Benefits of writing an E-book

When it comes to having success on the internet, there are a plethora of things you can do to further your business. Everything from writing articles to posting in forums to creating a blog can be beneficial. But why not compile a number of articles and create your own eBook?

There are a number of ways you can benefit from having an eBook of your own. Obviously, it gives you the opportunity to display your expertise on a particular subject. Through several pages of content, people will quickly identify your passion and knowledge on the subject. This will only lead to them wanting more and coming to your web site.

While it allows you to display your knowledge on the subject, people can find the eBook for years to come; and you only have to write the book once. As soon as you place a link to the book and begin to disperse it on the internet, there is no stopping people from finding it anywhere at any time.

You do have the option of selling your eBook if you choose to. It makes for a great way to earn residual income. Because it is on the internet forever, it is always nice to earn some income from a book you wrote two years ago. You can constantly have money flowing in whether you continue to promote it or not.

Another option is to use your book as a way promotes your web site and other programs extensively. There is nothing people like to hear more than the word free. Giving out your eBook as an incentive to join a program or come check out your web site can be extremely effective. It gives you the opportunity to promote other programs while also showing your generosity.

One of the best things about having an eBook is that it displays a lot of content and is a quick download. People do not have to spend hours uploading each page or changing a page each time. You can create the document so people only have to download it once and can then view all pages in any order they choose to.

There are a number of hot products and ideas on the internet that are making people rich. Whatever your purpose is, having an eBook that is a quick download can generate business you may never see again.

WHERE MAKE MONEY ONLINE BLOGGING FOR MONEY

As more and more people are recognizing the power of the blogosphere, more and more blogs are popping up everyday. Many of those blogs need bloggers, and many of those are paying blogging jobs. Following is a list of resources to find paid blogging jobs.

Problogger: Darren Rowse's blog about blogging is one of the best places to find paid blogging jobs.

Indeed.com: Performing a search for 'blogger' or a similar search tool on Indeed.com will provide a list of results culled from various websites.

Freelance Writing Jobs: Deb Ng provides a list of links to blogging jobs found by searching the Internet each day.

Performancing: Performancing.com has a forum that allows people to post blogging jobs.

Authority Blogger: Authority Blogger has a section within the site's forum where people can post blogging jobs.

About Freelance Writing: Ann Wayman lists a variety of blogging positions found by searching the Internet.

BloggerJobs.biz: This site provides a good compilation of blogging jobs found on the web as well as some that are hard to find.

Writers Weekly: Writers Weekly is a site dedicated to helping writers. The blogging jobs listed on Writers Weekly include paid classified ads as well as a compilation of original market listings that are received from the editors at each publication.

Media Bistro: Media Bistro occasionally includes blogging jobs in their job listings.

Blogher: While this site is primarily for women bloggers, it does include some blogging job postings.

Craigslist: Many people post blogger jobs on Craigslist.

Freelance Blogging Jobs: A blog that compiles blogging job listings from around the web.

As with any job posting, do your research and make sure the opportunity is legitimate before jumping in blindly. If the job seems too good to be true, it probably is.

7 WAYS YOU CAN MAKE MONEY FROM A BLOG

Blogs aren’t just mainstream any more; they’re ubiquitous. In Why Should My Business Have a Blog? I talk about how a blog can be a valuable adjunct to your existing business. But what about the flipside? What if you have a blog and want to turn it into a business, using your blog to make a profit?

Making money from a blog is possible and isn’t even particularly difficult any more. You don’t have to be famous or even have huge traffic (although how much money you make from your blog will depend on both of these factors to some extent). The seven ideas below will get you started. To make money from your blog you can:

1. Use advertising programs.

These are more advertising program options for bloggers than ever before. Here are just five of the ever-expanding possibilities for making money from your blog by putting ads on your pages:

• Google’s Adsense
• BlogAds
• Chitika eMiniMalls
• Text Link Ads
• AdGenta

Besides placing ads on your blog pages themselves, there are also programs for RSS advertising such as Pheedo.

You might also try something such as Jim Kukral’s BlogKits BlogMatch Network, a network designed to match bloggers with advertising opportunities.

2. Use affiliate programs.

With affiliate marketing, a company agrees to pay you a commission for helping to sell their products. Visitors see the company’s ad on your Web pages and, if they click through to the company’s Web site and do a particular thing, you’ll get paid. The particular thing the visitor has to do varies; some affiliate programs pay per click while others pay per lead or even per sale. These are four of the biggest (and most established) affiliate programs on the 'Net:

• Amazon
• Linkshare
• ClickBank
• Commisison Junction

3. Get sponsored by a company.

Blog sponsorship is a growing trend as more businesses realize the popularity of blogging and the potential marketing reach of bloggers. Company sponsorship deals appear to range from obvious “advertising” blogs that are squarely focused on a company’s product(s) through adding a company’s name, logo and brand to an existing blog (“sponsored by….”).

The main problem with this way of making money from your blog is that you have to be known already (and have enough traffic) to attract sponsorship.

4. Get hired by a company.

Many businesses would love to have blogs, but just don’t have anyone currently on staff who has the time and the talent to put a blog together and keep it going. You could be the answer and make money from a blog in the process. The trick to landing such a gig is finding the businesses that want/need the services and persuading them that you’re the blogger they need; diligent research and some cold calling will probably be needed unless you already have a high profile and a track record that will bring the businesses calling.

5. Sign on to be a blogger.

Hubs or networks of blogs appear to be springing up all over the ‘Net, some of which are looking for people to write blogs and are willing to pay for it. Payment models vary. At Creative Weblogging, for instance, bloggers have the option of choosing either a fixed monthly payment in exchange for 10 posts a week, or a percentage share of the ad revenues. Two more examples of blog networks looking for bloggers at the time of writing are:

• Weblogs.Inc.
• AllBusiness.com’s Business Blogs

6. Create a blog to advertise a specific product/service.

Blogs are fast becoming the trendy alternative to the classic salesletter site. In this case, the format is the only real change; the message is the same. Typically, the pitch is woven into as many blog entries as possible – or even used a tagline to every blog entry.

Jim Kukral’s 99 Ways to Blog for Business blog is a good example of a blog designed to move a product (in this case, his strategy guide for creating blogs for businesses).

7. Sell other intellectual property, such as ebooks, telecourses or consulting services, through your blog.

This idea is closely related to the previous way to make money through your blog. The difference is that in this case the intellectual property you’re selling is just part of or incidental to the blog you’re writing; it’s not the raison d’etre for the blog. For instance, you might have a blog about beekeeping and be selling an ebook about how to build a mason bee house on your pages.

So the answer is, yes, you can make money from your blog. And with blogging becoming increasingly popular, there will be even more opportunities for making money from your blog coming – ideas that haven’t even been thought of yet. For the moment, for maximum income, you will need to focus on multiple income streams and perhaps even multiple blogs.

USE WEBLOG TO GET PAGE RANK FROM GOOGLE

This is a case study documenting best practices in using a weblog to achieve #1 rankings in Google.

Background: Common Craft is an independent consultancy that helps businesses discover and manage online communities and weblogs. As the founder of Common Craft, I established the company’s website, CommonCraft.com, as a weblog—a regularly updated chronicle of news and commentary related to Common Craft's niche.

Challenge: I planned to use search engine results as a promotional tool for the new venture. I knew that achieving high search-engine rankings could be an effective way to find new clients, so my challenge was to make CommonCraft.com appear as high as possible in Google search results. Below is the strategy I used to achieve #1 rankings for targeted phrases in Google search results.

Solution: I researched Google's PageRank™ technology and learned how to use keywords on my website. Because CommonCraft.com is a weblog, I knew it had inherent advantages in achieving high rankings in Google results- it is updated often and linked-to by other weblogs. The ultimate solution to the challenge lay in (1) attracting links to Common Craft from high-ranked weblogs and websites, and (2) the design and structure of the Common Craft weblog itself.

1. Links from other weblogs: One way Google ranks a website is to look at the number of websites that link to the site. (A “link” is a clickable piece of text that allows the user to jump from one site to another). Each incoming link increases rankings and a link from a high-ranked site is more valuable than a link from a lower-ranked site. These are the basics of PageRank™.

These links are created when one website references another—perhaps to quote a recent post or comment on the subject at hand. Reciprocal links are common between weblogs and help to build a foundation for achieving high rankings.

By writing weblog entries that other weblogs linked to, I increased CommonCraft.com's PageRank™ in the Google system.

2. Weblog design and structure: Google also places importance on keywords—words and phrases that may appear consistently throughout the site because of their relevance to its content. Headings at the top of pages, keywords that appear as links, and repeating keywords all help to appeal to Google.(reference)

To maximize the power of keywords, I used my weblog's categories to achieve high rankings. The blog has seven categories of posts, with each weblog post archived by category. Two examples of categories are "Weblogs and Business" and "Online Community Building." With each weblog post, the category name is displayed at the top of the page as a link to the category archives. This created repeating keywords that appear as links throughout the site. The repeated words and the fact that they are linked both contribute to their search relevance. To maximize the power of keywords, I defined the phrases I wanted to target in Google and named my categories after those phrases. Then, I displayed the links to the category names at the top of each weblog entry (see graphic right).

Results: Within two months of starting the weblog, I noticed that searching for "Weblogs and Business" (a category name) yielded a #1 ranking on Google. From this point on, I saw each of my category names grow in rank on Google. CommonCraft.com remains the top-ranked Google search result for the phrase "Weblogs and Business."

At the time of this writing (12/8/03), CommonCraft.com is ranked at the following positions on Google searches for these category names and titles:

* #1 Weblogs and Business (category name)
* #1 Online Community Strategies (site title)
* #1 Technology in Plain English (category name)
* #1 Original Writings (category name)
* #4 Online Usability (category name)
* #5 Online Community Building (category name)

Lessons learned: I found a way to achieve high rankings in Google by combining a few basic strategies:

1. Effective writing: I posted information that was valued (and linked to) by my peers. This built the foundation of the rankings.
2. Defining a niche: I targeted phrases and words that represented my areas of expertise.
3. Naming categories: I used the targeted phrases as names for the categories on my weblog. This repeated the phrases over and over across the weblog.
4. Weblog format: Each time an entry was posted, it displayed the category name not only as a repeated keyword (as in #3 above), but also as a link to the category archives at the top of the page. This created linked category names across the Weblog.
5. Consistency: I posted to the categories on a regular basis.

In sum, the rankings were achieved by defining a niche, targeting search phrases, naming categories for each phrase, and writing effectively about subjects related to each category.

MAKE MONEY ONLINE FOR SHARED EXPENSES

Collect money online for shared expenses with a roommate, group purchases, or to do fund raising with the web-based software listed here. Set up an online money collection for the office to chip in for your boss's birthday present, to help pay for a class trip, or as a fund raiser to save the purple toed iguana.

You have to register to set up an online collection or shared expense tracking on one of these web sites. Some online collection sites require you to specify the amount of money you need to raise, what funds are for and by what date you need the money.
1. Fundable
Use a Fundable money collection to collect pledges, and when enough pledges are made, Fundable sends you the total.

Fundable online collections have expiration dates which can be extended. If a collection expires before reaching its total in pledges, Fundable deletes all pledges.

Fundable collections are publicly listed but can be hidden. Anyone can pledge.

Cost: Completed collections are reduced by a 10% fee taken from the total collection. Starting a collection and making pledges are free. No costs associated with expired collections.

Minimum collection: $200

Payment: PayPal account required to receive collections. Or, pay $10 to receive a check from Fundable.


. ChipIn
Set up an online collection with ChipIn to get widgets to raise money on blogs, web sites and social sites like Facebook, MySpace or Blogger.

A contributor's credit card or PayPal account is immediately charged when a contribution is made to a ChipIn collection. Contributors do not need to register with ChipIn.

ChipIn does not require an amount or date to be set for an online collection. If you set a target and do not reach the goal, you can either claim the funds that have been raised, or you can extend the collection.

Costs: ChipIn charges no fees to contributors or to collection organizers, but PayPal fees may apply.

Minimum collection: None.

Payment: PayPal account required to receive collections.

3. Buxfer
Buxfer is web-based personal finance software that can easily be used to collect on shared expenses and club dues.

Buxfer groups, which consist of those who are splitting a cost, show dollar amounts owed or to be received by group members.

Buxfer has gadgets for iGoogle, Facebook and Netvibes, and Buxfer sends email or SMS notifications when transactions are posted and for group activity.

Minimum collection: None.

Payment: Buxfer uses Amazon payments to transfer money online.

Cost: Buxfer rounds amounts down for totals that do not divide evenly and keeps the extra pennies. Sending money with Amazon Payments is free, but there is a fee for receiving money.

Buxfer Privacy Policy
Visit www.buxfer.com
4. BillMonk
BillMonk tracks the debt between groups of people then suggests a way to shuffle debt around so each person owes an equal amount, but has debts with fewer people. BillMonk members can also create a library of items to lend to friends and reports who borrowed what.

BillMonk categorizes expenses with tags, downloads CSV data for spreadsheets, and bill or loan information can be sent to BillMonk from a mobile phone.

BillMonk supports over 30 currencies and virtual currencies of some online communities such as Second Life.

Minimum collection: N/A

Payment: BillMonk FAQ says it encourages using Obopay cover debts.

MAKING MONEY ONLINE FROM AMAZON AFFLIATE PROGRAM

You've probably heard before a lot of hype about how much money you can make with affiliate programs. Maybe you've even set up a site yourself, only to find that after buying the domain, a few bucks a month in hosting, software or a web designer to design your site, etc., that the piddly affiliate fees hardly even covered your cost. Well, here's the hype-free way to really make money with an Amazon.com affiliate site. And it'll only take a day to make the site. The secret? Low cost, low effort.
Difficulty: Hard
Time Required: One day
Here's How:

1. If you don't already know it, learn some basic HTML. You have to do this to keep your costs down and still get what you want. Even if the site is basically laid out for you, you're going to need to know how to insert images, create hyperlinks, and do some basic text formatting. Our HTML Guide offers a free 10-week HTML class and a great collection of beginning HTML tutorials. Get over any anxiety you have about this. Just do it. You'll thank me for it later.
2. Decide on your topic. You're going to be doing product reviews and recommendations, so pick a topic that you enjoy and know something about. If you can't stay passionate about the topic, that will show, and it also won't hold your interest. Choose a narrow enough niche to be distinctive, e.g., bands from your city, left-handed guitarists, music for a certain kind of dancing, authors of a certain religion, books about arts & crafts, etc.
3. Choose your domain name. Make it keyword-rich, not clever. Think how people will find your site in the search engines. Here are some ideas (all available, by the way):
Music: BandsFromTexas.com, BandOutOfBoston.com, SouthpawGuitarists.com, ClassicPsychedelia.com, Non-Stop-Hip-Hop.com, Merengue-Music.com
Books: Mormon-Authors.com, Arts-and-Crafts-Books.com, Books-by-Stephen-King.com, ClassicBusinessBooks.com
Others: Best-Baby-Toys.com, MomsMags.com, FelliniMovies.com
4. Register your domain name. If you're not technically inclined at all, register your domain wherever you set up your hosting in step 5. Otherwise, you can save a few bucks by choosing a lower-cost provider. Not a big deal for one or two sites, but it can be for ten or twenty. I use GoDaddy, who have great domain management tools and are less than $10 a year. The least expensive I've found from a reputable source is 1&1, whose price is under $6 a year (last I checked).
5. Set up your web hosting. This is where most people get burned. For this kind of site, you do not need $10 a month web hosting! Check out Discount-Hosting.com for no-frills hosting with adequate functionality and bandwidth, for around $10 a year! If you want more features, or especially if you're planning to run multiple sites, see GeekHosting.com or Multidomain-Hosting.com.
6. Install weblog software. "Weblog, you say?" Yes. It will give your site all the structure you need, plus make it easy to quickly post new content. My pick is WordPress, which is open source (i.e., free), easy to install and use, and yet very powerful. Download it and follow their installation instructions. Turn on notifications to Weblogs.com and Blo.gs. In WordPress, this is under Options | RSS/RDF Feeds, Track-Ping-backs.
7. Make it pretty. Free templates for WordPress are available at Not That Ugly. Choose a style you like and then tweak it to suit your tastes and the theme of your site.
8. Set up categories. Most blog software allows you to create sub-categories to help organize your entries. This will help visitors narrow in even more specifically on their interests. For example, BandsFromTexas.com might have one group of categories for genre — rock, country, blues, etc. — and another for city of origin — Austin, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, etc.
9. Sign up as an Amazon Associate. It's simple and free. Just visit Amazon and click on the Join Associates link at the bottom of the page (here's a direct link for your convenience). Your site should already have at least the basic setup done, even if you don't have any content there yet.
10. Create your blog posting bookmarks/links. There are two links that are going to be essential for you to make this easy. First is the blog posting link. In your blog software, on the posting page (see their instructions), at the bottom of the page there should be a "bookmarklet". Click on the link (and hold the mouse) and drag it up to your Links toolbar in your browser (assuming Internet Explorer), or your Favorites menu. This will allow you to blog a product with one mouse click.
11. Create your Amazon Build-A-Link bookmark/link. This will make it easy to build the link with your affiliate ID built in. Log in to Associates Central, look in the left navigation sidebar, go to Build-A-Link, and under Static Links, find Individual Items. Click and drag this onto your Links toolbar or Favorites menu.
12. Build your first link. Go to Amazon and find the product you want to review. Scroll down to Product Details and find the ASIN or ISBN. Double-click on the number itself to select it, then right-click and choose Copy. Click on your Amazon Build-A-Link link. Right-click in the search field and choose Paste. Change the selection from Served Link to You Host. Click Go. Your selection should show up. Click Get HTML. Choose the kind of link you want, select the highlighted text and copy it.
13. Blog your review. Now click on your blog posting link (Press It! by default in WordPress). If you're using WordPress, you should now see two pieces of link code in your posting form, the first one ending with "Associates Build-A-Link >< /a >". Delete through that point. The second part is a link to the product with your Amazon Associate ID built in. Now just write your product review, choose the appropriate categories for it, and hit Publish.
14. Build out your site. Before you promote your site, you want to have some substantial content there. Write several product reviews. Have at least 2-3 in each category you've created. You may also want to make a categories for articles, news, and commentary about your topic. The more content your site has, the better. And the great thing is that while you're writing all this, the search engines are getting notified automatically, assuming you turned on the notifications mentioned in step 6.
15. Promote your site. The best free way to do this is to communicate with other bloggers writing about similar topics, and to participate in online communities where your topic is discussed. See the Online Business Networking category for ideas, as well as the Internet Marketing category.

Tips:

1. You have to learn some basic HTML and basic concepts about running a web site. It's just not that hard. If you have to rely on purchased software, you won't be able to get exactly what you want, you won't know what to do when things go wrong, and you'll end up spending money you don't need to. Spend the time to learn it. It will be well worth the investment.
2. I slightly recommend music over books and other products, mainly because you can listen to the clips of an entire album in about 10 minutes and get a good enough feel for it (without buying it) to do a short review. If you have another topic that you're passionate about, great, but make sure you have a unique angle on the topic. People can get reviews about a lot of those consumer products anywhere. You need to give them a reason to come to your site.
3. To draw repeat visitors, create a newsletter. Frequency should depend on how often you're posting new content. Start with monthly. EZezine will let you send up to 1,000 messages a month for free, with no ads. By the time you exceed that, you should be able to justify paying for the service.
4. To pick up some extra pennies, sign up for Google AdSense. It probably won't generate a lot of revenue, but it's free to sign up and completely effortless to maintain.
5. Set reasonable expectations for earnings. You've only invested $20. You're going to make 5% on most products. That means that you need to sell $400 worth of stuff to make back your investment. To make $20 an hour, what you write must generate $400 worth of purchases. You get credit for other purchases made while at Amazon besides just the product you linked to, so it's not as hard as it may sound. It won't make you rich, but it's not hard to be profitable, and it builds over time.

MAKING MONEY ONLINE WITH GOOGLE ADSENSE

Google AdSense is the Google program where you can host pay-per-click ads on your Web site. When someone clicks an ad, you earn money. Simple as that.

Is it really as easy to make money with Google AdSense as many would lead you to believe? Now that I've become heavily involved with managing Google AdSense programs for my clients, I can see it's not all play and no work.

Unfortunately, a lot of people bought into the idea that there was a lot of easy money to be made and they are now finding out they aren't making nearly as much as they thought they would. Additionally, Google has a lot of prohibited practices when it comes to AdSense, and too many Webmasters are finding out they violated Google's policies after the fact - often because they never bothered to read the AdSense policies in the first place.

Webmasters must not only comply with AdSense policies, but their web sites must also comply with Google's webmaster policies.
Prerequisites for Making Money with AdSense
To make money with Google AdSense you need plenty of traffic coming in to your site or there won't be anyone to click the ads. Web site promotion techniques, especially search engine optimization and article marketing will bring more traffic to your site. You also need to have content that will attract the ads with the highest Pay Per Click (PPC) rate that are relevant to that content. Then, you need to lay out your web pages so the ads blend in with your Web site. Studies have revealed that people who visit sites that contain ads that use colors that are not in harmony with the actual Web site tend to develop "ad blindness". Meaning no matter how much traffic comes into your site, chances are no one will click the ads because they'll be ignoring them. If no one clicks, you make nothing.
Dealing with Competitors

If you offer products or services on you Web site, the first thing you'll notice when you begin hosting PPC ads is that many of the ads are coming from your competitors. Therefore, you'll want to put ads on pages that aren't earning you any money, or do like I did and not put ads on your site until you're so busy anyway you'd rather make a few dollars off of your competitors than to continue turning business away with nothing to show for it.

Google AdSense allows you to specify up to 200 URLs for sites you want to bar from placing ads on your pages. The problem is that most times you won't know the competitors are out there until their ads appear.
Google Money Making Ad Options
Google offers three ways to make money from them:

* Google AdSense for Content - A variety of size and shape ads for placing in your content are available. These can be text or image ads or both - you specify what you'll allow. Ad units are full ads. Link units are simply a strip of text links that your visitors might want to click. Google allows you to put up to 3 Ad Units and 1 Link unit on each page of your Web site, provided you follow its policies - both for AdSense and for Webmasters.
* Google AdSense for Search - This places a search box on your Web site. When a user enters a term and conducts a search, a search results page opens, that hosts more pay-per-click ads. You can customize the color scheme of the search results page to harmonize with your web site.
* Google Referrals - Here you make money by referring visitors to use a Google product, like AdSense, AdWords, the Google Toolbar and other Google software. Just like Google AdSense for Content and AdSense for Search, Google generates the code that you paste into the desired location on your web page. You can choose from a wide variety of buttons and text links of different colors. As an example of how Google Referrals works, if someone goes to your site and clicks the link and signs up for an AdSense account, when that person earns a $100 from Google AdSense and receives a payout from Google, you'll also receive $100 for referring them. This is a great idea to me, because you can be the world's worst Google AdSense advertiser, but if an ad dynamo happens to visit your site and uses your referral link, you can make money anyway!

Google AdSense Payments

Google will not issue an AdSense payment until your earnings exceed $100. Unfortunately, there are loads of Google AdSense Forum entries about Web site operators who accumulated $90 or more in click through earnings only to get banned from Google and not get paid anything at all before they ever reached $100. This may be because Google doesn't take a close look to see if you're complying with their guidelines until it comes time to pay you. So yes, there's a lot more to the story than meets the eye.
Other Programs Besides AdSense

Yahoo and MSN have similar programs, although those programs aren't as well-developed as Google AdSense and there aren't as many available advertisers to display ads on your site. The fundamentals for making money are the same.