Whether you know it or not you run a magazine. It’s true. If you run a blog then you run a magazine. Worries of distribution, subscriptions, advertisers, graphics and articles. Grinding out content daily isn’t for the faint of heart. I’m not even going to touch the subject of running multiple blogs. So where do you start? What do you blog about?

A blog is a website consisting of entries that are often called posts appearing in reverse chronological order with the most recent entry appearing first. Blogging is growing more and more popular by the day. For many novice wanna be bloggers there is still plenty of space in the world wide internet to join in. Blogs pop up everywhere and you can blog on some sites for free. Blogging is a great activity to get involved with. Some bloggers even get paid to blog. Others just enjoy putting their opinion out there for the world to see and interacting with fellow readers. In other words — think outside of the box!

If you are not sure what you should blog about than you should learn about the many benefits of blogging and what others blog about. One of the biggest benefits of blogging is the opportunity to voice you opinions. Blogging allows you to expresss your thoughts and opinions. If you have something to say and you feel in everyday life you won’t be heard than say in your blog. Blogs give you the freedom to express yourself and what you really think of the world. Most people blog about their daily life. What happened to them at work or during the weekend. A special holiday or event they participated is often blogged about. People blog about their personal opinion of current local news or international news. People blog about their families or raising kids. Some people blog about their lover or lack of love. Heck, you could even write about your mother-in-law being an ice cream thief (mine is). Blogging is similar to open diaries. They are filled with the random thoughts of the mind. Some people enjoy blogging about their favorite things or the life of their pet. Your blog is your space to write about whatever you want to. You can let your imagination run wild or write about what is true and constantly going on in your life. Some women blog about their divorce or uneasy marriage. There are single women you blog about their wacky dates or lack of. What you blog about is all up to you. Remember it is your personal expression. There are some people who blog to help others. These blogs are usually health related. People blog about a particular illness or disease they have that others may also suffer from. The health related blogs is a great way for people from all over the world to unite and relate to each other. It builds a sense of comfort for people to know they are not alone. Blogging can be very therapeutic. There are people who blog to promote their business, product, or services. They blog about the latest products available, what their business is about, and the services they offer. Blogs can be a great marketing tool also. Some people blog to make a difference in the world. These bloggers blog about certain political issues and causes that can make a difference in other peoples lives. Some of these blogs is about abortion, adoption, poverty, immigration, abuse, welfare, war, third-world countries in need, the environment, and other united nations oriented issues.

Learning Howto Make Money Online with Affiliate Marketing

If you’re reading this, chances are, you’re thinking about the benefits of working from home. You want to set your own hours, work at your own pace, take time off when needed, and enjoy being your own boss. It’s an attractive thought, is it not?

How about setting up your own web-based business? Have you checked into it? Bet it seemed like a great big tech-based hassle. Web design, product selection… You have to learn how to advertise and sell AND ship the products — it’s got to be a big pain to maintain a web-based home business, right?

Not if you consider affiliate marketing. It’s a home-based business opportunity you can maintain and manage.

The website you will need can be easily constructed via the many site building programs which walk you through building your site from the very beginning. Then you will have the support you need to bring you up to speed when it comes to formatting links and adding other information to your site.

Once you build a functional website, you find the companies who will pay you to link to them. It’s not as hard as it sounds. They’re out there. You’ve heard of Amazon, right? Most major websites have affiliate programs and you can get paid by linking to them. Once you join, it’s just a quick bit of work to create the link and then you’re on the way to making money online.


But if you really want to cash in, you don’t want a website consisting of just a page with a list of links on it. This may earn you a buck or two, but when most web surfers stumble upon these kinds of pages after a Google search, they tend to get frustrated and leave. The best route for a successful affiliate marketing venture is to provide interesting web content on your site that relates to the company to which you are an affiliate.

But wait! I’m not a writer, you say. While content may be king on the internet, there are many companies who will provide the text you need to succeed. Interesting articles are available at a very reasonable price.

And because of that content, your website will be found on Google, Ask.com, Yahoo and other internet searches. You will weave links throughout your information and those links will give you a real cash flow.

Affiliate marketing? Is it for you? While there is risk with every business venture, perhaps you really were meant to work for yourself, from home…

Consider the idea of combining a cool website design with quality content, offering a mix of interesting links leading to affiliate companies. Give it a try. It might be just the job you’ve been waiting for all these years.

Folks love reading how much money certain Pro Bloggers are making each month. Take John Chow for example his JohnChow.com has been monetized since September of 2006. The following month, October, he reported $352.94 earned. Jump forward a couple months to see November 2006 earning at $2,139.93. Twelve months have passed since that report and John Chow is reporting November 2007 income from his blog at $27,420.83. That is not a misprint. Twenty seven thousand four hundred twenty dollars and eighty three cents.

This boys and girls is one hell of an inspiration to those of us that have decided to monetize our blogs. The first month I made the decision to ‘monetize’ I brought in something in the neighborhood of $650 for July 2007 and two months later I earned $2,800 for the month of September 2007. Oh yeah, forgot to mention that I also work full-time during the day so these numbers represent my efforts in the evenings with zero real knowledge of what the hell I was doing.

My goal was to see if it was possible and I showed everyone most importantly to myself that yes it was possible. OK, let’s move forward. On December 1st the announcement was made that the 90 day count down to me going pro had started. However, there are plenty of monthly income reports out there showing that money to be earned by monetizing your blog. My 90 day count down is slightly different from others in that I’m involved in seriously intense professional monetization training. My earnings will not be broadcast. My blathering posting has noticeably slowed during this training period. I will not be able to share everything taught but I can direct you to folks that provide training. So we see it is possible to make money blogging. But blogging is not the only way. On Feb. 16th 2008 I turn four oh. Join me on my journey to “retiring at 40“.

GAME ON!

I know folks are wondering how exactly macewan makes money online. Well, during the 90 day countdown to going pro I’ll share some of the methods used to generate income. Some methods can not be shared due to contractual obligations, but some can be. I’m fairly hesitant to share too much information because this could be viewed as bragging. It is not bragging. It is shock on my part mixed with excitement. Last hour I made $170. This does not include advertising on this or other sites. You can tell I’m not some slick marketing guy and I do not consider myself to be terribly smart. These are methods used to create wealth. This is one.

While there may be several methods enabling the implementation of auto-generating stores I choose BANS for 14 of my first stores. And that boys and girls is one of the methods available to create revenue flow. Hit on something that works and WORKIT! If you know a geek buy him this gift. It’s less than $100 for the software and it can be used on as many sites as you can dream up.

If possible through technical know how with time permitting scale your projects to multiply the income. One store brings in $12 a day? Well what is $12 times the 14 current stores up and running? Um, just under $170 a day. Every day of the year. Wash, rinse repeat.

When you here “eBay” and “money” in the same sentence your probably think of becoming an eBay seller.

You place product listings in the eBay marketplace, buyers bid, you pay your eBay seller fees and what you have left is your profit margin.

There is, however, another way to build a business which still revolves around eBay but which doesn’t involve you selling a single thing in the eBay marketplace.

This “other way” opportunity is based on the eBay affiliate program and a great tool which makes entry into this opportunity not only
possible but also super easy. This tool is called “Build A Niche Store“.

Now if you don’t know – an affiliate program enables you as an individual internet entrepreneur to promote the products of a company in exchange for a commission on all sales that you refer.

You are basically operating as an internet middleman and connecting internet browsers to particular products and companies through you own network of websites and marketing methods.

If we return to the eBay affiliate program, eBay actually invites you to promote all of the product listings in the eBay marketplace and in exchange for your efforts will pay you up to 75% of the revenue they make from each sale you refer plus up to $35 for each new active eBay member you refer.

You can have a read about the eBay.com affiliate program here.

What this means is that you can earn up to three quarters of eBay’s revenue simply for connecting people to the products listed in the eBay marketplace.

Not only do you get to partner with the best branded marketplace in the world, you also get access to and control over ALL of the products listed in this marketplace. The eBay product inventory becomes YOUR product inventory and yet you do NOT have to stock items, deal with customers, organize shipping or process refunds.

You are no longer limited to selling only those products which you can buy and sell for a profit margin. You can choose ANY niche market and promote those eBay products relevant to your chosen niche outside of the eBay marketplace, funneling targeted traffic through to eBay and into your own affiliate commissions.

Golf clubs, sewing kits, laptops, dog collars, diamond rings, Florida real estate…

If you know eBay you know how BIG it is – there are NO limits.

At this point you might be thinking - well this sounds interesting but in reality is there any money in it? Well, here’s the shocker – eBay’s top affiliates make over 1 million dollars a month. That’s right – 8 figures a year without stocking, selling or shipping a single thing!

Now eBay does provide some basic free tools to help you succeed as an eBay affiliate and build an affiliate business BUT it has been the development of a tool outside of eBay that has really opened this up as a legitimate business opportunity.

The tool, as I mentioned earlier, is called “Build A Niche Store” and what it enables you to do is build eBay affiliate websites targeted to any eBay niche you want. These act as the medium through which you funnel targeted visitors to eBay.

Here are a couple of examples, one targeting Race Cars and the other Golf Equipment:

Race Car eBay Affiliate Website

Golf eBay Affiliate Website

As you can see, these are professional looking websites that contain all of those eBay products related to their target niche inside a searchable store format, each of which automatically contains your eBay affiliate id.

These stores then automatically update as new products are listed for sale and old listing expire from the eBay marketplace and the software has built in development features which enable you to create new store pages, add content to these pages, create content pages, modify your template etc etc.

Basically, in the space of about 10 minutes (once you are familiar with how the software works) you can create a fully functional eBay affiliate website targeted to the niche market of your choice.

Your store content is all search engine friendly which will provide the foundation for attracting targeted traffic from the search engines and you can then use the development features to attract more targeted visitors which will in turn mean more eBay affiliate commissions.

It really is a brilliant concept and I’ve been hearing great things about the guys behind the project and the member forum which you get lifetime access to when you purchase the product.

Build A Niche Store comes with a step by step user manual which will walk even the most technically inexperienced through setting up their eBay affiliate website, 9 professional template layouts which can be customized (from inside your admin panel) to match your target niche, lifetime member forum access, comprehensive product support and possibly most importantly – an UNLIMITED domain license which means you can build as many of these niche websites as you want for the small one time fee.

Think about how many niches eBay caters to!

How big could your eBay affiliate business be?!

This product gets my full recommendation – check it out today…

Click Here To Read More About Build A Niche Store

This Tutorial is Part of Atomic Blogging ( A Step By Step Guide to Blogging )

What you see above are the number of Spam messages I get so far on my blog! It’s HUGE! Arent they ignoring? To avoid and prevent all this spam you must use Akismet - A Free Plugin to avoid spam for your blog.

Before I start, Akismet is a free open source spam program online to help fight spam for wordpress owners.

Just follow the following steps to get started to prevent Spam on your blog.
Read More…

Many “How To’s” exist online. It occurred to me yesterday, as I watched Val’s futile attempts to create fabric from Piggly Wiggly grocery bags, that my writing and posting a series of “How Not To’s” might just help the common blog.

If you don’t shop at The Pig, other grocery bags will do, they just won’t be as fetching in design.

I filmed my wife and family for this How Not To.

Put an ironing board in the middle of a room. In this case, it’s Val’s studio. Plug in $6.99 Procter Silex iron bought 4 years ago at a Walgreens when pressing my khaki’s seemed prudent whilst we visited friends in NYC . It is, most probably, the cheapest iron ever manufactured. Turn the iron’s heat setting to the highest temperature and be sure to wrap the cord around the ironing board legs.

Encourage all the dogs you currently own or are baby-sitting for to run through the studio and out the back door. (On this particular occasion, three Jack Russell terriers and one slightly demented Scottie served the dog requirement.)

Give half-a-gabillion plastic grocery sacks, all of them crumpled and smashed into a giant Target plastic bag, to a 90-year-old woman and ask her to flatten them out individually. Tell her to stack them with all the handles facing north. *This was my personal favorite step.

Cut handles and fused ends from about 20 bags. Trim a sufficient amount, allowing for plenty of fubars while not destroying the entire gabillion bag collection.

Eat a piece of double-chocolate devil’s food bundt cake with butter cream and cocoa icing. When fully recovered from sugar shock, commence fusing attempt.

Layer six plastic grocery sacks between two pieces of parchment paper. Iron the whole ensemble for 15 seconds, constantly moving iron back and forth across paper. Flip the toxic fume sandwich and grill on other side.

Ooops, iron too hot.

Dammit! Iron too cold.

Wow, that plastic shrivels really quickly, no matter what the temperature.

Try it all again.

Laugh and start a new project.

Get real purdy fall leaves from the front yard. Place leaves between two sheets of waxed paper thus creating a red - yellow - brown speckled leaves with very small spider montage.

Iron the montage.
Smile and remember grade school — The Best of Times.

Alexa has decided to move beyond the limitations of Internet Explorer on the Windows platform. Firefox joins those with a voice with Sparky - The Alexa Toolbar for Firefox.

Sparky Features:

• Related Links: Find sites that are similar to the one you are currently visiting.
• Traffic Trend: A sparkline showing the traffic trend from the last four months.
• Reach Meter: A neat little indicator that shows the site’s Reach.
• Traffic Rank: Shows the current site’s Alexa Traffic Rank.

Keep your computer safe from spyware and adware. The Alexa Toolbar contains no advertising and does not profile or target you. More information about the Alexa Toolbar and how to keep your computer safe from spyware and adware.

Bottom line if you use Linux then download the Alexa Toolbar for Firefox and participate in the ranking.