AboutBlogging.Info - Making Money Online

I first noticed the page peel script about a month ago. Like many people I have a near phobia of clicking on shiny objects on web-sites I’m not familiar with. But this caught my attention. The top right hand corner of the web-page was shimmering and the corner seemed to be peeled away. The text in the corner said: “Click here”. And I did. I was fascinated. If you hover your mouse over the corner the page will ‘peel away’ to reveal whatever is beneath. It is a very eye-catching and still relatively new way to advertise on your site.

As soon as I saw it, I wanted it for my own blog. I did my usual thing and went looking for a free version of the script. This turned out to be a harder thing to do than I thought. What I found was people trying to sell the script from prices as high as $80 to as low as $5. The closest I could come to free was sites who were running promotions where they would give you the script if you signed up for something else.

I was sorely tempted to pay the $5 to get it but ultimately I just forgot about it – until today. While stumbling around I came across the script for free! I downloaded it and got it running and it works.

Once you download and extract the .rar file all you have to do is:

1. Edit the peel.js script to point it to whatever url you want people to go to when they click on the corner.

2. You then create two images, one is the small 75×75 pixel image that you see when the corner is unpeeled and the other is the 500×500 one that you see when you move the mouse over it.

3. Upload the whole folder onto your web-site.

4. Insert one line of code into the header information of the page you want the peel to appear on.

That’s it! And it’s free!

Download free page peel.

An advertiser accepted my bid for the first time yesterday on SponsoredReviews.com. I registered two of my blogs with them last week and so far I have applied for nine opportunities. Of the other eight, one has been rejected and the other six are still pending. A second one was accepted today.

When I decided to try writing sponsored posts I first thought of PayPerPost. In fact I have applied and failed to join PayPerPost twice already. My application is in for the third time now and this time I think I have fulfilled all the criteria.

(BTW The reason I have been rejected twice so far is that I failed to read the qualifying criteria correctly. To have your blog accepted for PayPerPost your blog must be at least three months old. In addition to that you must also have 20 written posts within the past 90 days. My blog was more than three months old and had more than 20 posts so when it was rejected the first time I thought it was a mistake so I changed the settings to display 25 posts on the first page and submitted it again. When it was rejected the second time I actually read the reasons for it; I had only 17 posts in the last 90 days. Everything should be ok this time.)

Compared to PayPerPost, Sponsored Reviews is easy to join. The criteria for joining  Sponsored Reviews are that:

“1. Your blog must be at least 3 months old, and it must also contain at least 10 published posts in order to be approved.

“2. Your blog must have, and maintain, at least a 2:1 ratio of non-paid to paid content. The ratio is calculated on a monthly average.”

When you register your blog it is automatically graded, based on its Yahoo link count and Technorati and Alexa rankings. Your blogs grade with Sponsored Review is an average of the three. PageRank isn’t counted in the grading although advertisers often do specify it as a requirement in the opportunities.

Anyway, while I am still awaiting an acceptance into PayPerPost I got my first job from Sponsored Reviews last night . Writing the review was pretty simple. There were few requirements from the advertiser apart from a 300 word minimum and the inclusion of three links in the text.

It took me an hour to write and check the post. The review came pretty easily to me. It’s not exactly poetry but somebody is giving me actual money for writing it, which is a first as far as me and blogging are concerned.

When I was finished writing the post I put it on my blog and then I went back to the Sponsored Review web-site to post the url. As soon as I submitted the url the fun and games started! The automated checker on the web-site brought back a message that there was a problem with the links in the post and that I needed to fix these. It also said that if there was a problem that I should submit a ticket to the support staff.

The links that I placed in the post were exactly as I was asked to do in the post. The only possible problem I could see was that there was a redirect in the link. There was a setting in my blog which redirected every external link from my url via “go.php”. I created a ticket to the support staff and told them my problem and asked them if this might be the problem.

I have to congratulate the support staff because it took literally minutes for a reply to come back to my e-mail. They confirmed that the problem was the redirect in the links. They also suggested that I change the format of my links. I had them with no decoration (ie no underline) which made them less conspicuous. Support suggested that I should make them more conspicuous, otherwise the advertiser might miss them and mark it as a bad review. (This goes to show the importance of links and the real value of your sponsored review to advertisers.)

I sent back a message to the support staff asking them if they had any advice on how to solve the problem. Again the reply from them took only minutes. Unfortunately they didn’t have any specific advice to give as they weren’t familiar with my particular host. They did try to give some general advice but it didn’t help my particular problem.

Part of the problem with my personal blog is that it is on a free blog host. I don’t have complete access to the files. I can customize certain features through the dashboard. For anything else I have to delve into the mysterious world of editing the code in the theme.

I am far from expert at editing code. After more than half an hour of it I start to see double. Three hours later, after scouring the theme manually and using the ‘find and replace’ function, I couldn’t find any reference to ‘go.php’. It was like a phantom that jumped from the shadows when I least expected it with the sole intention of ruining my paid posting career. After three hours of this I became goggle-eyed and went to bed.

During the night I woke up around 3am with this problem on my mind. I got up and googled something like “wordpress, go.php”. The second link I clicked on gave me my answer. One of the plugins, called ‘click counter’ was responsible. I deactivated it and the redirect disappeared from my links.

This all goes to prove that nothing is ever easy! Not even earning a living from blogging! On the lighter side. I wrote and published my second sponsored review within 30 minutes today.

This has been a good start to my week blogging. All of a sudden I have now got three blogs which have achieved PageRank. This blog is now PageRank 2, as is my personal blog, while my bonsai blog is PageRank 1.

This is a good step forward for me and once again, as with my Alexa rank last week, all of the movement is in the right direction.

I also have more good news with my Alexa rankings. This blog has gone under a million for the first time and now stands at 969,979. The bonsai blog is at 1,368,894. My personal blog is hosted on another server and so I can’t take all the credit for the ranking it gets as a result.

Meanwhile my new Blogumnist blog, about how I quit my day job to blog is a new entrant to Alexa. It started off last week at 8,000,000 and now stands at 2,621,242.

While I’m still not making enough money from blogging to live on I take it as a good sign that after one week of being a full-time blogger (in theory at least) and just a little over a month of being any way serious about it I’ve at least made some progress with Alexa and PageRank.

The single most important thing I have done so far to achieve this has been to go out and visit other blogs and commented. I feel this to be the best way to build your online presence to begin with.

Since my post about installing the Alexa toolbar to improve your ranking a month ago, mine has gone from no rank to 1,161,153.

When I initially installed the toolbar into my browser and placed the Alexa widget on my site it took two days for me to register a ranking of 6,073,354. Within two weeks that went to 3,000,000 and then this week it went to 1,161,153. I have read of other bloggers making quicker progress than that but nevertheless it is steady.

My bonsai blog took a different course. Initially it took over a week to register any ranking - 10,000,000 - and it stayed at that ranking continuously until last week when it zoomed up to 1,513,426. I found this interesting because I usually have about twice the number of visitors to that site that I do to this one, but despite that the ranking was in the tens of millions until last week.

I initially thought the difference was because I had the widget installed on this blog but not on the gardening one but that doesn’t seem to have been the case because I have since put the widget on it too and yet the ranking still remained in the tens of millions for a couple of weeks.

I’m glad to see my Alexa rankings climb out of the high millions into the low millions. Despite however inaccurate the ranking may be it does at least give some indication of a sites popularity and to have it going down rather than up is surely a good thing

I still haven’t achieved a Google PageRank on any of my sites. Now that Alexa is starting to look a bit more respectable for me I must have a great look at PageRank.

If you use Firefox or Mozilla as your browser an interesting extension you can install is SearchStatus which shows you the Google PageRank and also the Alexa Rank of whatever site you are visiting. The statistics from SearchStatus are also used to record data for Alexa so they count towards your ranking.

Among the other interesting features of SearchStatus is that it can highlight all the nofollow links on a web-site. This is useful because I have come across some sites where they claim to follow your links but actually don’t.

I didn’t intend to do it but as it turns out I have adopted different ways to promote my various blogs. I have mainly gotten the word out about this one by leaving comments on similar blogs. My main traffic source for the gardening blog was via Adwords. The gardening blog also receives search engine traffic but that has happened by itself. Since I started promoting my new Blogumnist.com blog at the weekend I have been using social media sites. For my personal diary blog, I have taken no special measures at all and have just let nature take its course.

My launch of Blogumnist.com at the weekend was my first use of social media web-sites in a serious way and now, after it, I see what all the fuss is about!  Submitting your articles to these sites is a great way to get noticed. My experience from the submission of my post about how I quit my day job to blog breaks down like this:

Stumbleupon brought the most amount of hits, but it did so in a very concentrated way. My submission to Stumbleupon brought me 83 unique visitors in 50 minutes and nothing after that. The next most valuable source after that was Reddit. My submission on Sunday is still bringing me traffic today. It’s a more prolonged and steady flow rather than the rush that comes with Stumbleupon. Next after Reddit was Sphinn.com. It too is bringing a slow, steady stream to my site rather than a surge. Apart from those three sites the rest of the social media sites, including Digg, where I submitted my posting only brought a handful of visits.

Of course it depends on the article too. Another I submitted yesterday from my personal blog, a humorous one about sheep was taken up well on Reddit but hardly received any notice at all from the other sites, including Stumbleupon. The flow of traffic from Reddit on that occasion was heavier; just over 100 in the space of four hours. I am still getting visits from Reddit today to that post but nothing from the other sites I submitted it to. Someone else took it the post and put it onto a discussion forum which has been bringing me more visitors today.

I came across a good script on Monday which is pasted below. Paste this code onto your page where-ever you want it to appear and it allows your visitors (or you) to submit your post to the major sites as well as many of the others. It is much simpler and less cluttered than pasting all of those social media icons to the bottom of your posts. It might be worthwhile having a couple of direct links to the most important ones and using this link for the rest, just in case:

<script language=”javascript” type=”text/javascript” src=”http://ekstreme.com/socializer/socializer.js” mce_src=”http://ekstreme.com/socializer/socializer.js”> </script>