PayPerPost Direct

If by any chance you're reading this by visiting my blog instead of through your favorite feedreader, you might have noticed the new "PPP Direct" badge I've got in the sidebar. Wassit all about? It's PayPerPost's answer to competitors like ReviewMe, Blogitive, etc. Now advertisers can offer opportunities for sponsored posts to individual bloggers, with PayPerPost acting as the middleman. Sound familiar? That's because it is. But the cool part is, PPP's commission is a helluva lot smaller than their competitors. They collect a 10% fee, which I think is reasonable. I mean, compared to their usual "marketplace" commission, which is 35%, that's sweet, and compared to some of the other services like ReviewMe, which charge anywhere from 50% to a 100% commission, that's awesome.

All a PPP blogger has to do is login to their PPP account, click on "ppp tools", set their price, then cut and paste the code into their blog template and they're ready to go. Then advertisers can click on your badge (and I think there's also going to be a directory of PPP Direct bloggers that advertisers can use to find the blogs and bloggers they're looking for) and negotiate a deal with you. The advertiser gets the blog post they wanted, you make money blogging, and PayPerPost gets a cut for providing a sort of escrow service that ensures that neither party screws the other one.

Sounds easy enough, and I can't wait to find out if it really is as easy as it sounds.




Technorati Tags: PayPerPost, ReviewMe, Blogitive, problogging, paid content, sponsored blogging

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Niche Blogging -- Notebookism

I came across a link to this blog and checked it out to see if it was what I thought it was. And it was! Notebookism is a blog devoted to notebooks, diaries, sketchbooks, etc. And it's not only a blog, but there's a Flickr pool and a Google Group as well.

What's it got to do with making money online? Well, I don't know if Armand, the founder of Notebookism is making much money from it, but I think it's an excellent example of creating a niche blog based on a passion or a hobby. And anybody can do it. Start the blog, build the community, and monetize it with ads, affiliate links, etc. Of course there's no guarantee you'll make much money with it, but even if you don't, it can still be very rewarding to blog about something you care about, and to "meet" others who care about it, too.

Technorati Tags: blogging, notebookism, notebooks, diaries, moleskins, sketchbooks, niche blogging, niche marketing

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Bloggers Protected by Anti-SLAPP Law

Eric Goldman posted a nice little entry on his Technology & Marketing Law Blog about bloggers' anti-SLAPP protection. SLAPP stands for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, and it happens when one party (usually a big company) files a lawsuit to try to shut up another party who's saying something the big company doesn't like.

The thing is, criticizing somebody, whether it's an individual, a business, or even a big company, isn't necessarily against the law. So lots of places have anti-SLAPP protections so people won't get sued just because they say something somebody doesn't like. The recent case Eric discusses, anti-SLAPP protection was extended to a blogger, which really isn't that earth-shattering, but I think it's something bloggers should be aware of.

Since I blog about making money online, I also blog about ways you might think you're going to make money online, when really you're just going to get scammed. Occasionally, when I point out a particular scam, I get some idiot emailing me or posting in a forum somewhere ranting about "slander" or "libel" and how I should expect to hear from their lawyers...blah, blah, blah....take the shirt off my back....blah, blah, blah...cellmate named Bruiser...blah, blah, blah...and on and on it goes, and you wouldn't believe some of the ridiculous threats some of them come up with.

Of course laws are different in different places, and it's never safe to assume that just because something makes sense, that's how the powers that be will do things, but in most cases, in most places, calling a spade a spade isn't illegal, and criticizing, or even insulting somebody, isn't necessarily a crime.

So in the event that you end up dealing with some moron who tries to take it further than just throwing around baseless and pathetic threats, and who actually tries to take you to court in hopes that you'll stop the criticism (especially if your criticisms are dead-on), it's worth checking to see if there are anti-SLAPP protections where you are. It might just turn out that the moron is the one who's breaking the law.

Tags: blogging, bloggers, blog law, anti-SLAPP, SLAPP, Eric Goldman, law, lawsuit, GTX, stocklemon, stocklemon.com

The Importance of Honesty, Integrity and Disclosure

12 Important U.S. Laws Every Blogger Needs to Know has been a very interesting and informative read this morning. It covers things like copyright, deep linking, cybersqatting, SPAM, and lots of other things, but I think my favorite was the one about disclosure.

Disclosure has always been a big part of what this blog is all about. When I started back in 2005, the only people I saw posting how much they were making online were the ones posting scans of checks or screenshots of Paypal records that "proved" they were raking in five or six figures a month. Oh, and of course they'd be happy to show you how to do it for just $79.95. The first monthly total I posted was four figures, but two of those figures were on the right side of the decimal point -- $32.18. Not very impressive, but at least it was honest.

And when I started writing sponsored posts for PayPerPost, I was honest about that, too. Full disclosure, all the way. No other option ever entered my mind. Of course Google says that's not good enough, and wants me to jump through a few hoops to create a kind of disclosure that its spiders can understand.

I think disclosure is important for bloggers. I think it's important for radio personalities. And I think it's important for magazines, which is why I decided to write this post after reading about the sudden resignation of Harry McCracken, the Editor-in-Chief of PC World magazine. Although Colin Crawford, the CEO of PC World denies it, the reason McCracken quit is because Crawford and the marketing dept. were too willing to throw editorial integrity out the window, and to "tone down" criticisms that might have a negative impact on major advertisers.

When that sort of thing happens, whether it's online or offline, it means that every article or review can be considered an undisclosed paid "advertorial." I wonder if Matt Cutts is planning on coming up with a clever little HTML hack to help Googlebot deal with crap like that?

Technorati Tags: blogging, disclosure, PC World, McCracken, PayPerPost, Paypal, Google, Crawford, advertorials

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50 Blog Directories

Over at MikesMoneyMakingMission, Mike Perry has a big list of 50 blog directories, organised by PageRank. The weekly traffic and earnings reports he posts show that he doesn't get a lot of traffic from blog directories, and neither have I. Does adding your blog to a directory with a higher PR help increase your blog's PR? I have no idea. But since FreeCashSpace has been sitting on PR3 for a loooooong time now, I'm willing to try and see if these blog directories can help. Over the next week, I'll submit the FCS blog to all 50 directories, and see if it has an impact on traffic or PageRank.

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ImgRed Image Redirection Service

Wow, I saw this on Lifehacker and it looks like an awesome service -- image redirection! It's must faster and easier than saving an image to your hard drive then uploading to your server or a free image hosting service.

With ImgRed, when I add an image to a web page, blog, or forum post, I just add the ImgRed URL to the code, and ImgRed automatically fetches the image, stores it on their servers, and even makes a thumbnail that I can use as well.

Sweet!

Technorati Tags: blogging, blogtools, imgred

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Who's Making Money From Your Web Presence?

Howard Reingold has a link to Trebor Scholz's post at Collectivate.net called "What the MySpace genereation should know about working for free." It's a good reminder that much of the value of sites like MySpace, eBay, YouTube, StumbleUpon, etc.is created by the people (us!) who use them. And that value comes with a pricetag. News Corporation paid $580 million for MySpace. Google paid $1.6 billion for YouTube. And eBay's market cap is currently over $46 billion.

We, as users/creators at these sites, need to keep those numbers in mind, and ask ourselves if what we're getting in return is worth it. Collectively, we create the content and the data (much of which we are completely unaware of) that makes these companies worth billions. Are they giving us enough in return?

It's an interesting question, and definitely something we need to take into consideration when we decide to create our own web presence. And I also think it's important to think about how things might change in the near future as envisioned by KirkH in his comment for Jeff Jarvis' Who Owns the Wisdom of the Crowd? The Crowd. post at BuzzMachine. How will things change when everybody is connected to the net all the time? When we don't need an ISP or a web hosting company or a webmail service, and all the software we need is available for free? Will we still provide billions of dollars worth of content, data, and attention to a bunch of big companies, or will we each get our own slice of that gigantic pie?

Technorati Tags: sociable web, web 2.0, cyberculture

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Posting With ScribeFire

You might've noticed the "Powered by ScribeFire" link in my last post. It's there because I just downloaded and installed the ScribeFire blog editing extension for Firefox.



Which means when I visit a page I want to blog about, I can right-click and select "Blog this page" from the Scribefire contextual menu, and the the browser window is split, so that I can type my blog post in the bottom half, and still see the page I'm blogging about in the top half. Very handy!



In addition to a blog post editor, there's also some pretty cool tools instantly available at the click of a button. "Page Tools" gives you Technorati-related info about the page you're blogging (like which other blogs have linked to the page, etc.), and "Bookmarks" lets you add del.icio.us tags. And clicking on "Publishing Options" lets you do a bunch of different things -- post as a draft, add Technorati tags, bookmark the post at del.icio.us using the same tags, and adding any TrackBack URLs you want to ping. Oh, and you don't even have to use it to create a blog post; you can also use it to take notes, which is great if you see something that you want to blog about later.



Setting it up to work with Blogger was no problem, and it says it also works with Wordpress, Drupal, MoveableType, TextPattern, Roller, LiveJournal, Windows Live Spaces, Performancing and Jeeran. Or it can be manually configured to work with other blog platforms.



They got a bit more work to do on it, but so far I'm liking it a lot.



If you want to try it, you can download it from Mozilla's Firefox Add-ons site.

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My New tumblr Blog

Dave Weinberger says tumblr is the new Twitter. I don't know if I agree with that, but I created my own FreeCashSpace tumblr tumblelog to see if I like it.

What's a tumblelog? According to Wikipedia, it's a revival of the type of blogging that people used to back when they were called weblogs and they were more about sharing the cool stuff you found on the net. Tumblelog entries aren't supposed to be fully-developed articles, but just ideas, links, pictures, or whatever else you want to post quickly. No comments, trackbacks, or much of anything else. Just short, simple posts.

You can visit the FreeCashSpace tumblr tumblelog or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Tags: blogging, tumblr, tumblelog

FCS Blog, Now with Hot New Technorati Tags

Now that I've switched this blog to the new version of Blogger, I can include "labels", Blogger's version of categories, for each post. And I've also added a Greasemonkey script from A Consuming Experience that lets me add Technorati tags as well. Maybe a little redundant, but I'll give it a shot and see if I like it.

I've also just discovered that Blogger hasn't been pinging Technorati when I post, like it says it does. I checked my Blogger settings and they're ok, so I'm going to have to figure out what's going on, or maybe add some Technorati ping code into the blog myself.

Tags: blogtools, blogging

Best Books for Learning CSS and HTML

After reading Empress' post about learning more about CSS, I couldn't agree more. Anybody who's interested in building websites should learn "the basics" of Cascading Style Sheets. And if you want to go beyond the most basic website designs, you need to go beyond the basics and learn how to use style-sheets to maximum advantage.

The whole point of CSS is to separate the content and the design of your website. That means when you want to change the way the site looks, you just change the stylesheet, without having to touch the content of your site. To see what I'm talking about, pop over to the CSS Zen Garden and click on the links on the right-hand side, under "select a design." The changes are amazing, but all that's happening is that different stylesheets are being used to display the same content.

I'm a fairly low-skill CSS hacker myself. I can take an existing stylesheet and tweak it here and there to change some colors or fonts, or to make a column wider, but that's about as far as it goes. But like Empress, I'm keen to learn more.

There are some great websites that can help you learn about CSS, but if you're serious about getting good info, I suggest buying a book or two. That's a lesson I first learned with HTML. I've been building websites since 1995 (you'd think I would've gotten better at it by now) and I've always kept a few HTML reference sites in my bookmarks. Never gave a thought to buying a book about HTML. Then I had to buy one as a textbook. That was five years ago, and I can't count the number of times that book has come in handy when I was stuck.

Sure, I could've loaded an HTML reference site in another browser window, but sometimes it's easier to do it the old-fashioned way and pull a book off the shelf and find the information you're looking for.

For all you'll ever need to know about cascading stylesheets, the books I recommend are CSS: The Definitive Guide or The Zen of CSS Design.

And if you don't have an HTML reference book sitting on your bookshelf, I'd recommend either HTML, XHTML, and CSS, Sixth Edition (this is the newest edition of the one I bought as a textbook) or HTML: the Definitive Guide.

More Thoughts on Making Money With Domains

Jon at Super Affiliate Marketing Blog has a post about making money by buying a bunch of domains and throwing up a Wordpress blog and some Adsense code on each of them. It's called Why Investing in Cheap Domain Names & Blogs is Better Than the Stock Market.

I don't agree with the idea of putting up a bunch of useless or mostly useless blogs just to make money from the Adsense clicks. And on the scale he's talking about (over 2000 domains), I'm guessing that's about all that's going to happen. He's estimating that he'll make around $75,000 in Adsense revenue over the course of a year, which works out at a bit less than $40 per blog. With domain registration and hosting fees, profit ought to be around $20-25 per blog per year.

What I'm wondering is, what multiple of that "per-blog" earning could be achieved by putting in a bit more effort and making them into blogs that are actually worth reading? Obviously that won't work with thousands of blogs, but what about a more manageable number, like 10 or 12? If Jon's single-post blogs are set to make $40 a year in Adsense revenue, can real blog make 5 or 10 times that amount just from Adsense? And can it make even more with other advertising included?

With GoDaddy currently selling .info domains for $0.99 apiece, I have to admit I'm tempted to find out. $10 for the domains, and another $10 or $20 for some cheap hosting for a year, and I'm ready to go.

It looks like Sapphire at Affiliate Marketing Journal is planning something similar. After realising that she has a bunch of zero-maintenance sites that bring in $21-68 per month, she's decided to create at least 10 more of them. If her Project2160 works out, she'll be making an extra $200-700 per month from those sites.

Free Website Stats

Pat McCarthy at ConversionRater.com has written the Complete Guide to Web Analytics 2007, and if you're interested in adding web stats to your blog or website, you really ought to go read it. His list is extensive, and his comments about each package are very helpful.

At this point, I'm not looking to pay for stats, so the ones I'm most interested in include:

• Clicky
• Google Analytics
• PHPMyVisites
• TraceWatch
• FeedBurner
• MyBlogLog

I already use Feedburner to get stats on my feed, but otherwise I rely on the Webalyzer stats provided by my host.

Make Money With Contextual Advertising -- and I Don't Mean Adsense!

Another great post at DoshDosh about contextual ad systems that are an alternative to Google Adsense. I've seen most of these on various sites, but I hadn't really put them all together in my head as alternatives (or additions) to Adsense.

Maki links to an article by Michael Pick at Master New Media that offers brief summaries of over a dozen ad companies:

• Yahoo Publisher Network
• Feedburner Ad Network
• Quigo AdSonar
• ValueClick
• Kontera
• IntelliTXT
• Clicksor
• Miva

and a whole bunch more. Head over to that article to read up on all of them.

I've never used any of them, but since Google has asked me not to run Adsense on this blog because of the nature of the content, maybe I'll give one or two of them a try.

Paid by PayPerPost

I recently got another payment from PayPerPost, which brings my total payments from them to $40, with another $5.50 pending. Not a lot, but not a bad way to get paid to blog.

And another thing that I like about PayPerPost (besides, you know, the "get paid to blog" thing) is that since a lot of the "opportunities" involve blogging about a new product, or a new website, it's another way for me to find cool new things on the web, and then blog about them. And get paid for blogging about them.

So what am I going to do with the money? At this point, my plan is to save up for an iPod shuffle. My wife's got one that she wears at the gym and she loves it. I borrowed it the other day and I can see why she does. Now I want one too!

It might take a while to do enough sponsored blog posts to get the money, but I'm in no rush. If I were, I'd have to get a bit more serious about this paid blogging stuff. I had no idea, but apparently the top PayPerPost bloggers have earned from $4,000 to $7,000. Thousands! They must be doing a couple of sponsored posts a day to pull in that kind of money.

I have to admit, the thought is tempting, but I don't want to fill up FreeCashSpace blog with a bunch of sponsored posts that don't really have anything to do with the main topics of the blog. Maybe what I need to do is submit a few more blogs to PayPerPost, so that I can put sponsored posts on different blogs. I think I'll have to give that some serious consideration.

In any case, I've already got $40 in the bank (well, actually in my Paypal account), and more on the way. In fact, I'll get paid for this post because PayPerPost reward members for letting everybody know that this "blog marketing" thing is real, and that you really can make money by including sponsored posts on your blogs. I've been paid 5 times now, with absolutely no hassles.

If you'd like to sign up and see what it's all about, click on the PayPerPost badge below and join.