The Latest in Moneymaking News

A few things worth noting in the Make Money Online blogosphere. Some may be news to you, others you may have seen floating around already. First up, there is Entrecard, which is a new online initiative launched by Graham Langdon (creator of the Million Dollar Wiki).

In a nutshell, this is what Entrecard is:

"Entrecard is your business card 2.0. It's a 125x125 image which represents you and your blog. Its part advertisement, part business card. It comes with a widget you place on your blog, so that others can leave their Entrecard for you. You can also use Entrecard to promote your blog and launch free advertising campaigns."

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The other big news this past week was that Google is changing how they pay for clicks. Google used to have it where a website viewer could click anywhere within the ad block and you the publisher would be paid. They now have switched it to website viewers must click on the ad title or URL link. This may not be the same for all size formats, but it could impact earnings for many publishers.

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If you aren't aware of Contest Blogger, give it a look over and subscribe. The blog regularly presents all sorts of blog and website contests you can enter for great prizes. The most recent example is a $100 giveaway for a "Love Contest". All you need to do is link to the contest sponsor Romance Tracker with the text love. And it's for the love of money.

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Also, congratulations are in order for BloggingZoom. It's a great new tool similar to Digg, but for those of us in the blogosphere. It recently zoomed into the 100,000 level for Alexa rank, which indicates the site is getting a heavy dose of traffic. Highly recommended for all bloggers, Zoom a blog article or two, it just might increase traffic and return visitors to your site!

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Finally I'd like to make a bit of a plea to the owner/host of 45n5.com's "Top 100" Moneymaking blog list. The top 3 are Problogger, Shoemoney and John Chow, as expected. After the top 100, are the "up and comers" of the make money online blogging world. Monetizer has emailed a few times now asking politely to be included on the "up and coming list". Monetizer believes this blog qualifies for the top 234 listed there, so if you're reading 45n5 owner, hook me up!

How I Bought $76 of Gas with PayPal

A funny thing happened at the gas station the other night. Monetizer went to use the trusty PayPal debit/credit card after making a $120 sale on eBay. So there's over $120 in the PayPal account. Gas is not cheap and Monetizer decided to get just $4 worth to get around town for the next day until more money came in. Chose "debit" at the pump and got the whole gallon :) Afterwards, the plan was to go withdraw $120 and deposit it into the real checking account. Well lo and behold, the bank would not release that $120 from the PayPal debit card from the ATM!

Monetizer tried a second bank, since it was after 1 A.M. The second bank was also refusing the requests. Finally, the Monetizer headed back home and checked out what was going on online with the PayPal. Well it turns out, PayPal had put a hold on $76 for the gas station transaction of just $4! Frustrated, Monetizer searched the net and found an eBay forum where another guy had the same problem with a $30 transaction for gas, at an Exxon Mobile. He was charged $76 as well after his PayPal debit gas station purchase.

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Turns out PayPal or the gas station does this to make sure you can cover the debit purchase. $76 does seem a bit steep though. Had Monetizer just done "Credit" rather than "Debit", this all would have been avoided. I emailed PayPal promptly about this and they emailed back the next day, then took the "hold" off my $76, releasing it back into the account. But it speaks largely to today's lesson on money. You need to be vigilant and know the rules for the moneymakers you use online, as well as other financial companies and sites you deal with or use (credit cards, your bank's fees, stock accounts, etc). Many of these places can be "sneaky" if you're not keeping a watchful eye.

A great example is of course Google Adsense. They frown upon invalid click impressions and for good reason. Studying the Google TOS is probably a great idea, because Monetizer has seen many newbies messing around and trying to get friends to "hook them up". That's a no no.

Some other programs have explicit and specific rules. For example, PayPerPost does not want you running Kontera contextual ads in the paid or sponsored posts you do. You'll need to use the special filter code seen here. On the flipside, ReviewMe.com allows you to run Kontera.

Most importantly, I wanted to bring the $76 charge from PayPal to everyone's attention. Gas is already expensive enough. If you're going to use your PayPal debit/credit card for filling up with gas, choose credit ;) Or, just withdraw all your money from every account you own and hide it under your mattress. It seems safer in today's internet-driven world.

Save Money on Holiday Shopping - CouponChief

According to the calendar today, there's approximately 40 shopping days until Christmas day hits us. Even less shopping days if you, your friends or family celebrate any other upcoming holiday. Many of us, the Monetizer included, like to wait until the last minute to buy our gifts for others. Probably the most popular way to get ahead and avoid mall crowds is by using online shopping to make your gift purchases. One way to save a good bit of money while doing your online holiday shopping is through the use of the CouponChief site.

CouponChief.com is a wholly owned subsidiary of Coupon Chief, Inc. Their main goal is to provide a one stop coupon deal and discount resource for visitors to their website. They also have a strong focus on customer support and providing up to date coupon codes and promotional deals and discounts to you.

CouponChief provides you with a great variety of online shopping coupons to help save some money at many top retailers online. Examples of retailers you can save with include online retailers such as eToys, Best Buy and Kohl's. With the Kohl's coupon you can save 10% off your entire online order. The Best Buy coupons currently offers 15% off on select accessories with select home audio and video products. There's also several Dell coupons available to help you save on that LCD TV you wanted (it's ok to shop for yourself too).

Give CouponChief a look if you're trying to save some money with your online holiday shopping, as we seem to be moving faster and faster to the holidays!

Use Clever Tactics but Keep Your Rep Up

All it takes is a little creativity to boost your blog's popularity or traffic levels. Using a contest, a catchy blog entry or something that hasn't been seen before online can usually give your blog an increased interest level. It's something to consider implementing, but always use tactics very carefully.

For example, there was the "Great RSS Battle" between Shoemoney and John Chow. While it was a friendly battle between the two top bloggers, it also benefited them both quite a bit. They gained a LOT more subscribers overall no matter who the winner was. The Monetizer was already subscribed to both of them, so it was a no contest here. But the point is, they were able to use a contest amongst them to really stir things up with friendly competition. You can do that with your own blog, depending on the subject matter. For example, if you blog about the NFL or another sport, why not have a friendly 'Pick Em'" contest against a fellow blogger. Each of you would of course give credit to the other on your respective blogs with a link to their blog and discuss your predictions. You could do this on other topics as well, but things with predictions (sports, Entertainment awards, etc) are usually an easy and good natured contest.

John Cow, which is considered a spoof of the John Chow blog also had a neat tactic recently. One day he blogged about making sure you back up your blog entries, a very important thing for us all to remember. About a day later, the blog post read "H4acked", indicating Turkish Data Processing Military had taken the Cow blog over. The tactic was to show people just what might happen should you not have your blog backed up. Bloggers blogged about the "security breach" too, so it helped John Cow quite a bit. And John Cow was able to teach readers the valuable lesson he wanted to illustrate in a creative way on his blog (as well as make 1 easy blog post called "H4cked").

Tactics of course should not be unscrupulous. For example there was a recent controversy over someone impersonating John Chow to email John Cow about a new RSS promotion. The fakers were promising to "sell RSS subscribers" to blogs that wanted to up their feed counts. Gary Conn discusses how being a fake can hurt you over at his blog. Impersonating a bigtime blogger is no way to jumpstart your blog, your business or your reputation online. This sort of tactic will only hurt you because it will damage your reputation and possibly result in civil or criminal penalties.

Bottom line: Use creative tactics, but tread carefully because your blog's reputation is at stake.