Archive for the 'Blogging' Category

If anyone told you how wonderful it is to make money online and earn passive money in your pajamas and they made it sound very easy then they are not telling you the other side of the story.Making Money Online is Not Easy. It takes time. It takes patience. It takes hard work and It requires Know How. There is no shortcut to making money online. 

There are many ways you can make money online.

1. You can sell stuff on eBay.
2. You can write a blog and put up ads.
3. You can become and affiliate marketer and sell other people’s products through some of those Online Affiliate Programs.
4. You can do paid surveys.
5. You can write sponsored posts.
6. You can write freelance articles.

I am not going to elaborate further on the ways to make money online. You can get plenty of ideas. Just google “How to Make Money Online” and you will be greeted with plenty of links to inspire you.

Making Money Online Requires Know How

However, don’t think you can do it overnight. Like everything else, if you want to make money online, you have to work hard for it. You also have to keep on learning. The cyber world and the internet is changing all the time. You have to learn about keywords and SEO and how to market yourself or your product or service online. You must have the drive and interest to learn for without it, you will be lost. Some of the work you have to do to market your online sites are really boring and administrative too.

So, if you think you want to just start a blog, place ads and start earning money in your sleep then think again. Start a blog only for the love of it and not for the money and slowly over time and with a little knowledge you may perhaps start to earn some passive income. However, it isn’t really passive because you have to put in effort.

Making Money Online Takes Time and Patience

It took me over a year before I had my first adsense cheque. Then there is my Squidoo venture. On my second Squidoo payday, I earned USD8.86 for 23 lenses then. This was after putting in 2-3 months of effort.

Making Money Online Takes Hardwork

If you look at my Squidoo lenses , you will realize how hard I worked to earn it. The kind of effort and time is not for everyone. Do it only if it really interests you and not for the money. If you do it for the money and you want to earn money online FAST, then you will be frustrated.

I do it because I love it and because I feel a  sense of achievement when my effort pays off, even if it is for just a very small amount. For example, two nights ago someone bought this off one of my Squidoo lenses and I earned a commission from my Amazon Affiliates account. I felt a sense of achievement and pride because I learned to make money online all on my own by learning all the time, testing and doing. That process is ongoing – learn all the time, trial and error then just do it but be very careful to avoid scams.

I guess you could say I earned money in my pajamas while I slept because the sales came in when I was sleeping but don’t forget, I actually put in a lot of effort and hard work into it. So if someone tells you making money online is easy, think again.

Making Money Online is possible but it is not easy and don’t expect it to be fast.

The other day I passed by a man trying to take a photo of a restaurant. Intent on getting the best shot, he was oblivious to me or any other passer by.

Some time ago, I had to walk up an escalator which had come to a halt because of a crocs shoe that had somehow got stuck at the top of the escalator. Everyone was staring at the shoe and several cameras were zipped out from pockets and handbags.

At a car park, it is quite common these days to see someone take out his camera phone to take a photo of his parking lot to help him or her remember where he or she had parked.

With digital cameras and now cameras within mobile phones, everyone seems to be taking photos of anything and everything and sending them round. With these online college classes you can take your love of photography from a hobby to a career.

Whenever, I see someone taking a photo of his food, I would automatically think to myself that this person must be a blogger but it is no longer true. That may be the case previously, but now everyone wants to send photos of what he ate to his friend or to the world and update it on his social media page.

So far, I have not gotten into the habit of taking pictures of things around me. That is because I don’t have a phone with a camera. Perhaps if I had one, I too would be taking pictures of my food, my surroundings, the restaurant and that shoe stuck on the elevator.

Google+ is now open to public and everyone can sign up for a Google+ account now. I love everything Google (accept my fluctuating Google Page ranks) however I do wonder whether Google+ is too late now that everyone has their feet firmly tied up to the Facebook boat. Will they jump ship? Only time will tell.

At the moment, it doesn’t look that way because Google+ does not appear to offer many extras to ordinary users like me. It will really need to be extra special for people to abandon the FB ship. Twitter and FB is different but Google+ and FB is too similar, so its either one or the other.

I have both because it simply means another extra outlet to post my links and improve my traffic and get backlinks for my sites but if you are using it for networking with friends and family, you won’t need 2 similar social network platforms! Are you really going to migrate all your posts, photos, etc? Why should you? Unless Google+ really offers extra pluses.

Will Google+ give Facebook a run for its money? Will it outdo Facebook the way Facebook almost killed MySpace and Blogs? Only time will tell. In the meantime, if you want to give Google+ a try and yet remain on FB, you can marry the two either by adding Google+ into  your facebook or add your Facebook into your Google+.

It is rather quiet over at Google+ at the moment. Its only been 2 weeks since Google+ is open to everyone so lets give it a little time. Hopefully it won’t fizzle out the way Google Buzz did almost without a Buzz.

You can follow me on Facebook or Google+.

I have mentioned before that its sometimes takes me only 5 to 10 minutes to write a blog post, especially a blog post without pictures. Well, it takes me a whole morning to write up a Squidoo lens. Phew! Writing Squidoo Lenses is hard work.

Take for example this post. I am in a hurry as I am rushing for some other task, so I can finish this post in 5 minutes flat because my thoughts are pouring out faster than I can type. On the other hand, it took me the whole morning to produce my latest Squidoo lens for little Bob the Builder Fans. Bob The Builder Online.

That is not all. Once a blog post is published, I promptly forget about it. However once a Squidoo lens is published, I come back to it often to tweak it over and over and add stuff and more articles in it constantly to improve my Squidoo rank. It is an ongoing thing.

Hmm…. it had better be worth my while! Still, I enjoy it and I guess that is the most important thing of all. I can’t decide which I enjoy more. Blogging or Building Lenses. I guess I enjoy blogging for writing and Squidoo for the images and what I can do to make it look nice.

Right. Times up. For the record, this post took less than 5 minutes.

I have added a new page to this blog. It is on my sidebar under ‘Resources’ and ‘Pages’ beneath it. The page is called “My Articles on the Web“.

Recently I have started to write on other sites other than my blogs. I thought it would be  useful to organize them all together here by creating a special page for it. Otherwise, soon I will find that I can’t keep track of my articles on the web. Hopefully I have time to write and create more articles.

As a start, I have created this page My Articles on the Web because it is always good to start keeping track of things early and do maintenance work later rather than to start keeping track later which will be a bigger headache.