BLOGGING AS A CAREER TO MAKE MONEY

Have you ever noticed that when you look to earn a serious part time income, more often than not, you have to step outside of your core profession or career field and sell some product, service or do something which does not reflect your profession or core competency career area. With this in mind, the purpose and focus of this article is to illustrate how you can earn a lucrative part time income within your profession while simultaneously adding to your professional credentials.

The solution: team blogging or blogging within a Virtual Enterprise with other like minded professionals. This Virtual Enterprise establishes a corporate umbrella over your blogging activity as if you were an employee within a large corporation. Your blog serves as the perfect vehicle for professional self expression where you can position yourself as a part time independent consultant within your career field. The end result is that you get best of both worlds. You get the flexibility of running a part independent consultancy on-line while enjoying the collaborative and marketing prowess of a large enterprise. In addition, just as every job or consulting project adds to your professional credentials, your participation in a team blogging virtual enterprise will significantly improve your credentials.

To get a big picture feel for this, imagine if today's freeways and cars were sitting idle because everyone is still using horses and buggies to get to work. Well, this is exactly what is happening with the internet and information technology (i.e. information highways) relative to the income production and wealth building benefits it offers individuals. This is because individuals are not taking advantage of the empowering benefits of the internet and other information technology. The empowering benefits can only come to the surface when individuals embrace independent collaboration outside of the box of a traditional corporate environment. In other words, individuals need to embrace and learn to use the internet and other information technology to interact and collaborate with other individuals outside of the box of a traditional corporate work environment and do it in ways which is financially empowering for all participating individuals. Once this collaborative dynamic is linked to the powerful on-line self expression movement known a blogging, we create an on-line environment where any individual or professional can dramatically improve their income and career credentials.

So, think team effort. Think collaborative alliance. Think strategic alliance. For years, large corporations have used the internet and other information technology to network, collaborate, pool resources and create larger "virtual corporations" that have more resources and clout than each corporation has standing along. Now, you can set-up as an on-line independent consultant within your field of expertise or area of interest (beginning with blogging), form strategic alliances or mini-virtual corporations with other like minded individuals, launch an on-line collaborative enterprise will little to no cost and dramatically improve your income and career.

Next, consider the following scenario regarding the formation of a virtual enterprise of bloggers (note: this scenario is written from the eyes of the organizer of the virtual enterprise. You can serve either as an organizer or as an individual professional contributor/blogger):

Step 1) Organize a team of individuals around a common mission. This mission has to be a "big picture" mission with a vision or scope larger than each participating individual. Also, this mission has to have a broad public appeal which requires input and feedback across multiple professional disciplines, industries and niche areas within each industry or profession;

Step 2) Set-up a website or websites promoting and supporting this mission. Be sure to integrate advertising oriented income generating solutions across the website such a Google Adsense, targeted affiliate programs, donation options, etc;

Step 3) Find other individuals and professionals who agree with the mission and want to contribute to the mission within their field of expertise or area or interest;

Step 4) Encourage all contributors to set-up and promote an individual blog designed to engage the general and business public regarding the mission. Each blog will focus on a specific industry or a specific professional niche within an industry. Each blogger will earn income with their blogs via niche oriented advertising options and affiliate programs;

Step 5) As each blogger promote their blogs and earn income, all blogging activity will continuously drive internet traffic to the primary mission based website established in step 2. This traffic will monetize the main website with advertising revenue. This revenue is referred to as "corporate income" where, as the organizer, you will distribute a percentage of the income to all participating bloggers based prior contractual agreements as well as use it to advertise the main website.

From this point on, the virtual enterprise is on autopilot. It creates a constantly expanding income producing environment while offering a dynamic solution for professional self-expression and credential building for all participating bloggers.

Does your Adsense Site Have a Newsletter?

One element every Adsense user should put on all their web sites is a newsletter form in order to collect email addresses.
Why? Because, if you do it correctly, setting up a newsletter can be a goldmine!
Let me start by listing the benefits of creating a newsletter:
Benefit 1: Your sites don't look like they were "Made for Adsense"
Now that Adsense has become very popular, more and more people are creating web sites solely for the purpose of making money with Adsense.
This is creating a backlash with people who see this as a negative thing. Plus, web sites that look like they were obviously made for Adsense are against the TOS. So you could actually get a warning from Google for this.
Adding special features to your Adsense sites make them more than just "Adsense sites".
Benefit 2: Another income stream
Having a newsletter allows you another way to make money with your web sites.
With a newsletter you can…
Promote affiliate programs… or your own products.
Sell advertising space to other web sites owners.
Advertise your other Adsense sites.
This is great because if your web site stops making money with Adsense, it can still make money from the newsletter!
Benefit 3: More repeat traffic for your web site
You should advertise your web site every time you send out your newsletter to your subscribers.
When you do this, it reminds them of your web site and many of them will return again and again. Every time they visit, there is a chance that they will click your Adsense ads!
Okay, Now that you know WHY you should have a newsletter, HOW do you start one?
Contrary to what most people think, creating a newsletter is actually very simple. There are two main ways to get started:
Using a third party service
There are quite a few companies that specialize in newsletter delivery. The two main companies are Aweber and GetResponse.
With both of these services, your subscriber list is hosted on their servers. When someone wants to unsubscribe from your list, they just click a link in your newsletter and they are taken off automatically.
When you want to send an email to your list, all you have to do is upload your content to the third party company and they send the emails from their servers.
Using your own servers
With this option you will probably need to install a script on your own server. There are scripts that will do everything that the third party services do. The only difference is, the emails are sent through your servers.
If you don't want to install a script, another option is to manually keep track of subscribers and manually remove them when they want to unsubscribe. This option is only viable when you only have a few people on your list but it will quickly become too difficult as your list grows.
We recommend using a third-party company when you first start. The cost is usually only about $20/month.
Providing content for your newsletter
Another misconception that people have is that you will need to write all the content for your newsletters. This isn't true!
The first way you can get content for your newsletters is by purchasing it.
You can find many freelance writers at eLance.com. All you have to do is post your project, wait for bids, and pick a writer. It typically costs about $5-20 per article.
We are currently working on an in-depth lesson on this subject… so look for that in the near future.
Another way to get FREE content for your newsletter is by reprinting articles that other people have written. You can find tons of targeted articles at web sites like ArticleCity.com, EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com, IdeaMarketers.com, and many more!
You can also search for free articles on Google by typing "KEYWORD articles reprint" (replace KEYWORD with your actual Archiving Your newsletter
Every time you send out your newsletter, you NEED to archive them on your web site. Every issue should have its own HTML page.
The reasons why you need to archive every issue…
It’s more content for your web site. Each issue of your newsletter is full of keyword rich content. Search engines eat, breathe, and love content. Every page that you get indexed into the search engines is another opportunity for more traffic (and income!)
It’s another feature of your site. Having a newsletter archive is another feature that makes your site more than “just another Adsense site”. As we discussed earlier, any feature that you can add to your site that makes it different than all the other cookie cutter Adsense sites is a very good thing.
It gives people a reason to return. Having repeat visitors is great thing because it’s free traffic that has a good chance of converting to clicks. People will bookmark your article archive page and some will even recommend your site to their friends!
Some people will reprint your articles. Every time someone reprints your articles on their web site you will get a link pointing back to your web site. This helps boost your link popularity, which in turn helps your site rank better in the search engines.
It gives people a preview of your newsletter. You’ll get more people to sign up for your newsletter if you have an archive because it gives your visitors a taste of what they will receive when they sign up.
Article writers will submit their articles to you. When article writers see that you archive every issue of your newsletter, they will be more willing to send their articles to you for free. Why? Because they know that their articles (and the links to their sites in their articles) will be found by the search engines.
Hopefully you see why it's so important to have a newsletter on your Adsense sites.

Google Launches Notification Service For Blog Search

Google on Thursday launched a notification service that makes it easier for blogger or blog-hosting services to notify the manual process for submitting the URL of a new or modified blog, and application programming interfaces, or APIs, for those who want to automate the process.
Google has posted more details of the service on its site.