Archive for Blogging
Personal Credit Card Debt Is Awful
Posted by: | CommentsOn the earth credit cards and credit debt is too well-known. Consumer debt from credit cards can be quite difficult, and create a very crippling scenario. No one is safe from credit card debt, as even high school students can encounter personal debt using credit cards also. With folks making use of their credit cards a lot more currently, a great number of men and women continue go into unsecured debt. Unsecured debt is not any good, since it contributes to personal bankruptcy as well as the devastation of your credit score.
Despite the fact that getting into consumer credit card debt is simple to accomplish, getting away from it can be something that takes a lot of work. Even though you go to an agency or firm that are experts in helping men and women out of debt, it will not occur immediately. To get out of debt, it will take you quite a bit of effort and time as you get your debt in check and begin the long process of repairing your credit.
To correctly defend yourself from consumer credit card debt, you will need to find out a great deal regarding credit, managing your money, and finances generally speaking. Usually, you are able to stay out of debt simply by creating a good budget and saving money whenever you can. If you follow this plan of action and avoid steering away from it, you’ll as a rule have no difficulties staying out of debt.
For those who have additional credit cards which you really do not use, such as store credit cards that are known for high interest rates, make sure you dispose of all of them. For those who have a lot of open balances, you ought to explore debt consolidation, that will combine all your bad debts straight into one payment so a person can get them out of the way faster. Through the use of consolidating debts services, you will simply have a single monthly bill to pay.
When you receive your charge card invoice, you should always strive to pay more than just the minimum. In the event that you only pay the minimum amount, a person would likely end up being in debt the remainder of your life – as you may be paying only the interest. On a monthly basis, it is best to strive to pay the minimum amount and then some. Forking over more than the minimum amount may also assistance to pay down your charge card monthly bill faster as well.
No matter how much credit card debt you are in, you can always find debt management services and agencies that will help you fight. Personal debt is very common right now, something many of us have experienced. Despite the fact that there are methods out of unsecured debt, the best way to get out of it is to stay away from it all together. Should you repay what you owe when they’re due and in no way miss a payment – you are going to always live a debt free life style.
Don’t let a bad credit score make you swear off purchases you must make. Always know your credit score before speaking to lenders. Consider online banking or telephone banking to make bill payment easier. raise credit report
Blogging for Money – Knowledge
Posted by: | CommentsTo continue my series about Blogging for Money – The Basics, I want to talk about knowledge. Time, Work, and Knowledge are the keys to making a blog successful.
If you live in the USA, then you went to school for 12 years or so, then off to college for 2-10 years. Hopefully you got a degree, otherwise you got screwed like a lot of other students have been over the years. In that time you learned a lot. You obtained the skills to go forth into a career and to work for someone else the rest of your life until they kick you out once you get to old.
What did you really learn in college? You learned a lot about the subject of your major, and you learned to work for someone else, probably in one of those damn class groups. Do you see the problem? You learned a subject and how to work for someone. That is all you learned.
When it comes to being self employed, going your own way, thinking outside of the box, being creative, being an independent thinker, you didn’t get that education. You also didn’t get taught much on how to educate yourself once you leave college. Knowledge is a lifetime adventure, we are always getting an education even if we are not in school. Like in learning how to do anything, learning to blog and be a blogger takes time. It actually has a learning curve to it, and you can’t avoid it. Well, you can if you can plug yourself in and download the knowledge like they did in “The Matrix”.
The point is, to become a professional successful blogger like John Chow or Darren Rowse, you have to learn all the same things they did about blogging. They didn’t know much when they started either. It doesn’t stop there though, you will be learning the rest of your life. You already do now with technology as it changes all the time. Blogging is the same way.
So now that I showed you how to make time to blog even working a 40 hour a week job. Showed you how much work blogging really is in the real world. Now I just told you that you will be educating yourself about blogging the rest of your life. Is this a bad thing though? NO! While some people would think so, to do this right, you have to look at all of this as fun. Learning and educating yourself in new things is fun. If you see blogging as a chore then you will give up quickly. That is the problem with most bloggers, they give up because they can’t make time, didn’t realize it was actually work, or hated learning things.
How much knowledge do you need to begin blogging? The amount you have now. Everyone starts somewhere. Yes, you have a lot of work ahead of you but it will be worth it.
The key to planning your blogging is to take one thing at a time. Here is a list in the order I do them when I start up a typical website this will help you get going.
- Decide the topic of the website
- Ask myself if the topic is something I really enjoy
- If I didn’t say “yes” to step 2, then I pick another topic and start again.
- Create a domain name, one that isn’t taken. I usually make a list of possible names.
- Setup up web hosting. Setup is kind of the wrong word, actually just pick the web host and pay them to set up the account. If creating a blog I make sure they have “Wordpress”.
- Then I get Wordpress installed.
- After Wordpress is installed I log into the website and start selecting my settings and then I can write an “About Me” page and write the first post.
- Over the course of days I do a few steps at a time to the website, like design, templates, and so forth.
It takes a day to setup “Wordpress” on a website. After that it is just a matter of taking it one step at a time.
No, I didn’t forget about the topic or blogging in general. You picked a topic for your blog because it is a subject you like, so you must already know something about it. Since you already enjoy the topic you won’t mind reading everything you find on the topic, you want to become an expert in the topic.
While you are at it, read everything you can find on blogging. Even if you don’t fully understand it, read it anyway. Once you have it in your head, it will come back out later once you learn enough to completely understand it. Look at blogs on blogging, books on blogging, and talk to bloggers. There are a lot of websites out there that are on the subject of being a better blogger, as time goes by you will find most of them I’m sure.
While all of this seems overwhelming it isn’t as bad as it might sound. Each blogger on the net has went through the same blogging learning curve. We also continue to learn because of software updates, new websites, new software, and changes in technology. You never stop learning and if you can’t find the answer ask someone. A lot of bloggers on the net will answer questions.
Blogging for Money – Work
Posted by: | Commentsfew blog post back I talked about Blogging for Money – The Basics. I list three basic things you need to make a blog successful: Time, Work, and Knowledge.
I have discusses Time already in Blogging for Money – Time, now it is time to discuss work. Most people would think work would be a simple subject in blogging. Work is just writing blog posts everyday. Right? Wrong!
It takes a lot of work to create, design, tweak, write, promote, and learn the art of blogging. If you think throwing a blog up and make one post a day is going to make you rich and famous you are dreaming and need to wake up. Blogging is work, it might not be the same kind of work as slaving away in a retail store or doing the same job day in and day out on a production line in manufacturing, but it really is WORK.
A blog is created in stages. First you need a domain name. Sounds easy, but you could try twenty different domain names and all of them are taken already. You also need a domain name that hopefully gives a clue as to what the blog is going to be about.
Second you need web hosting. Sounds easy again, but not shopping around will cost you a lot of money or you could also end up with a web host that really isn’t suited for blogging. Lets face it, if the web host doesn’t offer blogging software and custom packages aimed at bloggers, can they really be a good choice?
I use:
Yeah, call it what you will, but yeah this blog survives on ads. Actually I do use them and recommend them. Not because I make money referring people but because I have tried many others over the years and right now they work well for blogging. Since they offer domain registration, hosting, and Wordpress installed and updated with hosting, you really can’t beat it. Plus it is super easy to setup and cancel stuff online without having to talk to a person who will do everything they can to keep you paying for someone you don’t want. Ok, now I will get off my soapbox.
Once you get Wordpress installed, you need a design theme, free or pay for one. Then you have to tweak it to look like you want. Once you get to that point you need to fluff it so you have the categories, links, ads, and header all setup the way you want. Yeah, only four sentences for something that can take a couple of weeks. Fluffing your first blog isn’t easy. You still have to decide on plugins, and all kinds of details.
Once you get the basic setup done, yes that was all just for the basic setup of the blog, you can then start posting. Thinking of posting as your lifeline, think of it as an evil, whichever you want just remember if you don’t post once to your blog everyday “God will kill a kitten”. I mean it too.
Yeah! You have it setup in the basic way. Now you can build links, tweak the setup, find new topics to discuss, and throw a lot more details in the mix. Posting one blog post a day isn’t going to cut it. You have to promote, tweak, and blow your own horn to get traffic, useless you are already rich and can afford to buy all the traffic you want. If that is the case why are you here wasting your time blogging for money???
Now on top of all this you still have a regular job you have to go to 40 hours a week or more. You know the place, “That God forsaken hell hole” you normally call it every morning as you crawl out of bed. You also having a loving family watching you go insane while you work and work on blogging, they also want attention from you.
Are you convince that blogging is real work yet? People often look at the money and that is all they see, but blogging is work. Once you do get the basics done on your new blog, you have to repeat a lot of things daily and weekly to create a blog worth coming to by people.
I have often told people what a normal day is like for me, most don’t believe it because they still work a 40 hour job at a dead end company waiting to die at work. If you think this still isn’t work then you need to follow my daily schedule for a few months.
A normal day for me goes like this:
- Force myself out of bed and to the computer.
- Spend one hour or so creating works of fiction.
- Shower. Eat. Clean house.
- Answer email.
- Check website stats (I have over 35 websites at the moment).
- Answer more email.
- Read RSS feeds to which I subscribe, currently over 300.
- Return all my phone calls.
- Fill all the orders for my retail business which came in over the last 24 hours.
- Go to post office.
- Think about lunch.
- Tweak products, prices, coupons, sales, and such for retail business. Also add any new products.
- Check advertising campaigns for retail business. Tweak.
- Answer any email that has come in since morning.
- Work on building links to blogs.
- Work on tweaking blogs, adjusting ads, thinking about posts.
- Write posts for blogs.
- Answer any comments on blogs.
- Forget about dinner and crash because it is 2am already.
That is pretty much my daily list and has been for a while now. Before I was blogging I use to spend a lot more time writing and editing.
Don’t let anyone fool you, blogging is work. It is damn hard work. If you want to make a living blogging it is even harder work.
How do you get through all this work? The best way I have found is to prioritize you blogging and the rest of your life. When it comes to blogging, do what you need to do everyday first.
- First thing you need to do is write posts. Post everyday to your blog.
- Second answer any comments that people post.
- Third check stats and tweak blog design.
- Fourth work on promoting your blog.
- Fifth learn all you can about blogging and how other people are doing it.
You goal is to always get everything done, but always do what you need to do everyday first so if you have to slack off on something it won’t hurt you as bad later.
Now if the work doesn’t kill you, maybe just maybe in a year or so, you will be making enough money from your blog to quit your day job. Then you will really have time to get deep into blogging.
You are probably wondering that it sounds like I hate blogging. I actually love writing and blogging, but you needed to hear the truth. Most people will see blogging as hard, very hard work, but I don’t. I don’t see it as work at all because I love writing. I’m doing what I love which is writing and to me that isn’t work.
If you can work your ass off blogging for six months, make posts daily, go with out sleep, stress over stats, work long hours without making a dime the first in six months then you will make it as a blogger.
Blogging for Money – Time
Posted by: | CommentsTime… In the first post I made on Blogging for Money – The Basics, I listed “Time” as one of three things you need to make a blog succeed. Time is one thing a lot of us do not have much of here in the USA. When you add up work, family, and all the details you find that you have already been getting less sleep just to get everything done. So you are asking yourself, “How do I make time for a blog?”.
Creating time to maintain a blog is really no different then being a writer. When I first started in my writing career I was working 50+ hours a week, running a online retail business, and working on my art. I had little time to go hang out at the bar with friends or little time for a social life. Adding to that I was having to cut into my sleep quite often just to keep the retail business caught up. Monthly sales tax reports are a pain!
Finding the time to write short fiction was a challenge. I had read several books on writing and I got a lot of ideas from them on how to become a writer on such short free time. Here is a list of tips and tricks I use to always find time to get my writing done. Since blogging is writing, you will find these same tips work great for blogging.
- Put your brain on paper – That is right. The first thing I started to do is carry a pen and small spiral note pad with me everywhere. Yes I mean everywhere, even to the bathroom. You would be amazed at the work you can get done in the bathroom. Ten minutes in the bathroom can easily provide topics for 1-10 blog posts for you to write. It also works well for anything you are trying to figure out. I have a long list of domain names in mine. When I get to a computer I find out if they are taken and if not, I register them on the spot. Writing down website urls I see when I’m out shopping is another idea, which goes with another set of posts I will be doing on business. Even if you don’t get back to what you write that same day, write it down anyway. When you do get the free time, go back and review what you have written.
- The Hour Lunch – A hour lunch can do a lot for you. When I started writing I would actually go sit in my car, eat some fruit and write. Yeah, you don’t get to socialize, but you can get an hour of writing in everyday that way. Breaks at work also work well, in fifteen minutes you should be able to write one paragraph.
- Early Bird Catches the Worm – One idea that never really worked for me was getting up one hour earlier in the morning and spend it writing. You haven’t got the stress from that day still crushing your brain cells so you should get a blog post written with ease. Remember your note pad to get you going on an idea. This never worked for me because I’m a night owl, I usually do my blog posts and writing from 10pm to 3-4am. I only get about 5 hours sleep a night anyway and have found I’m so use to it, sleeping in is hard for me.
- The Culinary Writer – Yep, cooking dinner for the spouse and starving kids can still provide some writing time. Grab your pen and notepad on the way to the kitchen. Once you get dinner started, you do have time here and there to add to your notepad. Just don’t burn dinner.
- Turning the television off – Did you know all televisions have an off button? Yep, that is right! Amazing little button on the front of your television that will get rid of that distraction and give you 30 minutes up to three or four hours. Trust me, all sitcoms are the same with just the names and places changed. After about 100 episodes it will get canceled anyway. And you don’t need your soaps, they never end, there is always problems and someone is always doing something wrong. I didn’t say you had to live without television, but you need to cut down a lot. Once you get through the withdraw, you will find you don’t need it.
- Long drive to work – I know people who spend over an hour driving to work on way. While that would be hard for me, why not take advantage of that hour? No, your trusty notepad and pen isn’t going to work here. They do make tape recorders, voice recorders, and other recording devices you can use in the car while you are driving. An hour alone in a car can be a wonderful thing and produce a lot of work.
Well, I just showed you all that free time you probably have been wasting. If you really want the fame and riches that go with blogging, you have to make the time to blog. After reading this you should be finding yourself writing a little each day. Even if that little is only 10 minutes. It is a start.
It’s All About the Money Boys and Girls!
Posted by: | CommentsIt is all about the money! That is the way it feels when everyone is trying to sell you the secrets to getting rich blogging. Advertisements littered with million dollar homes, stacks of cash and fast cars. You do know by now it is hype, designed to suck you in and drain your wallet with the promise of getting rich. To be honest, there is someone getting rich, but it isn’t you. Can you guess who it is?
As blogging has grown over the years, so has the number of people trying to cash in on selling programs to “The Secrets of Getting Rich by Blogging”. I have tried dozens of programs over the years, spent a lot of money in the process. It was only after some time did I realize how these people got rich. They got rich selling the program, not by using them.
Lets start from the begining. In all these programs what are they selling you? If you answer anything but “Information” you need to re-think this whole thing. They are selling you nothing but information. Is the information they selling you a real secret? “NO” The information is actually free to anyone, you just have to know where to get the information. All they did was collect it all into a book for you to buy. They are just providing a short cut for a small (sometimes large) fee. Most of the time, when you get the information it is just a book telling you where to go get the actual information.
As of late, I read something over 200 RSS feeds dedicated to the subject of making money blogging. How can I read so many feeds a day? I can because most of the feeds are all saying the same thing. One blogger picks up a new or latest “Get Rich Program” and before you know it they all have jumped on the band wagon. What is happening is they are all trying to keep up with the latest trend, hype, scam, or the Jones next door. They are trying to squeeze money in some form out of ever visitor they get to their site.
In the process, the good writing and content which got them to the top is already starting to show signs of falling to the bottom. I was on a certain blog earlier today, it is by a person well known in the blogging world. I haven’t visited their blog much lately because usable content has went way down hill and having too much money and ego is going up. I was shocked to see that the advertisements on the front page out numbered the content.
What is the point of this post? The point is when does a blog become over monetized? When can you admit your content has went in the toilet because you are too busy trying to make a buck out of everyone visiting your site? You have to remember, the higher you get to the top the further you have to fall. Yeah, I could say a lot more things but I think you get my point.
Blogging for Money – The Basics
Posted by: | CommentsEveryday new blogs are created with the hopes of finding internet riches and fame, those same blogs are failing weeks and months down the road. The reason? Most people go into blogging with the mind set that the riches and fame comes quick and easy. That is pretty far from the truth. Blogging is like a business and it takes time to grow and nurture it into a long term income source.
Think of a blog as a child growing up. Along the way to adulthood there will be trials & errors, mistakes, and many other learning experiences. Also along the way there will be opportunities that will offer shortcuts for a price, secrets for a price, and many other things to get your hard earned money. They will offer this software, this service, or something else with hopes of making it all go faster. You will fall for some of these and in time learn that they are just promises without any substance.
What does it really take to make a blog succeed on the internet? Time, work, and knowledge. All three of theses relate together in a very intricate way. Lets first look at time.
- Time: The only thing that will speed up or slow down how long it takes your blog to make it are work and knowledge. The more work you put into a blog the faster you will can see results, the more knowledge you have the faster the work will go.
- Work: If you don’t work on the blog, it will never make it and be just a dead spot on the internet. Knowledge will make your work easier but won’t do the work for you. If you don’t have the time then you can’t do the work.
- Knowledge: In everything you do, there is a learning curve. Just think back to learning to ride a bicycle. It took time and work to gain the knowledge on how to ride a bicycle. Blogging in the same way. You can’t just say one day I’m going to be a professional blogger if you know nothing about it. Quitting your day job would be kind of dumb and your spouse will probably leave you. It takes time and work to gain the knowledge to be a blogger.
There is hope in the dreary night though. If you really want to be a professional blogger you can and all it takes is Time, Work, and Knowledge. You don’t need a $400.00 program, secrets of blogging masters, or any other high priced item to get started on the learning curve to be a professional blogger. You can actually start for free!
What does it really take to make money blogging? Actually that is quite an easy question to answer.
- Website: While having a domain name and your own website is best, this costs money (not a lot but still money). You can get a free blog at either blogger.com or wordpress.com.
- Content: Some people say “content is king”. While many will argue, that isn’t quite true. Content is highly important. The value of your content to others will determine if your blog is worth coming back to in the future. Blogs are like retail, you need people to come back or you won’t survive.
- Traffic: Traffic is truly king. You can have the best content in the world, but if you don’t have traffic you don’t make money. Even if you have bad content, you can make some money if you have the traffic.
- Monetize: This is the last thing you worry about but the first thing a beginner will work on. Yes, you do need a way of making money on your blog. If you have the first three and don’t have this one you won’t make any money, but if you have this and not the first three you won’t make any money either. Worry about this last since it is the easiest to handle.
Those are the four most important things you need to have a money making blog. The details of each are just that details. Details are part of the learning curve.
Among these four basic items you need to have for a money making blog. You will find that doing them in the order listed is also something you want to think about. You need a website first, then create content, then traffic to read your content, and then lastly work on monetize. Once you have all four you are on your way to riches and fame.
Is that all there is? Heavens no. You are forgetting about the learning curve and the details. Once you get the basics, the details are what you spend 99% of your time working on learning. That is where time, work and knowledge come back into play. How much money you make will depend on the details. There are no secret to the details. What has worked for one person in the past may not (probably not) work for someone else.
Those secrets, information, programs, educational courses, and such out there on the net are people trying to sell you are either them, telling you the same thing trying to find their path to riches, or trying to lead you down the same path they took when the path has already changed.
Right now, you are at the basics. In the coming weeks I will be going over the basics in detail explaining more of each. If you are waiting to hear the “Secrets” there aren’t any. A good understanding of the details will take you much further then the “Secrets’ will any day.