Exponential Growth - 6 Months down the Track - A Summary

Exponential Growth of the Million Dollar Experiment Down Under

Its been a strange Month, I started out with a huge boost from a number of Sponsored Posts and then pretty much cruised on from there. I had achieved the Monthly Target quite early on so from there endeavoured to concentrate on increasing Passive Income.

AdSense has been a little disappointing for me the last couple of months, I would have hoped to have been a lot further ahead with this than what I am currently however at least I suppose it gives me something to focus on this month as I try and turn that around.

The beauty of exponential growth is that it creates realistic targets on a monthly basis and ends up growing into a healthy amount of income, if you can sustain it.

Budget for this Month $US 91.69

Active Income $62.52
Passive Income $67.06

Total month to date $US 129.58
Total Earnings to Date $US 579.94 or $NZ 852.85

The Famous Five

Last month we started a link program that is second to none, the top 5 referrers of traffic to this blog from the previous month get a link after every post for the next month. Its all about sharing the love!

However a new month has rolled around so it is time to pull out the red carpet for the top 5 referrers of traffic to this Blog from the month of March. Congratulations Mike on taking the Top position and we welcome a new Site to the top 5 Hot Blog Girls!

1. Mike's Money Making Mission
2. Kumiko's Cash Quest
3. How to earn money online?
4. Stratz's Blog
5. Hot Blog Girls

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Cut, Paste and Post - Sponsored Posts on Steroids

Have you ever done a Sponsored Post? If so and you are like me the worst and most time consuming part of a Sponsored Post is trying to find out enough information about the company you are reviewing to create an original article about them. You know you are only going to get between 5 and 15 dollars for it, so time is a consideration.

What if there was a place where the Advertisers wrote their own Sponsored Post and all you had to do was Paste it into your blog and click on the Publish Button? Would this make things easier?

Well I think it would and as I think there is a market where advertisers could pay less for their advertising, and Bloggers could spend less time learning about products they might not be interested in I have started the "Sir Bloggers Easy Post System".

I have had a blog for a while now called www.sirblogger.com which is not doing much so I thought I could put it to good use and set up a Blogger to Advertiser network, anyway the Easy Post System works like this...

For Bloggers
Advertisers contact you with a post they would like to place on your blog, it can be up to 200 words in size and contain up to 3 links. The Advertiser has written it for you all you need to do is publish it and send the URL back to the advertiser along with your paypal userid. The Advertiser then has agreed (by contacting you in the first place) to pay you $5 for posting the advert. If this appeals to you great - submit your blog here...

Worst case scenario you get a free link to your blog from the Sir Blogger Website!

For Advertisers
The Sir Bloggers Easy Post system has 3 advantages for Advertisers over traditional pay per post sites..

1/ No 3rd party involved, the advertiser deals direct with the Blogger.
2/ Price - because you are not paying anyone else there is no commission or "affiliate" payment involved
3/ Advertising Copy - you write your own for each site that you want it to appear on. No more spelling mistakes or grammatical errors. If you like you can get your marketing department to write the articles and just change them a bit for each site you request to post them on to avoid "duplicate content" on the search engines.

If this sounds like a great way to create buzz for your site please head to Sir Bloggers Posters and choose which Blogs you would like to use. The cost is $5 for each 200 word article with up to 3 links of your choosing in it. If you wanted 5 sites to post an article it would only set you back $25 dollars.

More Information at Sir Bloggers Easy Post - Advertisers and Bloggers Direct - If you think this is a good idea, please help me spread the word, I can see great income potential for Bloggers if the time factor is removed from sponsored posts, and at the same time it is a saving for advertisers.

MillionNZDollars Weekend Links

Every weekend we compile a list of some of the best articles that we have come across during the week. The following articles are worth a visit so why don't you check them out.

Interview With Professional Blogger Gayla McCord - George interviews Gayla McCord who is doing well making money with her Blogs - she has stuck at it for a some time and starting to see some decent results.

Blogging Tip: Don’t Make the Mistake of Monetizing Your Blog Too Early Maki looks at some of the mistakes Bloggers make early on and also writes about how he has recently removed AdSense from his Blog!

Money Making With Free Blogs - Part 2 Mike looks at 10 ways to bring Visitors to your blog site, a must read for Bloggers starting out and trying to get more traffic to their site.

That's all for this week, if you have an article you would like me to share with the readers of this site please let me know via a comment and I will check it out.

Have a good weekend, the next article on this site will be our full March Summary - the sixth month in our exponential experiment that is to date progressing on target. We will also announce the 5 biggest referrers from March who will each earn themselves approximately 20 links via posts that I do during April.

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Top Five Referrers For February - Great sites that are worth a visit!
1. Kumiko's Cash Quest
2. Mike's Money Making Mission
3. Stratz's Blog
4. If Ya Want to Make Money
5. How to earn money online?


Do you like Curry Chicken? Visit Curry Focus for Free Delicious Recipes
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Europe Job Search

6 Skills I Use to Make Money Online

I was thinking today to do what you and I do takes quite a diverse skill set. Now I am certainly not an expert at most things, the only advanced knowledge I would have is in the area of SQL for programming databases, certainly something most webmasters can live without. Anyway I thought I would list the skills that I use on a regular basis to run and maintain the 7 or so websites/blogs that myself and a couple of colleagues own. With the way templates and CMS sites are nowadays most of this is probably not necessary however it certainly comes in handy if you want to build or adapt something original.

1/ PHP/HTML Programming - this is something that I do because I have to, I am no expert at it and usually pull together bits of code that I find on the web to achieve whatever task I am trying to get on top of. PHP is a powerful language and I know that more of my time spent learning more about it will assist in the future. It is also what Wordpress is written in so comes in handy for Wordpress blog modifications.

2/ MySQL - This is the database behind many websites and again is part of the platform that Wordpress uses, luckily for me working as a Database Analyst in my day job this part comes fairly easy to me, however can be confusing for some.

3/ General Computer Knowledge - After working in IT and performing a variety of functions over the years this is not to much of a show stopper for me, however when setting up my development environment and configuring Apache Web Services, PHP and MySQL to replicate the environment of my ISP I have often thought that as painful as it can prove to be for me, some people must really struggle trying to get this stuff going.

4/ Writing Skills - These are necessary for Blogging, probably an area where I really struggle compared to some of the Bloggers out there. However I do what I can and try and spellcheck my work and proof read everything so hopefully there are not to many errors in my posts. Unfortunately I left school when I was 16 and went and worked in a tyre shop - so don't have the best education compared to most people!

5/ SEO Knowledge - This is something I am very interested in and learning more and more as time goes on. I really think that having great SEO knowledge can be the difference between having a good site that no one visits and having a good site that makes you a few bucks because its traffic heavy. In the last couple of weeks I have been doing some fine tuning on a few of my sites and hope to see some results in the weeks to come

6/ General Internet Knowledge - Ftp, http, paypal, forums, image handling, RSS Feeds, RSS Readers etc etc the list never ends, you need to have good general knowledge of the internet.

The way the Blogosphere is now you can probably make it with very few of these skills, however the more knowledge that you gain the better your chances will be. I think if you are a great writer this can mean that you can more than likely make it without to many other skills, however you made require some assistance to get you going.

Subscribe by Email to the Million Dollar Experiment Down Under

Top Five Referrers For February - Great sites that are worth a visit!
1. Kumiko's Cash Quest
2. Mike's Money Making Mission
3. Stratz's Blog
4. If Ya Want to Make Money
5. How to earn money online?


Do you like Curry Chicken? Visit Curry Focus for Free Delicious Recipes
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Europe Job Search

Tracking Keywords - Bloggers Toolkit Series

You may wonder why all the focus on key words lately however it is all about money really. To achieve my goal of earning one million nz dollars I need lots and lots of traffic to my sites - thousands of visitors a day.

Of course one great way to get traffic is optimizing your website or blog for popular keywords which bring us to the second part of this keyword series. You may want to read the first article before taking on this one. Keyword Selector Tool - Bloggers Toolkit Series

There is a tool that I have found to be very useful and well worthwhile for the tracking of where your site ranks over time related to certain keywords. This is good stuff for Bloggers and site owners trying to get more traffic because it means you can measure the success of changes that you make when trying to optimize your site for certain keywords.

The tool is called the Search Engine Key Word Tracker - however before you go and register for it, let me give you the lowdown.

Why would you want to use this tool?
If you are interested in optimizing your website or Blog for certain keywords and would like to track and measure how you are going a tool like this will give you the necessary visibility of where you are at on an ongoing basis.

How do you use it?
Its pretty simple to use which is good to know! Basically you wander along to Search Engine Key Word Tracker register which just takes a couple of secs and then you can log in to the control panel. From here you simply add the keywords along with the sites that you are interested in and it will display where they are currently ranked in Google.

Once you have set these up it is just a matter of working on your site to promote the words that you are interested in and you can check back whenever you like to see how its going. One thing to keep in mind is that when you log in to view this tool you need to click on the Check All link to update the information.

There are many ways of improving the ranking of your site for certain keywords and the 3 methods that I use most often are...

1/ Using the key term in anchor text of a link - if you don't know what this means it is the words shown for a link - not the actual link itself. For example great site would be the way to go if you wanted to promote these keywords for the site www.shoemoney.com which is the link behind it.

2/ Using the words in the title of the html page

3/ Including them in the text of your site, particularly as headings and/or bold text as the searchbots treat these as more important than general text.

Goodluck with your keyword optimization and let me know of any other worthwhile suggestions that you have, I am also always on the look out for good tools to include in the Bloggers Toolkit Series.

March results coming soon....the month is drawing to a close.

Top Five Referrers For February - Great sites that are worth a visit!
1. Kumiko's Cash Quest
2. Mike's Money Making Mission
3. Stratz's Blog
4. If Ya Want to Make Money
5. How to earn money online?


Do you like Curry Chicken? Visit Curry Focus for Free Delicious Recipes
Aussie Job Search
Europe Job Search

Sponsored Post - BroadBand Suppliers in the UK

If you are looking for Cheap BroadBand Suppliers in the UK and don't know where to start you can check out this Broadband Provider site .

They list a wide range of suppliers that are rated and ordered by popularity as well as value for money which makes choosing the best supplier for your situation very easy.

If you do not have time to shop around, you can just choose the best of what our supplier of the month has to offer.

One of the methods I would use if I was looking for a new BroadBand ISP would be to see what other people were using. This site highlights the best selling plans so this certainly can assist the decision making process.

The site also lists other ways that you can make an informed choice, so its worth a read.

Sponsored Review - The Science Of Getting Rich

Background - The Secret
The Secret was a movie created to share with people the secrets of success. E.g Health, Money and Relationships. It is about using the laws of Nature to achieve these very things, focusing on the Law of attraction.

The Secret was launched in March 2006 and became a Worldwide Internet Event.

The Science Of Getting Rich
Instead of a Sequel to the movie "The Secret" have launched a how to program, which features some of the teachers from the movie.

You've seen the Movie,Now Live the Philosophy and Claim the Wealth the Universe Has Always Had Waiting for You.

There are always the detractors of a course like this, but seldom are there programs offered that combine the credibility of teachers like Jack Canfield (Chicken Soup for The Soul), Bob Proctor (creme-de-la-cream success coach) and Michael Beckwith (popular spiritual leader) right after a great Movie so the timing is right. At $1995 it is not a cheap opportunity at all, but would be a worthwhile investment if you are looking at giving up work for once and for all. I like the way the methods and principles align themselves with the Million Dollar Experiment.

You can visit the official site at http://official-secret-seminar.com/

PayU2Blog, Technorati and our 5 top Blog Referrals

A couple of weeks ago I submitted my Blog to one of the new Pay per post players on the scene and today I received an email from them.

Thanks for your blog submission, your blog qualifies and currently we pay $ 5 per completed assignment. We pay out every other Friday via PayPal. I wanted to say Hello and make sure that you are ready to get started working with us on our projects. You can also get more information
off of our blog at:http://blog.payu2blog.com/5/bloggers-get-paid-to-blog/

Great I have fired them off another email with some more information that was requested and with a bit of luck will be able to give them a shot very soon. Of course I will be sharing the experience.

As far as Pay per post sites go these are the ones that so far have been successfully used by this experiment. We did a full review on pay per post a month or so back.

Blogitive
Blogsvertise
Loudlaunch
PayPerPost

It has become obvious to me in recent times that given enough websites you could probably almost eke out some sort of a living by writing paid posts, however it wouldn't be the most satisfying way to earn a crust.

Technorati - we have just moved into the top 17000 Blogs woohoo, would be very happy to get into the top 10,000 so if you have a like minded blog with 3 months or more of content lets swap links and help each other out.

Who are going to be the top 5 blog sites for March that earn a months worth of links from my posts in April? Well let me tell you at this stage it looks like there will be a couple of new sites that have moved up the MillionNZDollar Referral ladder, all will be revealed in a few days once March is done and dusted.

Coming soon we look at an excellent tool for tracking the ranking performance of key words that you are interested in optimizing your site for.

Take it easy

Rob

Top Five Referrers For February - Great sites that are worth a visit!
1. Kumiko's Cash Quest
2. Mike's Money Making Mission
3. Stratz's Blog
4. If Ya Want to Make Money
5. How to earn money online?


Do you like Curry Chicken? (Free Delicious Recipes from the Curry Focus website)
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Keyword Selector Tool - Bloggers Toolkit Series

Our Bloggers Toolkit Series continues with a look at the Wordtracker Free Keyword Selector Tool. This is not the only tool available in this area of SEO, however is certainly easy to use so here's the lowdown.

What is a Keyword Selector Tool?
These kind of tools let you type in any keywords that you like, and by going off what terms have been searched for over the previous month will give you an idea of how popular that term is. So for example if you are basing your website key words around the term "Money Blog" it is apparent that 602 searches on this term were carried out in February. If you manage to rank highly for these words, then you are going to get quite a few visits on a monthly basis. (From what I understand the Tool only queries the Yahoo database so there will actually be a lot more searches than what this tool shows you if you count Google etc - however it gives you a good idea of popularity)



Why would you want to use a Keyword Selector Tool?
This tool helps you directly identify the kind of key words that are popular. There is no point in spending time working on your site that is full of keywords and phrases that are rarely searched for - you are better of setting your sights on something popular as that is going to directly relate into improved traffic to your site. (As long as you do a better job than anyone else at optimizing your site for the words that you have in mind.)

OK now I know which Keywords I want to focus on - What do I do now?
Now that you know what words you would like to concentrate on it is a matter of fine tuning your site and the links into your site for these keywords. Also you will probably want to track the ranking of your site for these keywords both before you start optimizing - and on an ongoing basis, however that is going to be covered in the next article on this subject.

Your homework for the next few days while I prepare the next article in this series is to start finding what key words you would like to track - don't always assume that it should be the most popular that you find as there is a lot of competition for these words, find something in the middle and concentrate on building quality content around these words.

Top Five Referrers For February - Great sites that are worth a visit!
1. Kumiko's Cash Quest
2. Mike's Money Making Mission
3. Stratz's Blog
4. If Ya Want to Make Money
5. How to earn money online?


Do you like Curry Chicken? visit the Curry Focus website for Free Delicious Recipes
Aussie Job Search
Europe Job Search

MillionNZDollar Weekend Links

We are a little early posting the links this week, that's because I am away for a long weekend down in the beautiful town of Queenstown. Because of this there will be no update on this site for about 3 days.

5 Ways That You Can Make More Money From Your Squidoo Lenses George looks at some of the ways Squidoo can help earn us a few bucks.

Make Money With Monthly Links Mike looks at a new player on the scene that pays you for Monthly text links on your blog, I submitted my site to them a couple of days ago, however have not heard back from them. Mike it appears heard back fairly quickly and received a "test" link to place on his site.

The Ultimate Guide on How to Get Your Website Listed in Wikipedia Maki looks at the dos and don'ts of getting your link into wikipedia.

How to stop Google Analytics Tracking your own Visits: Tutorial Matt has a quick run down on how to stop messing up your Analytic stats by removing your visits by way of a filter.

Enjoy your weekend, and try to get some time away from your computer!

Top Five Referrers For February - Great sites that are worth a visit!
1. Kumiko's Cash Quest
2. Mike's Money Making Mission
3. Stratz's Blog
4. If Ya Want to Make Money
5. How to earn money online?


Do you like Curry Chicken? (for Free Delicious Recipes)
Aussie Job Search
Europe Job Search

10 things I wish I had known 6 Months ago about Blogging and Earning Money Online

This is the list of 10 things that I wish I had come across 6 or so months ago when I began this Blog! Note they are in no particular order, just a list of 10 helpful suggestions and/or links for a new Blogger. I have not included any affiliate links in this post so you can be assured its unbiased.

I have also not mentioned Google AdSense because I was already using this before I even started Blogging and most people are already familiar with it.

1./ Money4Blogs - I actually read about this on another site quite early on, however to save you time and get you started earning some money go and see these guys. Instant money for a 1 year link on your site.

2./ Google Analytics - Simply the best way I have found of tracking and analyzing the traffic that comes to your site. If you want to know more about Google Analytics fortunately for you I wrote an article on it a while back - Using Google Analytics to track and Analyze your Blogsite

3./ Google Alerts - Find out within minutes anytime anyone anywhere mentions anything about you or your blog. Also you may want to view my earlier article about this - Google Alerts - Another must for the Bloggers Toolkit

4./ Shoemoney - this guy is a legend, if you want to read about a guy that seems to pull money out of thin air start subscribing to the shoemans site.

5./ Digital Point Forums - I have only recently discovered these, however these forums are a gold mine of information for the aspiring money blogger, also a lot of information about SEO and general website info.

6./ Colorzilla - Although I am reasonably competent with html, php etc sometimes trying to find the color to blend in with your adverts easily can be a pain, especially when there are style sheets, divs etc This tool makes it so simple, just hover the mouse over the color and it tells you what it is! Its a firefox plug in, so you will need firefox to use this tool.

7./WordPress - Obvious to most, however when I set up one of my own hosted blogs a while ago believe or not I had not heard of WordPress, I wish I had because one of my sites is now stuck on B2Evolution and its gonna be a major to move it across. Just go straight to WordPress would be my recommendation.

8./MorgueFile - Great place to find royalty free images for your websites. This is a quote from the MorgueFile About Us page...

The morguefile contains photographs freely contributed by many artists to be used in creative projects by visitors to the site.

9./ITeamWork - This is an online project management system that allows you to set tasks and timelines for the various projects that you are involved in, you can also collaborate with other people for joint projects. Simple to use and a great way to keep track of all your ideas.

10./Ezine Articles - Ezine articles is useful in 2 ways that I have found, 1 way is you can submit your articles to the site and it will contain a link and information about you as the author. The other method and I probably wouldn't recommend this in all cases however you can reproduce other Authors articles as long as you don't change them - and you must include the references to the Author. I find this useful for some of my sites that are niche topic sites and I can supply relevant articles that I don't have to write myself. Again you need to be careful and keep the mix right with your own unique content, however I have found it to be useful to date.

Anyway there we have it 10 things that have taken me a lot of time and sweat to find - I hope you can make use of some of the items on this list, and maybe they can save you some time or help you make a few extra bucks somewhere along the way.

Top Five Referrers For February - Great sites that are worth a visit!
1. Kumiko's Cash Quest
2. Mike's Money Making Mission
3. Stratz's Blog
4. If Ya Want to Make Money
5. How to earn money online?


Visit Curry Focus for Free Delicious Recipes

VoIP Forum - Community for Vonage

If you are looking for support and information to assist you with your Vonage VOIP setup, then the Vonage Forum is a wealth of information that holds a large community of active VOIP users.

One interesting section of the forum is the feature wish list, where users talk about features they would like to see.

Until I visited this forum I hadn't realized how much of an industry has been created around VOIP phone systems, there are thousands of posts to do with wiring setup, call plans, transfer of phone numbers and just about everything else to do with Internet Phones.

What does a John Chow review mean to your site stats?

Note 19-March-2007 this post has been updated with the latest stats from the harpzon.com blog, hence the "bump" on my site - we have taken another look to see how Mitch is going a couple of weeks after the John Chow review....

I was visiting one of the (many) sites that John Chow has recently done a review on and noticed a sitemeter link down the bottom of the page so thought I would have a look. The answer to the question is quite a lot!

It would be interesting to return back in a couple of weeks to see how many continue to visit the site. Reading the Harpzon.com blog was quite interesting, sounds like a switched on guy. His Blog is only new however is worth a visit.

Update 19- March-2007 Mitch does a guest blog post for John Chow, so I thought it was worth a revisit to his site meter stats, to see how the ongoing visits were looking.

The results are a credit to Mitch really, obviously he is supplying enough content to keep the readers coming back, and has in less than a month scored a great reader base for his blog - looking solid dude keep up the good work!

Visit Curry Focus for Free Delicious Recipes

MillionNZDollar Weekend Links

Just a couple of links this week - Remember if you have a related site to mine, and write an article that you think the readers of this site would be interested in please let me know.

The Google Bid Gap - Sometimes Less Is More This article is by John Chow and is a must for all those publishers running Google AdSense on their sites.

Headline Remix Madness – Part Two CopyBlogger shows some examples of headlines that have been rearranged to make them a little more eye catching. Very interesting stuff.

I have finally officially submitted my interest to the Join The Blog Traffic Challenge! and are going to be attempting to double my traffic over the next 2 months. You need to join up before the 31st March if you want to be part of this, and what better incentive can there be when it comes to motivating yourself to drive more traffic to your site?

We will explore some ideas over the next couple of weeks


Top Five Referrers For February - Great sites that are worth a visit!
1. Kumiko's Cash Quest
2. Mike's Money Making Mission
3. Stratz's Blog
4. If Ya Want to Make Money
5. How to earn money online?


Visit Curry Focus for Free Delicious Recipes

Free Blog reviews going at the Our Blog Review website

Our Blog Review is a new site run by the Hockey Crazy Greg Stratz. If you are looking at promoting your blog it can be a good idea to submit it to a site like this where it will get reviewed for free (at worst you are going to get a link to your site).

Greg has been kind enough to answer the following questions for us about his new site.

In a nutshell Greg - whats the idea behind the Blog Review site and how did you come up with it?

The Site Our Blog Review is a site where you can submit your blog or site that you want to try to create some buzz for. You submit your blog, by doing that you will get at least one link-back to your site from ours, helping out your Technorati ratings. We would like it if you mention us in your blog and or give us a return link but if you choose not to we will still gladly review your blog or site. I was just searching for blogs one day and was not happy with the "other directories" "review sites" out there so I kinda took some general idea's from some and incorporated my own. of course I think if I was able to build good websites Our blog Review would look a lot different then it does now.

How many Blogs have you reviewed to date?

Right now we have about 20 full reviews up on the site. Also all the reviews in our directory have a mini review of them as well. Right now I am working on to make it easier to find the full reviews of all the blogs we have. It might mean the elimination of the mini reviews.

What kind of traffic are you getting on the site?

Sunday's have been our most popular day so far which we get between 100-200 visitors. Friday, Saturday and Monday's Are a little behind Sunday and have been averaging 50-100 with the rest of the week days averaging 30+ visitors. But remember this site has only been up for less than a month and the average visits have increased every week so who knows what the average will be next week.

Tell us a bit about the other reviewers, how did they end up being part of your team?

The review team we have is quite unique. We have Rachel, Sid, and John helping me review the blogs we receive. Basically they found Our Blog Review and and saw that I am looking for people to help review blogs. In return right now I can offer free publicity for there own sites and link-backs to them as well.

Future plans/ideas about the site?

Right now I am working on making it easier to find the full reviews of the blogs and most likely create a list of them in there category instead of having mini reviews. Thus making it easier for people to find a blog. I would also kinda like it to morph in to a hybrid review/personal blog type site with lots of visitor participation. Possibly create a Our Blog Review store.

Some things about you Greg, where do you live whats all the fuss about hockey and what team do you play for?

I live in Vancouver Canada right now. I have duel citizenship with Australia ( by decent) As for hockey I love playing it, right now I have been getting back into it playing beer league hockey out of 8 rinks in Burnaby. Will be playing spring hockey this spring/summer for the first time so that should also be fun. I played is as a youngster till juvenile ( which is equivalent to junior B teams in the east coast ) I was too small (size wise) for the old NHL but since they changed the rules last 2 years I could have had a shot at the big time since I am extremely fast.

Greg has a personal blog which gets updated sometimes. http://www.gregstratz.blogspot.com/ he is 26 years old and hates working like the rest of us. If you are looking for some free publicity for your blog why not stop by www.ourblogreview.com and submit your site.

Top Five Referrers For February - Great sites that are worth a visit!
1. Kumiko's Cash Quest
2. Mike's Money Making Mission
3. Stratz's Blog
4. If Ya Want to Make Money
5. How to earn money online?


Visit Curry Focus for Free Delicious Recipes

March Summary To Date - Budget Nearly Achieved Already!

We are now just over halfway through March, I tried to add another Blog to PayPerPost the other week, but noticed that you needed 10 Approved Posts before you could do this. Hence I churned through a few to get things moving along which gave us a great start to the month. Now we are looking to be well over target so can just concentrate on building traffic and "real" posts.

And to date for March here are the numbers

Budget for this Month $US 91.69

Active Income $46.52
Passive Income $43.92

Total month to date $US 90.44

Total Earnings to Date $US 540.80 or $NZ 795.29

If you missed the last summary all of our sites are now being counted instead of just this one -hence the figures are moving along a bit quicker than normal!

I now have 13 referrals on MyLot aff, the income it is bringing in is quite small, maybe 10 to 20 cents a day. However this is passive income that does not involving covering your blog with adverts!

This month the active income is made of PayPerPost, the passive is MyLot referral income and Advertising e.g AdSense, Banners on sites etc. Passive is what we will be concentrating on for the rest of the month.

Top Five Referrers For February - Great sites that are worth a visit!
1. Kumiko's Cash Quest
2. Mike's Money Making Mission
3. Stratz's Blog
4. If Ya Want to Make Money
5. How to earn money online?


Visit Curry Focus for Free Delicious Recipes

Motivation - Or Lack of it - Is there a cure for Laziness?

Often I find it very hard to motivate myself to work on my sites and write articles etc.. I tend to waste away precious time reading other articles about blogging and making money online instead of concentrating on getting my own backyard in order.

I am curious to know if this is a problem that other blogger/online money makers have or am I just lazy? Lately I have been writing task lists for myself that include backup this website, post an article on this blog today and things like that. It seems to help a bit and I feel so much better when I have made a decent contribution to one or more of my sites.

At the moment I have the added task of studying... I have this theory that ( I am studying extramurally) instead of spending hours going through the course materials like a normal person probably would - I spend what little time I have working hard out on the assignments as they tend to cover what is in the course material anyway - then I just have to do a last minute cram for the exam and can normally wing it!

Unfortunately I left school at a young age, so maybe if I had put in a bit more effort back then I would not be faced with studying now - but better late than never.

Anyway I guess its a bit of a weird post - but what I would really like to know is that if you are reading this article, please share how you motivate yourself (if you need to!) and do you have similar issues with getting sidetracked and wasting time.

Thanks and hopefully we can share some good tips for lazy bones people like myself!

Top Five Referrers For February - Great sites that are worth a visit!
1. Kumiko's Cash Quest
2. Mike's Money Making Mission
3. Stratz's Blog
4. If Ya Want to Make Money
5. How to earn money online?


Visit Curry Focus for Free Delicious Recipes

Are Sponsored Posts the Blog killers everyone thinks they are?

There is a lot of debate about this subject - you can read the more than 70 comments on this post from Problogger to get a bit of a feeling for some of the thoughts out there about them Do You Read Paid Review Posts? … alot of bloggers are dead set against those that write sponsored posts, and then there are others that don’t seem to mind one way or another.

Why do Bloggers do Sponsored Posts?
Well to answer a simple question with a simple answer in most cases I assume it is for the money. Most Bloggers do sponsored Posts so that they can create some sort of return from their Blog. This may pay for hosting of the site, a bit of development to the blog or any other reason.

Do they believe in the Product they are writing about?
This is a good question and it may be the case that yes they do, or most bloggers realize that they can even write a negative review (if it is warranted) and still get paid for it. So the chances are that the blogger is stating the facts as he/she knows it.

What if the readers don’t like it?
This is a hard question I guess its a bit like what if viewers don’t like a particular advert on T.V or a movie maybe. The best course of action if you are offended by a sponsored post is not to read it… yep its as simple as that really!

Will Sponsored Posts ruin my Blog?
Well the answer to this is yes or no, depending on whether you let it or not. Sponsored Posts have been around for a long time and if you handle them in a mature and honest way there is no reason that they should affect your blog in a negative way - however you may want to obey the following five ways of sponsored post ethics…

1./ Always make it obvious to your readers that a sponsored post is a sponsored post.
2./ Write a “real” article straight after the sponsored post so that a visitor to your site is greeted with a real article.
3./ Try to keep sponsored posts in line with the topic of your blog.
4./ Don’t boast (to much!) about the money you make from sponsored posts on your site.
5./ Don’t sell yourself too cheap - only write for reasonable paying opportunities- your time is probably worth more than 5 bucks.

As you can see there are fors and againsts depending on what kind of person you are and how forgiving your readers are - they are going to be turned off your site quickly if all there is every time they visit is a bunch of sponsored posts - however as long as you include other good quality articles I doubt any reasonable person would hold it against you. (lets hope not anyway!)

Top Five Referrers For February - Great sites that are worth a visit!
1. Kumiko's Cash Quest
2. Mike's Money Making Mission
3. Stratz's Blog
4. If Ya Want to Make Money
5. How to earn money online?


Visit Curry Focus for Free Delicious Recipes

MillionNZDollar Weekend Links

Dosh Dosh finds another Pay To Blog site PayU2Blog. Another way to Get Paid to Blog. In the interests of the Million NZ Dollar experiment Down Under I have signed up and will share the experience as I go through the process of using this Pay to Blog Site.

Auction Ads Launches - Shoemoney works through some of the background and history of what has become Auction Ads

My 3 Month Blog Traffic Challenge - George invites people to join him in a challenge to increase (double) their traffic in the next 3 months, yep lets bring it on.

Treasure Trooper Part 2: Cash Offers - Laura takes another look at treasure trooper - lots of good guidelines here to help you make some money out of them.

Make Extra Cash With Ads OnTime - An interesting way to make a few bucks by watching video advertisements and getting paid for it!

Top Five Referrers For February - Great sites that are worth a visit!
1. Kumiko's Cash Quest
2. Mike's Money Making Mission
3. Stratz's Blog
4. If Ya Want to Make Money
5. How to earn money online?


Visit Curry Focus for Free Delicious Recipes

Not interested in Sponsored Posts but still want to get Paid?

There is always something going on in the fast paced world of blog marketing. The latest craze is the Review My Post program by PayPerPost. This program means that even if you are not interested in doing Sponsored Posts you can get other bloggers to review your posts by adding the badge like down below and earn $7-50 for doing so.

Bloggers can simply add this badge at the end of their post and easily earn money and build traffic with no additional effort.

You will still be required to sign-up to payperpost (and go through the normal approval process) then by placing the badge after your posts if anyone wants to do a review on your post both you and the poster will be paid $7-50 ea. It almost sounds to good to be true.

Why are PayPerPost doing this? Well I'm not sure because there doesnt seem to be a direct benefit for them from someone writing a post about one of the posts on a Blog but I guess its all to create hype and buzz about PayPerPost.

So here it is - click on my badge, sign up with PayPerPost, review my blog post and get paid $7.50

Focusing on your Referrers - I'm gonna spread the word on every Post!

To often in the past I have not given enough credit to the great sites that I am fortunate enough to have linking to me. These sites pump through traffic to my Blog on a consistent basis.

What I have decided to do is that every post I will include as part of my template a link to the top 5 Sites judged from traffic sent to this Blog from the previous Month. The below sites are ones that I regularly visit myself and I hope that you find them as interesting and helpful as what I do.

If you are looking at a way of paying recognition to the sites that send you traffic, why don't you do the same, its no trouble at all to place the links into your template, and that way you can help the sites that have helped you... I'm going to try to assist with their Technorati and Google search Rankings by feeding them a bunch of links - they will get between 15 and 20 links from me per month.


Top Five Referrers For February - Great sites that are worth a visit!
1. Kumiko's Cash Quest
2. Mike's Money Making Mission
3. Stratz's Blog
4. If Ya Want to Make Money
5. How to earn money online?


Visit Curry Focus for Free Delicious Recipes

Improving Your Google AdSense Earnings - AdsBlackList

This is another addition to the Bloggers Toolkit Series

To improve the quality of the Google AdSense Adverts that you are displaying on your Blog or Site, there is a website that you can register with that will automatically generate a list of low paying advertisers to filter out (relevant to the content of your site).

The site is called Ads Black List and is very user friendly. It is just a matter of registering, logging in and providing the URL of your main site. It automatically picks up the title and key words from your site and once this is done you can easily generate a list of URLs that you will be able to filter from withing your Google AdSense set up.

To set up this filtering within AdSense log in to your account. Click on AdSense Setup, then competitive Ad filter and simply paste in the 200 or so URL’s that have been generated for you.
You may be wondering what Google think of all this, and so was I when I initially investigated it. The fact is Google have no problems with you using the competitive ad filter - you are allowed to filter your adverts.

Most of the sites end up being filtered out because they are MFA’s (Made for AdSense) with little or no content. An MFA hopes by paying a low amount per click they can lure an unsuspecting visitor to their site, then hopefully collect a high amount on an outgoing click. Not the best way to build a reputable Online Empire in our book.

Good luck with the Black List!

Visit Curry Focus for Free Delicious Recipes

Pingo! - Calling Cards with No Hidden Costs

Pingo is the place to go for mobile prepaid calling cards that offer competitive rates along with superb customer service and convenience.

You can receive up to 4 hours free International calls just by heading to this page http://www.pingo.com/en/freeinternationalcallingcards.do , following the instructions on this page and then emailing link@freeautobot.com to receive the free phone card. There are also affiliate programs available where you can earn money for referring others to Pingo.

One of things I was pleased to see is that with Pingo calling cards there are no additional fees- just a nominal monthly maintenance fee - what you see is what you pay. Click here for mobile Ecuador calling cards

We have designed Pingo to be the best value in long distance calling, with the best quality available today

140 Day Summary of the Million Dollar Experiment Down Under

140 Days has passed in what have become busy times for the Million Dollar Experiment Down Under. I was writing a list of some of the weekly tasks that I need to do as part of running my sites, and unfortunately for me it is becoming quite a list!

Anyway time to cut to the chase. Now this week, I am going to try something a little different, it is probably a bit tiresome seeing the same old figures about beer testing coming up each week, and I guess because I have been earning a little less on this site, while concentrating more on others that I might as well start including them.

It has also become difficult keeping separate figures for the different sites that I have so yep I am going to combine all of them together (A couple of people have suggested that I do this also). It is going to be from when I started the Exponential Growth Experiment, as I started recording everything at this time, and is going to updated with how we are going for the month to date, earnings broken down into Passive, Active and Overall. Passive is made up of Advertising, e.g Banner adverts on sites, Contextual AdSense etc. Active is when we have had to actively do something for the money, e.g a sponsored Post. Money is counted when it is approved.

At the end of each month I will include a graph like in the Exponential Growth Article. You can view the status at the end of February here.. Exponential Growth - 5 Months down the Track - A Summary

And to date for March here are the numbers

Budget for this Month $US 91.69

Active Income $15.50
Passive Income $6.69

Total month to date $US 22.39
Total Earnings to Date $US 472.75 or $NZ 695.22

So you can see by including all my sites incomes, I have also given my Million Dollar Experiment a good boost. And why not include all the income, I have been working on them all - so might as well!

Let me know what you think if you have an opinion as to whether this is a good or bad idea. And what sort of detail you would like to see.

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Money that I have made to date from Payperpost

I have been using PayPerPost for just over 1 month now, and have had approximately $46 US dollars approved for payment. A lot of the posts have been enjoyable to write because they are about things that I would have written about whether compensated or not.

E.g this post is a sponsored one - yet I would have written it anyway because I believe that it is of value to the readers of this site to know how much they can expect to earn from a particular program on their blogs.

At times it takes them several days to approve a post, however they calculate the payment from when you submitted the post - not when it is approved. So although this had me a bit concerned the first couple of posts that I did it is no longer an issue for me because the payment is prompt.

Sometimes if I am struggling to think of something to write about I can go into Payperpost - select an opportunity that I think will add value to the site and not only get ideas about topics but make a few dollars at the same time.

The money that I have earned so far is still sitting in my PayPal account. The wife and I have a weekend away in a couple of weeks without the kids - very rare! So I will keep saving up and maybe go out for a nice dinner or buy a few drinks with the cash that has been collected.

MillionNZDollar Weekend Links

Taking a leaf out of Mikes Money Making Mission, I have decided to post a weekly set of links to the favourite articles from the Blogs that I have read during the previous week. The articles are well worth a read.

Make Money By Keeping Visitors On Your Blog This article by Mike Perry goes through some of the ways that he manages to keep visitors on his blog.

Promoting vs Income Greg Stratz talks about 7 things he has come to realize in his short (but busy!) blogging career to date.

What on Earth is a Blog Carnival - And... How Does it Help you Earn Money? Nice article from Shirlene Moore about how Blog Carnivals can help you bring you more traffic, which should in turn relate to more income!

A Review of Kontera - Monetize your website with Contextual In Text Advertising Maki looks at Kontera which seems to co-exist quite nicely with Google AdSense and looks like a great way to add additional monetization to your blog... hmmmm might have to look further into this one!

That's it for this weeks links, if you have written an article that you believe should make it into my weekly links, please let me know and I will check it out. All articles must be original content of course!

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Exponential Growth - 5 Months down the Track - A Summary

4 or 5 Months ago I read an article on Problogger about exponential growth of Blog Sites - it was this article Making Your Adsense Earnings Grow - Exponential Blogging and it had me thinking. I started doing some calculations on what I had just earned during the Month of October on my sites and figured that this could be a starting point. The amount that I earned in that initial month was $36-85 US dollars.

The beauty of exponential growth is that it creates realistic targets on a monthly basis and ends up growing into a healthy amount of income, if you can sustain it. What really had me thinking was that if I could sustain this model of growth of 20% a month for 30 Months straight I would be earning over $7000 US dollars a month. I don't know how this stacks up in the country you live in, however in NZ it is a very tidy income that could enable my family and myself to live very comfortably indeed.

November came around and I went flat out doing sponsored posts and making money anyway I could, this meant that I had doubled my income quickly however it was taking a lot of effort that simply wasn't creating ongoing returns. I soon figured out the error in the thought process and began trying to reach the target by passive means alone, this meant trying to increase traffic to my sites and spending my time doing this, rather than taking up time writing sponsored posts -however I still had this as a back stop if I needed a few extra bucks to make the target.

This model has really begun to work for me, I have been concentrating on the sites that are showing the most returns, as well as trying to increase the ones that aren't doing enough. Traffic and income is steadily increasing and it is very exciting plotting the figures every month and seeing the growth occur.

February has just finished, and being a short month I was prepared for a difficult one. The target was $76-41 and I am pleased to say that we have come in comfortably over that figure, a full graph of the last 5 months is below, remember where we took a dip was the time where the focus changed from actively earning the dollars - to trying to spend 95% of our time building passive streams by way of increasing traffic to raise the advertising earnings of the sites.

If you are considering doing an exponential growth plan of your own, I highly recommend it and just advise that you take it one month at a time. If you look at it like this you only need to make 20% on what you have just achieved previously so its not that overwhelming really. Focus is important though - failure cannot be an option if you want to follow it through and achieve the dream.

Good luck - let me know what you think of this Exponential Growth Experiment and whether you are keen on doing one of your own.

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PayPerPost - More Money for Premium Blogs

Many paid for writing article sites are now available on the Internet and as a blogger you need to try and decide which one is right for you. Over the last 5 or 6 months I have tried many of them - and now stick to the ones that I believe offer both the Blogger and the advertiser the best bang for their buck.

When considering blog marketing you need to think about the length of time you are willing to spend writing posts along with what kind of value the posts are going to add to your site. If you can create a buzz from the posts that you write as well as get reimbursed for the time you spend writing the articles then surely you are on a winner.

PayPerPost have a segmentation system now which means that if you have a high traffic Blog it is possible that you could earn $1000 for a post! I think this is important that the higher your Blog Ranks and the more traffic that it brings, the better the renumeration.

And even though there are higher earnings available for premium blog sites, the opportunities still are plentiful for the midrange bloggers with Google PR of 3 - 6 - some of the advertisers prefer Bloggers to have their own domains, however there are still many available that are satisfied with a blogspot or similarly hosted blog.