles of creating high AdSense earnings. Many of them (certainly more than 3 percent) would have known lots of advanced strategies too. And yet only a tiny fraction were earning the sort of high income that AdSense makes possible.

It’s likely that a lot of people on the site were beginners. They’ve gathered the information but have yet to put it in practice. Others might not be interested in taking AdSense as far as they can go with it. They might see their ads as a way of earning a some extra money but never thought of it as a way of replacing their day job.

But what was stopping the rest from reaching their dreams of earning high incomes from their websites?

Well, here’s what I think… It’s a question of dedication.

Search for anything on Google and among all the good results you’re going to find a bunch of Web pages that contain nothing more than ads.

The people who own those sites are never going to create a six- figure online publishing business. They’re looking for a short-cut instead of thinking about the long term.

And that’s the difference between a top-earning online publisher and someone who makes peanuts: the top-earners understand that an online publishing business is exactly that… a business. It requires an investment of capital to buy traffic. It requires an investment of time and effort to create content, analyze stats and put new strategies in place. And it requires patience and planning to go from a simple blog to a network of sites a year or two down the line that all earn solid profits.

All of that adds up to dedication, focus and a professional approach to publishing. It’s not an easy answer and it doesn’t bring success overnight… but it’s worth making the effort to put it in practice.

Steve Maclin says that is why he developed his new site, www.best-detective.com. After conducting exhaustive online research, Maclin discovered the need for a website that would provide free, comprehensive evaluations and comparisons of the very best online detective services of the year.

The original idea for the website was that it would be a ‘review site,’ one that would simply compare/ contrast/ review the major online detective services available. In the process of evaluating available services, we noticed an even greater need for a site that would (1) detail its evaluative criteria, (2) provide updated information that would highlight the very best services of a given year, (3) provide immediate access to each of the top services, and (4) provide news and articles related to the most popular keywords used for online people searches (e.g., online investigations, background check, cheating spouse, criminal records, public records, etc). We placed our findings in an even broader context, i.e., of warning users to NOT purchase ANY service until they had read our product reviews, as this would inform them as to what they might reasonably expect from each product/ service.

We found that online detective services are all alike, but only in the most unimportant respects. Where it counts, is where they differ and it helps to have at your fingertips the academic expertise required to evaluate and compare these products as one would compare “apples and apples.” One product, Net Detective, boasts a 211+ million name database of info which is updated every 1-3 months, so users get the most recent data available. Most other such products either offer much smaller databases, rent the use of Net Detective’s database, or simply fail to update. Then, there is the cost. Where many of the top 10 services ask $50 or more, Net Detective offers its award-winning tools for a one-time fee of $29.

If you want to know what you’re getting into before purchasing an online background check service, go to Best Detective, your best all-around source for up-to-the-minute news and information.

However, there ARE other options available for site publishers wishing to monetize their web pages.

I recently came across a site called Kontera. They have a different approach to contextual advertising. Rather than display ads directly on the site, their engine looks at a web page and highlights certain keywords on the page by placing a double blue line underneath the word.

This is a unique approach to contextual advertising because the ad is hidden until the visitor decides to roll the mouse over the link. It allows the web publisher to have more space for content. And when a visitor sees the ad, they may be more likely to click it due to the novelty of the link.

You may see Kontera ads appearing on this site.

If you own a site, you may want to take a look at putting Kontera on your pages.