AboutBlogging.Info - Making Money Online

The result of Googles clampdown on sponsored posts continues to take its toll on my weekly Internet earnings. Last week I earned $59.37 bringing my total internet earnings to $629.37. It is 14.84% of my target of $400 per week. This is the fourth week in a row that my earnings have dropped from my personal high-point of $150.

The difficulty with earning is due to my overdependence on sponsored posts as a means of making money online. I have found sponsored posts to be an excellent means of getting an income from blogging but it is undoubtedly going through a difficult time since Google launched a campaign, primarily directed against people who work with PayPerPost and reducing their PageRank to zero.

This has created a situation within PayPerPost where most advertisers continue to require PageRank as a qualifying requirement for bloggers. That leaves a growing number of bloggers who don’t have PageRank competing for the small number of jobs which don’t require it.

I can’t help but think that those bloggers who still have PageRank and use only a minimal amount of disclosure must be doing very well out of this!

Combined with the time of year, which according to veterans of last year is slow at best, and it is not a good time. If this keeps up I might be looking for another job early in the new year!

Here’s where the money came from:

PayPerPost $41.00
PayU2Blog $10.00
Smorty $7.20
Adsense $1.02
Helium 15c

This is a review of another web-site offering its services in the obviously crowded payday loan market. Payday Loans are short-term small advances of between $100-$500 on your next pay check and are intended to be repaid within that time period.

PayDayLoansABC readily admits that its services are available to people with bad credit who might have difficulty arranging an extension on their credit card or bank overdraft limit. The price that people with bad credit pay is simple: higher interest rates.

According to the web-site the time from the first online application to the lodgement of the amount requested to an applicants account will be within 24 hours. This lending service is available throughout most of the United States with some exceptions. Visit http://www.paydayloansabc.com/ for full details.

The requirements to qualify for a payday loan are also listed on the web-site but the main ones are: a monthly income of at least $1,000; no outstanding payday loans; a copy of your most recent payday stub; and, an active checking account.

Payday loans are not something that I have heard of being offered in Ireland but I have heard of sites that offer them in the UK. I can remember times in the past when I would gladly have availed of them if they were on offer to me. Christmas is an extremely difficult time for many people and the month-long hangover that occurs in January can be a nightmare. My thoughts are with them all.

Last week I earned $70.90 bringing my total internet earnings to $570.00. This is slightly down on the previous weeks total of $72.15 which itself was about half of the previous weeks earnings of $152.83. The total of $70.90 is 17.73% of the amount I would need to earn each week in order to achieve my goal of blogging for a living.

At this stage there is no doubt that the biggest cause for the drop in my earnings is the PageRank penalty which Google has imposed on bloggers who it has found to be doing sponsored posts. This penalty is most noticable with PayPerPost which as the busiest network is the one where it easier to see.

While some advertisers have been quick to accept the new inhouse RealRank system that PayPerPost has devised as a more accurate depiction of a sites traffic and therefore influence than PageRank it is still the case that most advertisers require it for even some of the most low-paying of jobs. This has made the job market for those who have lost their PageRank much more competitive and the few jobs not requiring PageRank are usually taken pretty quickly.

There still are some good opportunities in the PayPerPost system however and we will have to wait and see how things develop as RealRank becomes more established.

As it happens I have started to experience this shortage in PayPerPost jobs just at the time when my first jobs are beginning to mature and the money is starting to flow into my account. When your PayPerPost post is approved it is then checked again 30 days later and if it is still there on your blog you are paid for the job. I am now starting to get money coming into my account every few days as each of the jobs I completed is checked again. So, while I feel the shortage of jobs at the moment I also see the awesome potential to earn money that PPP presents for the ordinary blogger.

Anyway, here’s where the money came from last week:
PayPerPost $45.50
Sponsored Reviews $13.00
Irish Opinions $5.82
PayU2Blog $5.00
Adsense $1.40
Helium 18c

I’ve noticed that a couple of bloggers have signed up for blogrush during the week by clicking on my widget. For the first time I have gotten a Blogrush ‘referral network’! This has had the benefit to me that for each time someone in my network earns a credit by having the widget displayed on their site then I also get a credit and that credit leads to one of my posts being advertised on someone elses site.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with a bit of free publicity and that is what Blogrush gives you. I have found - and this seems to have been everyone elses experience too - that Blogrush will only bring you a small trickle of traffic. The widget is only worth displaying until you find something more valuable to occupy that space. Of course for many bloggers, including myself, anything that will bring you even one or two extra visitors is more than welcome.

One of the big failings of Blogrush is that only the headline of your post is displayed in the widget. This really is like judging a book by its cover, buying a pig in a poke or even just assuming that the headline will have any remote connection with the contents of the post.

Since the launch of Blogrush Phase Two you are now able to see which of your headlines are being displayed in the widget and how many views they are given. Those headlines which attract the most clicks are displayed more often. This has led to the regrettable situation for me that one post I wrote with an inaccurate and sensationalist headline AuctionAds Increase Earnings 500% is my most successful headline on Blogrush. This is especially regrettable since I have now dumped AuctionAds because I think it’s completely useless. I would be happier with Blogrush if I could have control over which of my headlines were displayed.

Another interesting thing I found about Blogrush was that I found that visiting the Income.com blog and commenting on it about Blogrush brought me more traffic than the widget ever did! Unfortunately John Reese turned comments off after they began to carry out manual reviews of the blogs in their network and that turned that tap off. Then last month he announced that he was taking a break from blogging and simply stopped posting! I miss that blog

Summing up, Blogrush is free. It doesn’t do any harm having it on your site so long as you have the space for it. It does bring you some extra visitors and every little helps

Last week I earned $72.15, bringing my total internet earnings to $499.10. It’s about half the amount that I earned the week before but on the other hand it’s ten times the amount I earned six weeks ago, so while it hasn’t been great, I can’t complain too much.

The main reason for my drop in earnings last week was due to shortage of time. My temporary job was very busy and also hard work last week. In addition to doing twelve-hour days I was also physically tired when I got home. I was so wiped out that I only did the minimum amount on my blogs that I could get away with. A number of the sponsored posts that I had been given by the various sponsored post sites were due within certain time limits last week and I had to push myself to write those ones. Apart from those sponsored posts that I had to write to a deadline I didn’t do any more work on the blog, and then to top that off I went away for the weekend starting on Friday and barely even thought about blogging until I got back yesterday evening.

It was interesting therefore, that in a week where I spent so little time on blogging that I was still able to do relatively well. Here’s where the money came from:

PayU2Blog - $35.00

Almost all of PayU2Blogs sponsored posts are $5 but they have been throwing a lot of them my way since I signed up. You may have to do a lot of blogging to make money this way but I’m not too proud to accept $5 for a sponsored post. I look forward to the day when I can afford to turn my nose up at a $5 post but it hasn’t come yet!

PayPerPost - $14.50

This is by far the least amount of money that I have made from PayPerPost since I joined them. In the previous three weeks I made between $57-$64 each week. The reason for the drop last week was due to my shortage of time. While I was busy writing the posts that PayU2Blog and SponsoredReviews had already scheduled me to write I didn’t have time to add to my work-load by taking more jobs from PayPerPost.

To date I can’t say that my loss of PageRank has affected my earning capacity from sponsored post sites so I can’t attribute my drop in earnings this week to that.

Sponsored Reviews - $13.00

This is from one post that I wrote when an advertiser accepted my bid. Sponsored Reviews is different from other sponsored post sites in that you bid for jobs. If an advertiser is happy to pay the amount that you are willing to do the review for they will accept your bid and you will then have seven days to write the review.

When I signed up for Sponsored Reviews first my bidding price was $6.50. I have raised this to $13 now simply because there are other sites where I can get $6 reviews without having to wait for weeks for an advertiser to accept my bid.

Smorty - $6.00

Smorty is a useful extra sponsored post site to be a member of. In my experience I find that the number of available jobs are all taken up quickly so you need to check into it regularly. Once you find a job and accept it you then have three days to complete it.

Adsense - $3.53

This is the best I’ve done with Adsense in five weeks. I’d noticed that my Dublin blog was starting to get an increased amount of search engine traffic and so I put Adsense back on it. As it happened, a couple of the clicks happened to be well paying ones. I hope this continues but I still haven’t worked out any strategies to make that more than an aspiration. While I also get a good amount of clicks on my bonsai blog these are low paying and don’t amount to much.

And finally . . . Helium - 12c

Once again, I mention this for the sake of completeness but it is also interesting to see that the amount I get from it each week is consistent. So far, it’s the closest thing I have to a residual income. It might be only 12c, but at least it’s my 12c!