Free Content to Use on Your Blog

Free Content to Use on Your Blog

As you probably guessed, I am speaking about the free article directories which help authors promote and syndicate the content written (meaning, of course, articles). Authors and promoters are allowed to get their articles out with the potential of being read by a large number of people. And when I’m speaking by the authors, I’m referring to amateur writers who are looking for a mean to get their work read or to professional marketers who use the service in order to promote their own website. This is possible due to the articles submitted to these directories, articles that inform people of particular products or services while also promoting websites.

Known as article marketing, it represents a great way of promoting your site. All you need to do is simply write good quality articles for sharing your knowledge and experience and submit your articles to a free article directory. If the readers are impressed, for sure they will want to visit your website in order to find out more.

On the other hand, webmasters all around the world use these platforms every day in order to find free content that can be included on their own sites. This content is free to use providing the links to the source page and also providing the author of the respective article. The articles placed on different websites, can drive even more traffic to your blog as people outside the platforms could potentially read them.

Pay-Per-Post Sites from IZEA

Pay-Per-Post Sites from IZEA

IZEA is a social media marketing company and the world leader in sponsored conversations, which operates a network of over 300,000 social media publishers and 30,000 advertisers around the globe. Below, I will present the platforms used to facilitate the connection between bloggers and advertisers.

PayPerPost. PayPerPost is the pioneer platform in the sponsored post industry. As a result, it has the largest network of blogging publishers and paying advertisers. Besides being the most popular paid blogging network, it always seems to have the most job opportunities available at any given time. PayPerPost pays bloggers anywhere from $5 to over $200 per completed and approved post.

SocialSpark. SocialSpark is IZEA’s premium social media marketing platform. The site provides robust targeting, detailed analytics and support for blogs as well as Twitter and Facebook status updates. SocialSpark is the only social media marketing platform that offers Pay-Per-Post (PPP), Cost-Per-Click (CPC) and Cost-Per-Action (CPA) options designed to fit virtually any marketing strategy. Additionally, SocialSpark is a social site where advertisers can handpick bloggers to help them promote their products and services through sponsored reviews or display advertising. If you're interested in making money through sponsored reviews, but you're concerned about losing your Google page rank because of the penalties Google often places on websites that participate in paid text link programs, then SocialSpark might be a good option for you.

InPostLinks. This service is a replacement for the original version of PayPerPost. The only difference is that the opportunities are link only, which means you don’t have to write reviews or to endorse anything. The only thing to be done is placing the link on a post. The way of integrating it into relevant content (but not with a review or endorsement) represents the fully responsibility of the blogger.

Sponzai. Sponzai is a sponsored guest posts service. It allows sponsors to write their own guest post including multimedia and links. Sponsors then select the blogs on which they want to distribute their pre-written post, and bloggers earn cash for posting this content. Basically instead of purchasing your review or you to write a blog post and include a keyword, you are now selling an entire “post” slot on your blog to an advertiser or sponsor.

SponsoredTweets. Sponsored Tweets is a Twitter advertising service that matches tweeters with advertisers. It allows marketers to hire both celebrity and long tail twitter users based on categories, keywords and other data. Twitter users tweet out messages on behalf of the advertiser in a transparent and honest way.

Make Money Using Twitter Advertising Platforms

Make Money Using Twitter Advertising Platforms

The popularity of Twitter makes a lot of advertising platforms to come out with opportunities of making money on Twitter. Here are 3 recommended platforms that can be used in order to earn some money, if your blogs have sufficient followers.

SponsoredTweets. It is a Twitter advertising platform that connects advertisers with tweeters. How it works? Advertisers create sponsored conversations on Twitter, while twitters earn money for spreading the word. As a twitter, you can define almost everything about the way you intend to approach the conversation and the offers you’re interested in. You can set your charge per tweet, charge per click, content rating, define your ad unit preferences, add keywords, and set up notification settings. As an advertiser, you also have a lot of control and extra insight into members and campaigns, so you can see and select the tweeters for your offer, set a minimum follower count and ratio, define the maximum cost, and invite specific twitters.

Magpie. Magpie is another platform which gives the opportunity to earn money on Twitter. In order to participate in this program all that you need is a Twitter and a Paypal account. The basic idea is that you get paid to allow Magpie to post magpie tweets in your Twitter stream. They maintain an average post to natural tweets ratio of 1:10.You can adjust the ratio according to your convenience. Magpie has four types of ads: pay-per-sale (here you get a cut of the sale price when one of your followers buys something on one of customer's sites through one of your tweets), pay-per-lead (every time one of your followers enquires about a service or joins up for a subscription you get compensated), pay-per-click (every time one of the followers clicks on a link, the twitter is paid), and pay-per-view (you get paid a base amount for allowing a tweet to be placed in your stream).

Twittad. This platform provides the opportunity for Twitter users to display advertisements on their user profiles. Twittad provides the place where advertisers can purchase a user background image in order to promote a new product, website or brand marketing. The Twitter user puts the background up for sale by selecting a price and duration for the ad, and then advertisers pay the agreed price plus a 5% service charge.

Top Pay-Per-Post Sites

Top Pay-Per-Post Sites

Aside from advertising and affiliate programs, another popular way of getting some money from your blog is to write sponsored reviews for any advertiser which is willing to pay you to write about him. But in order to be facilitated the connection between the bloggers and advertisers, it is needed the usage of an intermediary, the so called pay-per-post companies. To this end, I will present below some of the most popular blog sponsored review sites that pay bloggers to write.

SponsoredReview is a platform that allows direct negotiation between bloggers and advertisers. This direct negotiation means that you have to browse through an advertiser directory and seek for those you want to work with. On the other hand, advertisers can do the same by making individual offers directly to bloggers, which makes the system working both ways. Payouts range from $5 to $1000 per each review, and the final payments are made every two weeks via PayPal.

BlogVertise is an interesting pay-per-post system, because there is no marketplace to browse. The connection between the advertisers and bloggers is made by the staff. All you have to do is register your blog, and when BlogsVertise has a suitable offer for your blog, it will be emailed to you. The average payout is around $5 - $15 per post, the final payment being made exclusively through PayPal 30 days after the sponsored post is approved.

On Smorty blogs must be at least 30 days old and to have at least 10 articles published in order to be approved. The quoted rates for a sponsored post range from $6 to $100. The PageRank of your blog and advertiser ratings of your previous sponsored posts determine the frequency and value of the offers. Payments are made weekly, exclusively through PayPal.

PayU2Blog is a smaller player in the sponsored review market. As a publisher, you will be given paid posting assignments on a weekly basis based on the blog profile you create.

Although Bloggerwave is also a small paid blogging network and lists few open job opportunities, their site is very friendly and easy to navigate. Bloggers here get paid a minimum of $10 for each completed and approved post.

With LoudLaunch the amount paid per post is based on the blog ranking, this network allowing bloggers to be compensated for distributing press releases. All you have to do is search through advertisers’ press release campaigns, select the ones aligned with your blog and post them on your blog based on the advertisers campaign. The compensation is based on the exposure your blog can deliver.

Once your blog is approved on the Blogitive system, you are given access to opportunities from companies to post about their news releases. The payments are made per posting, exclusively through PayPal, the standard amount being $5.

BloggingAds is a different system, they supply everything: the advertisers, the text of the post and the money, all you have to do is to publish the ad on your blog.

5 Ways of Making Money from Blogging

5 Ways of Making Money from Blogging

Most bloggers want to find ways to generate incomes from their sites. Nowadays, making money from a blog is possible and isn’t difficult any more. While you don’t have to be a famous blogger or even to have huge traffic, how much money you make depends on both mentioned factors. Below are presented five ideas that will get you earning some money from your blogging efforts.

Advertising programs. Including advertisements on your blog is the most obvious way to obtain an income from your blogging efforts. One of the easiest ways to bring in advertising dollars is through Google AdSense, a free service that provides both text and graphic ads that are relevant to your content and target market. You get paid when someone clicks on the ad on your blog. Generally, the revenues come in the form of (CPC) cost-per-click ads, where the advertiser pays a set amount every time a visitor clicks on their ad, and (CPM) cost-per-impression, where advertisers pay each time the ad is viewed on the blog.

Donations. Even though soliciting donations may sound like the perfect solution, depending on the type of blog you’re running, donations can make sense. For example, you can ask for donations to help cover the costs of continuing to provide readers with your insights and expertise. The key is to be very clear about your intentions, how the money will be used and to make sure you’re in compliance with any fundraising and tax regulations.

Affiliate programs. Another popular way to generate advertising revenue is to use affiliate programs, where you promote products by placing a text link, image or banner on your blog. The best strategy is to identify products that have some logical relationship to your blog. For example, if you’re blogging on travel destinations, ads promoting related products are a good fit.

Reviews. Bloggers can make money by reviewing products, events or businesses through their blog posts. To this end, pay-per-post programs can be also used.

Ebooks. Another great way to earn some money with your blog, is writing an ebook and sailing it through your blog. But, ebooks are successful for bloggers who have alerady positioned themselves as experts in their fields.

So at the end of the day, yes, you can make money from blogging. But for maximum income, you will need to focus on several ways of making money and even on multiple blogs.

10 Ways of Increasing your Blog Traffic

10 Ways of Increasing your Blog Traffic

I have used a lot of methods to increase the number of visitors on my blog: starting with promotion on forums, blog directories or social sites, and ending with commenting on similar blogs. Below, I will present ten ways of increasing your blog traffic, which were used by me or by other bloggers. But, most important is to find what suits you best, because the excessive time spent in this respect can cause stress and loss of interest in blogging.

Good content. Keep in mind that the scope is not only to attract visitors, but to keep them coming back to your blog. And this can be done only if you have researched and well written posts with unique content. Your readers want to find clear posts with good grammar. In this respect, it is also recommended to use medium fonts, light backgrounds and paragraphs.

Comments left on other blogs. First rule is to leave only meaningful comments. On the other hand, it is recommended to post comments in blogs having at least page rank 2 or seems to have high potential to grow. If you want to get ranked, make sure that the links anchored with your name are do follow links.

RSS feed and email subscribing. Allow your visitors to subscribe both by feeds and email. To be more efficient in this respect, display the subscribing box prominently at the top of your site.

Link exchange. Not much to comment here. Be sure you select only valuable blogs to exchange your link with.

Blog directories submitting. Submit your blog only to the top blog directories. Don’t waist your time subscribing to small directories with no future. The most popular blog directories are: BlogCatalog, Blogged, Blogarama, BlogFlux, GlobeOfBlogs, BlogExplosion or Bloggapedia.

Key worded content. The key worded content must relate to your post title and your url. A good example are the “how to” articles, because people often do their searches starting with “how to”.

Join social sites. In order to promote your blog join social sites like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Technorati etc. Be carefully though, because this type of promoting is time consuming and requires a lot of work.

Linking in forum posts. If a post from your blog or the blog generally is relevant to the subject discussed, leave a link in the respective forum post. Also, you can leave a link to your site, in the signature, when posting something on forums.

Cross promote your similar blogs.

Add recent comments box. Lets you know to comment back when needed.

If there you have some other good methods to increase the number of visitors of a blog, don’t hesitate to share them.

The Key for Successful Sponsored Posts

The Key for Successful Sponsored Posts

About the fact that sponsored posts represent or not a danger for the blogs, it was written a lot. What I intend with this article, is to discover some tips to be used when posting sponsored articles without driving away the audience. Because yes, if it is done properly, it doesn’t harm the respective blog.

Credibility is everything. If your readers trust you, then the advertisers have reasons to pay for you to write a post about their products / services. And as you know, they pay more, the more loyal following of readers who come to your blog for advice, you have.

Authenticity of the review. Since the sponsored posts refer to the reviewing of products or services, the idea is to actually use them before doing the review. If you write the articles based on other reviews, it will come out. And this is good neither for your readers nor for the advertisers paying for the post. Why? Because, on a hand, the advertiser will not give you another sponsorship opportunity, and on the other, your readers want to find a real review about a product or a service.

Sponsorship transparency. If you receive compensation in order to write a post, then state it clearly. And here you have some possibilities: it can be mentioned at the top of the article, at the bottom or in the title. Even you can have a special category on your blog named "sponsored posts" or something like that. The idea is to use full disclosure in order not to lose your readers.

Sponsored posts must be kept to a maximum 10% of your content. The golden rule is to keep sponsored posts at a maximum 10% of your blog content. If you write 10 posts per month, then one sponsored post won't drive away your readers. It is not necessary a 100% rule that will ensure you the success. In some cases this 10% rule can be too conservative, but in others can be already too much.

Give your customer what is he paying for. You have to take care also of your advertisers. They are paying money, so they deserve to get full value from your blog. In conclusion, make sure you give your customer what is he paying for. Because if you write the articles just to be written, then the coming opportunities will decrease (in number and/or in amount).

Link-Only Opportunities from inPostLinks

Link-Only Opportunities from inPostLinks

A new service for monetizing blogs is available for more than 2 weeks already: link-only opportunities from inPostLinks. This service is a replacement for the original version of PayPerPost.com. The only difference is that the opportunities are link only, which means you don’t have to write reviews or to endorse anything. The only thing to be done is placing the link on a post. The way of integrating it into relevant content (but not with a review or endorsement) represents the fully responsibility of the blogger.

And what are supposed to be the advantages of this new system? Improved functionality, improved disclosure and more opportunities. Instead, the first reactions received so far from the users, refer only to the small amounts offered for the opportunities, in some cases being 50 cents for a pr2 or pr3 blog.

My question is if anybody who tried already this service, managed to get some real interesting opps? And if so, how much you earned until now?

Tips for drawing attention to your blog

Tips for drawing attention to your blog

Every owner of a blog wants to attract attention to his site. Some says that the content is the key, but others that the promotion of the content is everything. In fact, what is the point of having good quality content if no one sees it? There are a lot of strategies all over the internet meant to convince users to visit a specific web page, but not all of them are working. Below, are presented some of the best methods of attracting attention to your site:

The title is the most important. The first contact of your readers with the posts published is the title. A catchy title, will definitely keep up the interest of the visitors to your blog. Another way to draw attention to your posts is to be rated high in social bookmarking sites as Digg or Delicious. Having in view that this rating is based on the votes of the users at these sites and that many of them will only see your title in a list when they vote, it results that the title is far more important than the rest of the post.

Good quality content. Once you have decided on a good title, it is very important that the text delivers the content promised by the title. There is nothing more annoying than reading a text which doesn’t have to do at all with his title. The promises delivered in the beginning, must be kept. On the other side, the text must be focused on the subject. In online, the reading is not in the same way as reading offline a book or a magazine. On blogs, people want to find, as faster as possible, what they are looking for. To this end, short paragraphs and sub-headers must be used.

Provide resources. An online reputation can be built also by providing easy to use resources. Here, how-to articles, step-by-step instructional articles or question-answer articles can be used. This is due mainly because these types of articles are very simple to understand.

Add useful applications to your blog. Providing a free and useful application to your readers is another way of drawing attention. The advantage of this technique is that once people come to your site for the respective application, it is a lot easier to get them to view your other content.

Run a competition. Many bloggers can thank to some smart competitions for their success. Competitions are particularly popular if there are no or few strings attached. Internet users are getting more wary about giving out their emails, so it can sometimes be worth sacrificing an information-gathering opportunity in the hopes of drawing repeat traffic.

Learn continuously about increasing your blog traffic. A lot of websites offer good and reliable SEO articles, which can be very helpful in the effort of building awareness for your blog.

The new version of PayPerPost

The new version of PayPerPost

PayPerPost is a pioneer in the sponsored post industry, not being simply one of the many ways in which bloggers can earn money with their blogs. One attractive feature is that PayPerPost offers several ways for a blogger to make money: by accepting offers from advertisers to submit blog entries based upon some specific criteria, by negotiating directly with the advertisers (using PayPerPost Direct service), as a PayPerPost affiliate or using PayPerPost v4.0, the next evolution in sponsored conversations.

This is a completely new version of PayPerPost. How different is it? Well for bloggers, there is no more busy dashboard, no more Advertiser-set prices and no more waiting for blog approval. For advertisers, they have complete control over who invite to take opportunities, and who gets approved for payout.

10 Blog Directories for Submitting Your Blog

10 Blog Directories for Submitting Your Blog

Simply having very good content on your blog, is not enough. If no one knows about its existence, it is for nothing. One way to attract more visitors on your blog is to list it in as many blog directories as you can. But when you list your blog in a directory, make sure you provide accurate details and proper categorization. This way, anyone who is looking for a blog on a specific topic will find yours in the search results. Below, I present the top 10 free blog directories that your blog should be in:

Blog Catalog is a social networking service that allows members to submit their blogs and create unique personal profiles online in order to find and communicate with other bloggers. The directory features interesting categories, from arts, entertainment or lifestyle to business, news or technology, and offers the possibility to search by country, language and user. Blogs can be added to the site, but must be approved before they go ‘live’ in the directory.

Blogged is, at the same time, a blog directory and a news type site which provides breaking news taken from the blogs listed on the site.

Blogarama is a massive index of over 100,000 blogs, very simple to search and use. In order to list your site, you have to follow a couple of easy steps, starting from creating a free account and finishing with the adding of your blog details.

Blog Flux is a huge directory easy to use due to the fact that it allows you to search blogs alphabetically.

Globe of Blogs is a directory which offers the feature of searching for blogs by title, author or subject. In order to be accepted, your blog must not be a commercial one. Also, linking back to Globe of Blogs is optional, and is not a condition for inclusion in the directory.

On Blog Explosion directory, you can: add multiple blogs, add banners to promote your blog with click through reporting, refer new members, get your blog reviewed by other members or get full blog statistics.

On Bloggapedia, you can easily connect to the top blogs and newest posts. Innovative categories and a colorful design make this directory very interesting.

Bloggeries has the best categories and subcategories home page on the internet. The layout is clear and concise, and readers are able to find what they are looking for very fast.

Super Blog Directory has an excellent system for categorizing the blogs on the site, being also easy to navigate. It also allows site users to rate blogs (from 1 to 10 stars), containing also professional blogging resources.

Blog Hints is a blog directory and a blog search engine, which allows you to add your site to various categories (i.e. games, politics, health, reference, humor, science, shopping, financial, travel etc.). In order to be able to propose your blog, you have to create a free account first.

If you have a favorite directory not mentioned above, let me know!