When it comes to professional blogging, it’s hard to make sweeping generalizations, especially when it’s about the average earnings of a blogger.  Some people make money blogging fairly easily, ringing up a thousand dollars in revenue in their third month alone.  Some bloggers, however, don’t have as much luck, even if they felt that they did their best with their sites.

If you’ve hit a dead end as far as your blog’s earnings are concerned, there’s bound to be a combination of factors behind that.  Below is a list of some fairly common reasons why a blog isn’t earning as much money as it should:

1.  You’re asking for money too soon in the game:

Blogs take a long time before they can get recognition and be established as a credible source of information for a particular niche.  Because of this, it’s probably going to take a while before you see any rewards from your efforts.  Competition is stiff in the blogosphere, and much of the first months (or the first year!) of your blog will be spent in establishing why you’re different from the rest.  Until you’ve actually made a name for yourself (and your blog), revenue will be hard to come by. 

For some people, it takes only three months before the cash starts rolling in.  For others, however, it can take longer than a year before any rewards seem apparent.  Be patient, work hard at your blog, and your efforts will pay off sooner or later – exactly when that will happen is still a mystery.

2.  Ads have taken over your blog:

You put up your blog in the hopes of getting some extra cash, and one of the first things you do is plaster your blog with Google Adsense in the hopes that your blog will be a revenue market.  Smart idea?  Absolutely not.  When you’re first starting out, the last thing you want to do is drive away readers, which is exactly what you’ll end up doing if you cover your blog with ads at the get go.   Keep advertising to the barest minimum if your blog is still new, and work on building your reputation through the quality of your blog posts.

3.  You’re not updating as often as you should:

Some bloggers work under the assumption that 3 or 4 blog posts in a week is a good posting rate if they want to monetize their blogs.  Unfortunately, bloggers have to work much harder than that, especially if they’re just starting out.  By delivering fresh content at a regular pace, you’re giving off the message that you can be relied on to provide new and valuable information every time.  Regular updates also prod Google and other major search engines to index your blog frequently, which can positively affect your search engine rankings in the long-term.

4.  Money is your primary concern:
This is one of the most fundamental mistakes that bloggers commit:  blogging only for the sake of money and nothing else.  While it’s okay to want to make money blogging – who doesn’t? – what’s more important is for you to actually be passionate about what you’re writing and to be devoted to your blog and its progress.  Bloggers who are in it only for the money  tend to flood their sites with marketing gimmickry that don’t yield long term benefits.  More dedicated and substantial blogs, however, are the winners in the long run.

If any of these common traps are exactly the sort you’ve fallen into, it’s not too late!  Just make a few key adjustments and changes to your blogging strategy, cultivate some patience and tenacity with your blog, and the rewards will come to you in due time.

Any website owner who starts down the path of internet marketing will soon discover how many "guru's" are out there all claiming some secret trick to boost your search engine rankings.  The reality is there are a few things to really pay attention to, but most of it really comes down to hard work.  Depending on what keywords you want to rank for, you can achieve success in a week or 2 or it may take months of hard work to get any results.

Asisde from basic webpage SEO stuff to make sure everything is done correctly, the biggest single factor still in your rankings is the number of links and where they come from.  The PR(page rank) of the site linking to you is important, as is the content on that site.  Recipricol links used to work really well (you link me, I link you) but now its really downplayed by Google as a valid method of links.

The easiest way to get links is through article marketing.  This is not the least work path, its the easiest as far as results go in my opinion.  The setup is simple:

1. Do some keyword research on your topic.  Pick 2-4 keywords you will focus on.  Make sure they get decent search volume but do not go after stuff that is too generic (meaning it will have unusually large seached volume) - those will be way too hard to rank on in a reasonable time.
2. Plan on writing 10 – 12 articles of 300-400 words each, using 2 of the keywords with links to your site in each article, with no more than 3 links per article total.Use the kwyword itself as your link text, not http://.
3. Publish 4 of the articles on a major article directory that has good ranking such as Ezine Articles or ArticlesBase.  These have human reviewers so it will take a bit of time to get your article published.  Luckily they do not expect it to be the first time its published, so while you are waiting there you can post it elsewhere.
4. Make sure you get some software that helps to spin the article content and links.Spinning an article allows you to auto substitute other words or phrases into the article each time it is published so you get a slightly unique version to a totally new verson depending on how much you spin it.  DO NOT try to use rewriting software – I have seen none that do a decent job – usually it reads like garbage and that will not help your rankings.  If you spin an article right, you can easilly get 10-20 different reading articles from a single article, enough to not worry about duplicate content out there (and possible penalties). 
5. The next step is to mass distribute your articles to sites looking for great content.  You can do this manually for free, or find some tools to purchase that can greatly speed this up.  I usually choose to pay some money in the savings of time.  There are so many things to do, you have to trade off somewhere.  You want to make sure you spread out the distribution – its unnatural for any site to go from no links to 500 links in 1 day – what is more natural is 0 to 10 to 18 to 25 to 40 … over several weeks build it up.
6. You will need to start tracking your ranking level on the few keywords you have picked out.After you have used article directories to get about 300 links or so you should start to see a boost in rankings.  Some keywords that are not as competitive, much less, and of course, some it might take thousands.Your goal on most keywords should be to get into the top 10-15 in ranking, number 1 is nice but sometimes the effort needed to keep and hold it is not worth it. 
7. In addition to the article work, you can also use social media accounts to link to each of the articles you publish AND also to your main web site.  You should make a hub pages site and a squidoo lens about your site or niche as well with links to the site.

Sites all want fresh content on them to improve their quality score.Most want articles about their site topic to keep the viewer on the site longer and to get better search enging ranking.  This is exactly why article marketing works – you get links on disribution sites, webmasters get to search for content to add to their site from what is published.

Make Money From Home

Are you ready for a life changing turn?

How often have you heard that there’s a lot of money to be made online.Perhaps you read a newspaper column that had a nice big advertsiement next to it asking for three payments of $17.95 or maybe a friend of a brother-in-law made millions online and retired early.  Maybe just maybe you’ve been skeptical up until now but something just tells you there is money to be made online, something whispering late at night that you can succeed if only you’ll try.

Well the truth is that there is money to be made online and there’s a lot of it at that.  Not to mention all the ways to make money online, man o man are there a lot.  If that question’s been keeping you up late at night burning the midnight oil, you need to ask yourself a new question.  How can I begin to capitalize on this online phenomena?

The first thing you need to do is find an internet marketing mentor, someone who’s been there before and knows the roads that must be travelled.He or she will protect your best interests because it is their duty, It will be like having a dedcated lifeguard at the beach saving you from drowning.  Choosing a good mentor can be a very hard task indeed.  You’ll have to kiss a few frogs to find a prince, but just keep on kissing and do it fast, and once you’ve found one never let’em go.

After you’ve found your mentor it’s up to you, read the material, try the material, and rinse and repeat.  This is where most people get stuck, they just keep reading and reading on and on.  You’ll know you’ve found a good mentor when they kick your butt and tell you to get moving instead of just reading.  Since I intend to give it to you straight there are a lot of other obstacles to your online success; personal things, professional things, even technical things.  You’ll have to become a true entrepreneur and go over them, through them, or around them before you receive success.Just remember, when yoiu go through the trials that will come up, you can gain a lot of leverage by learning from other peoples mistakes.

Download a FREE report about internet marketing from home.

ebay income

If you’ve ever read an article about eBay, you will have an idea of the kinds of incomes people are making – it isn’t unusual to hear of people making thousands of dollars per month on eBay.

Next time you visit eBay, see how many PowerSellers there are: you’ll find quite a few.

Now consider that every single one of them must be making at least $1,000 per month, as that is eBay’s requirement for becoming a PowerSeller.Silver PowerSellers earn at least $3,000 each month, while Gold PowerSellers earn more than $10,000, and the Platinum level is $25,000. The top ranking is Titanium PowerSeller, and to qualify you must make at least $150,000 in sales every month!

The fact that these people exist gives you come idea of the income possibilities here. Most of them never set out to even start up an eBay store – they simply started selling a few things, and then kept going.

There are plenty of people whose full-time job is selling things on eBay, and some of them have been doing it for years now.

Can you imagine that?

Once they’ve bought the stock, everything else is pretty much pure profit for these people – they don’t need to pay for any business premises, staff, or anything else. There are multi-million dollar businesses making less in actual profit than eBay PowerSellers do.

Even if you don’t want to quit your day job and really go for it, you can still make money with ebay classified.  You can pack up orders during the week and take them down to the post office for delivery each Saturday. There are few other things you could be doing with your spare time that have anywhere near that kind of earning potential.

What’s more, eBay doesn’t care where you live, who you are, or what you look like: some PowerSellers are very young, or very old. Some live out in the middle of nowhere where selling on eBay is one of the few alternatives to farming or being very poor.

eBay tears down the barriers to earning that the real world constantly puts up. There’s no commuting involved and no job interview – as long as you can post things, you can do it.

Put it this way: if you know where to get something reasonably cheaply that you could sell, then you can sell it on eBay – and since you can always get discounts for bulk at wholesale, that’s not exactly difficult.

Buy a large amount of something in-demand cheaply, sell it on eBay, and you’re making money
already, with no start up costs.

If you want to test it out before you commit to actually buying anything, then you can just sell things that you’ve got lying around in the house. Search through that cupboard of stuff you never use, and you’ll probably find you’ve got a few hundred dollars’ worth of stuff lying around in there!

This is the power of eBay: there is always someone who wants what you’re selling, whatever it might be, and since they’ve come looking for you, you don’t even need to do anything to get them to buy it.

So you want to get going on making money with ebay?

Well, that’s excellent! There isn’t much you need to learn to get started…

If you see this post a few times it’s because I really need help and I’m posting it on three of my blogs – sorry for the repeat, but if you can help, please do!

I need some help fixing my husbands blog – Guitar Licks. Today when he visited the site (while I was still sleeping) the blog had error messages stating that the WP_posts database had crashed.

When you visit his site it loads with the WP theme and sidebars, but there’s error messages at the top and a “post cannot be found” message where current posts should be listed on the index page.

Some of the errors state:

ALTER TABLE wp_posts ADD FULLTEXT `yarpp_title` ( `post_title`)

ALTER TABLE wp_posts ADD FULLTEXT `yarpp_content` ( `post_content`)

So I’m assuming this error has something to do with the Yet another related post plugin that I’m using on most of my blogs. This blog is using the plugin version 2.16 and is using WP 2.62.

In the Yet another related posts plugin admin area there was a message that said:

YARPP’s “consider titles” and “consider bodies” relatedness criteria require your wp_posts table to use the MyISAM storage engine, but the table seems to be using the engine. These two options have been disabled.
To restore these features, please update your wp_posts table by executing the following SQL directive: ALTER TABLE `wp_posts` ENGINE = MyISAM; . No data will be erased by altering the table’s engine, although there are performance implications.
If, despite this check, you are sure that wp_posts is using the MyISAM engine, press this magic button:

I clicked on the “magic button” as the plugin seems to be working just fine in all of my other blogs and I ended up with even more errors!

Help!

I’ve looked at the WP database for this blog and the WP_posts table says “in use” and I can’t browse it. I also can’t use the backup plugin in Guitar licks – it’s there and functioning but just hung when I tried to do a back up.

I’ve backed up the whole database using PHPmyAdmin so I have a copy in case something goes terribley wrong. Now I just need to know how to fix it.

Should I just place a check mark on WP_posts and then click the repair function at the bottom of the structure screen in PHPmyAdmin and see if that repairs the problem?

I’m nervous about attempting to fix this as I’ve never had to try to repair a database error before. Any help would be appreciated.