How to Make a Living From Blogging

There are several business models that entrepreneurs can use to make a living from blogging. The first and most common way to turn make a blog profitable is to sell advertising or use affiliate programs. A second way to make money from a blog is to help a single brand improve its image by creating positive associations between the blog and the product in the mind of consumers. Both kinds of blogs can be very profitable, especially if the creator has a keen mind for marketing.

If you are going to blog with the goal of selling advertising, there are a couple of ways you can go about recruiting sponsors who want to put advertising on your site; you can let someone else do the legwork, or you can do the work yourself and keep all of the revenue. Within the first group, many people make an income from blogging by selling space through various advertising programs. These programs have some advantages since it doesn't take much time to get started. However, many people are a little disappointed with this source of revenue as it usually fails to live up to their expectations.

Selling advertising directly to companies who want to put banner ads or sponsored links on your blog can take quite a bit of time, but it can be fairly lucrative. If you have a lot of contacts in industries that are related to the topic of your blog, you may want to try to try this strategy. People who have a strong background in sales and are experienced at pitching proposals can make a lot of money by renting blog space to interested companies. The most serious problem with this model is that you often have to build quite a sizable readership before you can attract advertisers, which can translate into several months of work before you begin to make an income from blogging.

As blogging becomes a more and more lucrative business, a lot of established companies are thinking about how they can benefit from blogging. One way that companies are capitalizing on the blog movement is by having blogs that provide a kind of friendly face for their corporation. Often, a company will employ an established blogger to create a blog designed specifically to appeal to that company's customers. Many writers who never even dreamed that he could make an income from blogging has been approached by a company and offered a profitable opportunity.

How to Get Started as a Freelance Writer

Article writing makes a great job for stay-at-home moms as well as others who would like to work from home. If you are a decent article writer and learn where to try to find writing gigs, you could earn an insome from your writing. Listed here are some suggestions to help you get going.

Stay Away from Job Bidding Services

ODesk, Elance, Freelancer, and all the rest of the freelance websites that force you to bid against others to get assignments have one thing in common: these sites are flooded with foreign workers who are able to write articles for absurdly cheap prices. If you use freelancing sites, set your bid based on how much you believe you are really worthy of, and do not get caught up in a price war. If you find yourself working for $3 an hour, you'll just end up feeling stressed and get tired of it very quickly.

Content Sites

Nearly everybody goes through a situation where money is tight once in a while, and during those times, sites that specialize in article brokering are a good choice. The Content Authority pays weekly, and Textbroker pays twice per month. The amount of money these sites pay is not that great, but there's almost always work available and the money will prove useful until you can find jobs that pay more.

Online Marketers Often Need Content

There are a lot of sites on the net that need fresh articles. Some site owners write their own articles, but a great deal of these folks hire out the writing to article writers. If you've got great writing abilities, you can often get more money for the content you write by marketing the services you provide in forums where Internet marketers spend time.

Magazines and Newspapers

If writing articles for magazines seems to be unrealistic, let me reassure you that it might not be. You don't have to have a college degree to have your articles published in a magazine. All you need to have is enough talent to write query letters pitching ideas to editors in a persuasive way, and also the ability to conduct interviews and craft the articles on time. It is a lot easier to sell your writing once you have some publishing credits under your belt, but a lot of freelance writers have been able to sell magazine and newspaper articles without having any prior publications. Pick up the Writer's Market book or online membership for a list of publications that accept articles from freelance writers.

Will Your Next Television be Able to Tweet?

For work and entertainment, the desktop computer continues to be an integral part of our daily lives. But as we make our initial steps into the twenty first century, many household devices are getting transformed into lean, mean, multi-tasking machines.

In recent years technology manufacturers have begun to build HDTVs with Ethernet and Wi-Fi allowing your TV to connect to the Internet. This offers several types of multimedia functionality. Computer hardware manufacturers have been building high-resolution screens for several years but until recently they have been too expensive for the home and personal market. But over time, production costs decrease and large screen HDTVs are becoming more affordable for the home market.

We are no strangers to this process. Considering the number of gadgets we are exposed to daily, streamlining our tech-lives has become a useful marketing strategy for technology companies. Phones used to merely be phones, but now they have access to the Internet, have a camera built in and can be used to watch movies. The Internet has been a key factor in making this possible, continuing to push the boundaries of technology.

Online businesses are eager to take advantage of these new markets. National broadcasters offer streaming through televisions and popular websites such as Twitter and YouTube can now be accessed through a television. However, more and more services (such as online book marking and social networks) will undoubtedly be available soon. Imagine being able to save favorites online and access them all without turning on your computer. Personalization and customization continue to be key features of the Internet. Imagine being able to design, build and publish a personalized homepage and then access it by a button on your remote control called "personal homepage".

Whilst most people enjoy the combination of features into a multi-functional gadget, some people do not like them. Reasons range from wanting to "switch off and get away from being constantly connected" to wanting to "use the TV as a form of escapism".

Nevertheless, conventional computers still arguably offer the best Internet experience. But there is magic to be found when discovering new functionalities in traditional objects.

TweetDeck and Twitter

A new user of Twitter might be surprised to learn that a large number of people use the Twitter service, but rarely visit the Twitter site. This is one of the things that makes Twitter special. It has an api that developers can use to produce a wide variety of tools to make the Twitter experience more enjoyable and efficient.

One of the best and most popular of these tools is TweetDeck. It is a free application that greatly enhances the Twitter experience. It's especially helpful if you have more than one Twitter account or also use other social networks like Google Buzz, Facebook or MySpace.

It makes it easy to retweet or choose which account you want to post to. You can also schedule posts to give yourself some time off without neglecting your followers.

You can set up multiple columns for different accounts, lists, direct messages, mentions, etc. It's an excellent way to keep track of your social circle without visiting multiple sites and continually logging in to different accounts.

It doesn't do everything, but it's hard to beat for a free tool and new features keep being added. I do use paid tools for more specialized features, but I still find myself coming back to TweetDeck for general Twitter use.

I recommend that you give TweetDeck a try. I'm sure you won't be disappointed.