Enter this Crucial Contest!

Crucialwebhost.com is really in the holiday gift giving mood. They are running a "$4,000 Crucial Contest" over on their website and have some pretty nice gifts to give away. There will be six winners in the contest and here's the cool prizes you can try for:

- Xbox 360 Elite + Assassin’s Creed game
- A new logo design, courtesy of David Airey
- 5 years of our Split-Shared hosting, a $600 value
- Custom Wordpress theme for your blog
- $100 Adwords Campaign
- Website Critique along with 12 months of hosting

An Xbox 360 would be a nice early Christmas gift! How to enter is explained on their site's "$4,000 Crucial Contest" post. Basically you can increase your chances by signing up for their RSS or Email subscriber form, blogging about the contest (like this), and signing up for various programs or hosting. The prizes are too cool to pass up!

According to Crucial, the deadline for entries is Wednesday, December 5, 2007, and the winners will be announced there on Monday, December 10, 2007. Winners will be drawn using a random generator.

Six winners will be picked and, going in order, will choose which prize they want. If you win a prize that doesn’t suit your needs, you could always run your own giveaway to create some buzz for your website and give extra thanks to the sponsors.

Head over to the "$4,000 Crucial Contest" and get your entries in!

October 07: Minor Income Report

Yes folks, there is money to be made online. Monetizer wanted to let you in on some of the extra "minor income" (non-Adsense) made during October 2007. This income report comes as the result of a previous post, "Sites that Haven't Payed Monetizer But Will".

The Monetizer signs into various accounts to check on things regularly and was pleasantly surprised to see the Payout threshold was surpassed on Squidoo! The following message was nicely displayed on the lensmaster dashboard:

Squidoo - $18.32 earned (over a few months)

"YOUR ROYALTIES (09/01/2007 to 09/30/2007)
Your previous balance + previous Refer-A-Friend bonuses = $5.04
Your new lens earnings this period = $13.28
Total earnings = $18.32!

So, here's how you're spending your $18.32...

$18.32 will be sent to you via PayPal within a day or two (you reached your Cash Payout Threshold, congrats!)."

Not even 15 minutes after seeing this, Monetizer received an email saying Squidoo had just payed out to PayPal:

"Note: Zippideedooda, zippideeay, my oh my, today is payday! Here are your Squidoo royalties earned during September 2007. "

So now I'm rich :) Not too shabby for a bit of promotion work last month. It goes to show if you set enough good Squidoo lenses and they were getting decent traffic, you might stand to generate some nice extra passive income. The Squidoo lenses are a nice promotional tool as well for anything you are selling or promoting.

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Here's the rest of the Minor Income Report for October:

Cash Crate - $16 in October, just from surveys. The best way to benefit from this program is by referrals, and hoping your referrals are active participants. Many people are lazy, self included at times, so this one takes some motivated people! However you could basically earn money with Cash Crate to buy a domain name or start web hosting!

Clickbank - a sale of $23.50 or so was made. The only problem here as previously described, it was a credit card sale, and they have interesting rules regarding payout where you need 1 VISA and 1 Mastercard transaction, and 5 total credit card sales in order to get payed. If it had been a Paypal payment, Monetizer would be payed.

Associated Content - almost $60 total - Thanks again to DayJobNuker for this one. Monetizer earned closed to $60 in October for uploading older blog articles and taking on a few new opportunities. Usually your payout is from $3.20 to $6 based on the article, with $4 being the average payout. But to their credit this site pays out within 3 business days of accepting an article. Not a bad turnaround time at all!

Adding those up it's over $100 made from just these 4 programs. All of these did involve some work though, and the Monetizer can't always put in a ton of time on them, otherwise he'd be spreading himself too thin! This also doesn't account for Adsense earnings through other blogs the Monetizer does. This is mainly to illustrate the "other" moneymakers from last month.

But this post serves to show you that you can earn income online in more ways than just blogging or Google Adsense. While these numbers aren't exactly "ballin'" type numbers as my friend would say, they definitely indicate the possibilities given more work and effort!

So where to go from here? Monetizer is awaiting word on a recent PayPerPost application status as well as keeping an eye on ReviewMe.com for review opportunities. In addition, AuctionAds is coming close to a payout. But the important message here is that adding more income sources can only serve to boost your overall $$$$!

(Note: 73 cents has been earned for about 8,000 pts at GuessNow.com. It's not a terribly tough way to make money, as you can breeze through giving predictions on 40 or more questions a day. Also, about 71 cents has been earned at Associated Content for article page views. You get $1.50 per 1000 views there making it a bit of "passive income".)

10 Free Ways to Get Blog Traffic

Getting traffic to your blog is always a tough process, however with the right initiatives it's highly possible. It's also possible to do it for free, using the right strategies. Here are 10 ways The Monetizer has found that are great for bringing traffic to your website or blog. Try to put these into practice for your own blog promotional plan and see if you might increase your traffic and subscriber base.

1) Join BlogCatalog.com - As well as MyBlogLog and BlogTopList. However if you were to choose just 1 of these 3, go with BlogCatalog. Submit your blog info on the site and make sure it gets approved and displays on your profile before you start adding friends. You want your blog and RSS feed to be appearing on your profile before you start to get superbusy making friends. Once you're set up, you can add friend after friend on a daily basis, and it will bring people through (other bloggers mostly) to check out your blogs (using simple clicks on their Add Friend button). You can just go click crazy, add a friend then add a friend off their friends and so forth down the line. Aim for 25-100 per day and you will probably notice traffic and RSS subscriptions go up.

2)Add the BlogRush Widget - This really isn't a proven heavy traffic bringer, and you really have to set it up just right. On one hand you want a catchy title always displaying on other blogs, so that people will be curious enough to come over to your blog. But on the other hand, you're displaying a widget and it just might show a title sending people off your blog. It's a catch 22, but done properly it just may help your site. Sign up for BlogRush here.

3) Myspace or Facebook - With both of these you can build a nice looking profile and start finding friends on the sites who may be interested in your topic(s). Monetizer is just starting to tinker with Facebook, and it is really being talked up lately as having a lot of traffic and daily views. It may trump Myspace at some point. But if you can amass a large network of friends on either, you then have the ability to send bulletins to everyone (announce a great new blog post) as well as set up groups, distribute Facebook Flyers (not free) and more. Imagine having a Myspace profile with 1000's of friends, and being able to broadcast a catchy bulletin which many will see, linking to your blog post. Should bring a nice bit of traffic to your blog.

4) Submit to Search Engine Directories - In the previous post the Monetizer reviewed the Directory Submitter software. You can download a free demo copy and submit your site to about 200-300 directories. Some will have specific requirements and if you're doing the free submissions, they may take weeks or months to even list you. Starting now makes sense, as it's a great way to provide backlinks to your site, which is something Google loves.

5) Post on Forums - You want to join relevant forums for your blog topic and if they allow it a cool looking banner type signature for your site will usually attract people. Monetizer believes a lot of web users are visual, so seeing a cool, catchy banner will bring clicks. Become active and post responses on several forum threads and your site should get noticed. You may decide to look for the threads which have a high number of views and responses to post in as your banner will certainly catch more viewers' attention there.

6) Join and Submit Content to BLoggingZoom - Monetizer discussed the new site BloggingZoom here. This is a community built for us bloggers and they allow you to submit your own blog entries as much as you want. It's much like Digg as you get "Zooms" on your submitted items that people like. Popular items get displayed on the main page. The folks behind this site also claim they are going to work their butts off to help search engines find the content submitted. A pretty cool deal. There's an article by one blogger who went from relatively few hits on his blog, to over 200 in a day, so it definitely can help.

7) Submit an article to article directories - It's recommended you have 1 really clever or informative "pillar" type article on your blog. Maybe use it as one of your early entries too, such as a key definition list for your topic, or some serious research. You can download a free tool much like the Directory Submitter, yet it's for submitting to article directories. A great way to get your content out there and many of the article directories allow you to place your links for your sites along with the article. The other cool thing here is you can join associatedcontent.com, and submit the article and possibly make a small bit of money if they offer to pay for your material.

8) Comment on related Blogs - You see this a lot, but it's a great idea to leave comments on other blogs within the same topic category or niche as your blog. If the other blog gets a lot of visits, viewers may see your comment and head over to check out your blog. Also, the blog authors will tend to drop by to see who's commenting. This is assuming you are able to link to your blog when you leave a comment. (note: try to stay away from putting your link in the comment body, do it in the title area if possible)

9) Create an E-Book PDF or other item - This one takes the most time and work of the options here. The idea is to create a PDF full of valuable content related to what you blog about, and offer it as a free download on your site. Or create a cool banner graphic or widget such as a flash countdown timer to an event. Make sure you have your URL link to your blog listed in either the PDF or other item you make. If the item is good, word of mouth/buzz can spread like wildfire and get traffic to your blog. Friends will give the e-book PDF to other friends, which features your link. Monetizer recommends if you don't have MS Office, there is OpenOffice.org which is a free type of Office you can download and create PDF's with.

10) Use other social media - Beyond just Facebook and Myspace, sites like Digg.com and StumbleUpon are considered biggies. Also look into Squidoo, reddit, Sphinn, Furl and hi5. But there's a ton more and you shouldn't just stop at having your blog promoted and represented on a few social media sites. The more the merrier!

You may consider this list redundant as many other "How to Blog" blogs and "Moneymaker" blogs discuss several of these. However these above strategies are things the Monetizer has seen traffic come as a result of and believes you can as well. The two best ways so far have been via BlogCatalog and Myspace. Monetizer also realizes there's more than just those two ways and that Search Engine love is what can really help your site do well.

Weigh Your Moneymaking Options

In the world of online moneymaking, the Monetizer has learned a very valuable lesson we all should heed: "if it doesn't seem worth the money being made, then forget it". Case in point would be paid survey sites and those paid blogging sites. Both are nice opportunities to get a "bit" of extra money, but let's be realistic, if a site asks you to blog about a dry topic you just can't get a feel for, is it worth $10 or $20? Also, if a survey is taking you over 30 minutes to do and paying under a dollar, is it worth it? Most likely not. In either case you might be better off working a half hour extra at a real job :)

The best sources of online income seem to be the one everyone loves, passive income. The type where you've set up a site, it gets search engine love and visits keep on coming. Affiliate marketing and sales would rank as numero uno for this, where you build sites designed just to promote a product and receive a percent commission of its sale. Other examples of some small passive income would be two sites the Monetizer has mentioned, Squidoo and Associated Ccontent. Both can earn you moeny while you're away from them. Squidoo will give you a share of their Adsense revenue, if your lens page happens to be doing well. Associated Content will give you $1.50 for every 1,000 page views one of your submitted articles gets. It's not a ton of money, but if you did a timeless article on AC, you may benefit from long term income sources there. Submitting a ton of articles and making a ton of Squidoo sites could add up though. These are also both ways to promote your site as well. On each you can place links back, and on Squidoo you can go as far as to include your RSS feeds.

Deciding whether you want to put more effort into aggressive income like blogging versus setting up sites for passive income such as affiliate sales should be a major moneymaking consideration.

You also have to weigh the following when starting a moneymaking blog:

1) Do you start off with a free blog site from the get go, gauge how well it is performing, and then move to a hosted domain?

2) Do you partner up and find people to help make your site even better? Do you pay for site design and how much should you spend?

3) Do you eventually sell your site once it's built up a big following and traffic levels? How much is realistic to even ask for?

Almost every major blogger will tell you with question #1 to make sure you get that self-hosted domain from the start. Trust me it's something I'm learning the hard way about with another blog that has built up a decent following. Sometimes you may want to start from the ground up though, and maybe going with Wordpress from the start before hosting makes most sense. With #2 above, you usually can do well just finding free templates for your blog and waiting until you're making the money to afford a better site design. And with #3 selling your blog, sure who wouldn't want to pull some cash off a blog or site? The problem with #3 though is you usually will become attached to a blog or site you've done. It's your brainchild and your creation, so it will be a tough decision to wrestle with. Blogging Fingers recently was sold for $6000 though and quite honestly most of us would take an extra $6000 for a site we created. However, figuring out what your blog is worth can be a bit complex too.

So when you first start up any blog, you may way to consider the 3 questions above. If you're looking to make money from the project, you'll want to weigh the risks and rewards and consider the best strategy for your particular blog topic.