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Over the 5+ years I’ve been blogging, I’ve easily spent $1000 or more on blog templates. Although I’ve been quite happy with most of them, looking at the same design year after year gets dull. Yes, I’ve managed to teach myself how to design a site from scratch but, let’s face it, even that takes time — one thing I tend to be short on. Besides, all that time tinkering and tweaking takes away from blogging and making money!

Unfortunately, most of the free or premium templates that promise they’re “ready out of the box” are cookie cutter templates: install it and your blog will look just like everyone else’s. Sure, if you have some basic skills you can at least swap out the header image, but as far as configuring it to look the way you want? Good luck with that: you’ll spend hours, and chances are it’ll never quite look like what you imagined.

Or, you could sign up with One-Theme.com, a site that offers Wordpress themes based on three basic layouts that can be easily configured to make your blog look the way you want it to look. Choose your layout based on whether you a template for a standard website, a news site, or a regular blog, then select your color scheme and you’re ready to begin configuring your options. Want to run widgets? You can! Need to insert AdSense? No problem!

Best yet, your theme will be XHTML valid — something that even my former paid blog designers didn’t attend to. Let me just tell you, there’s nothing more frustrating than shelling out a few hundred bucks and installing a custom theme only to get one email after another from people who can’t read your site on their browser! XHTML compliance means your blog will display properly in almost every browser, at almost every screen resolution, and that translates into both site accessibility and happy readers.

And, yes, in case you’re curious: I’m planning a redesign of this site soon.

You may not realize it, but I write four blogs. (Well, five, really but one’s on hiatus awaiting a refocus and redesign.) Having more than one blog increases my opportunities to earn money by ensuring each blog is focused primarily on one specific topic, something that’s appealing to advertisers interested in specific keywords. It also ensures that I have a forum to write about whatever strikes my fancy. So if you haven’t been reading my other blogs, check out the list below. You’re bound to find something of interest, including highlights from BFTM this week.

From Blogging for the Money:

• Search engines serving a charitable purpose - Turn your online time into a good deed.

• Cut and Paste Cleanly - Strip formatting from MS Word or other apps so you can paste straight into blog entries.

From Chubby Mommy:

• My a-ha moment about exercise - It doesn’t have to be grueling to do some good.

• When did I become a matron? - Here’s a wedding I won’t be participating in, whenever it happens.

From I Think Therefore I Blog:

• How to freeze summer fruits and vegetables - Grocery stores and farmer’s markets are practically giving away summer’s harvest. Take advantage of the low prices and stock your freezer with savings in the process.

• Five fast ways to cut your grocery bill - Simple little steps to help you save big each month.

• Next weekend it’s cheap to go camping - Plan a trip with the kids to take advantage of free admission to any national park.

• Today’s Deal: Save $99 on a market umbrella! - This end-of-summer clearance is a great buy. I know because I have one!

From Electric Venom:

• Informal straw poll - What the press says about Obama’s appeal doesn’t seem to jive with what blog commenters think.

• Tippling Tuesday: The Drink Your Worries Away Edition - What discretionary spending item could you not live without?

• Word Fugue: The “Do Not Call” Edition - Got a minute? Play my addictive word-association game.

• News Flash: Republicans Aren’t Against Social Assistance - Guess who first introduced VA benefits, a pension for retirees, and Civil Rights laws? You might be surprised at the answer.

Ever tried writing a blog entry in MS Word then pasting it into WordPress? Looks like crap, doesn’t it? Or maybe you’ve copied a chunk of text from a website and wanted to paste it into Word, only to find that looks like crap, too. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could do those things without copying all of the formatting as well?

Now you can, with PureText, a completely free program that I’ve quickly found indispensible. PureText removes font formatting (bold, italics, etc.) along with embedded objects, indenting, bullets and more. What you get is, well, pure text much like you’d get if you pasted into Notepad.exe, copied the result and re-pasted it where you want.

In other words, it saves you time and typing. I’m pretty much in favor of anything that does that!

I just closed the books for August and am pleased they reflect another profitable month of blogging. For those curious about how the various companies stack up, I thought I’d post last month’s earnings. Do keep in mind that I’d decided a few months ago to be less aggressive in my efforts to make money blogging. Instead I’ve been pursuing a balance between my life on- and offline and spending far more time with my family than ever before. Still, if I can manage to pay a few bills with my blogs then I’m happy.

LinkWorth: $637.04. This is slightly down from previous months primarily because I took several days off in August. It’s still one of the easiest forms of my blogging income, however.

PayU2Blog: $130.00. Also slightly down due to my vacation(s), I still consider PU2B to be a mainstay for day-to-day income generation.

Sponsored Reviews: $468.00. I continue to love working with this company since it allows me to bid on reviews that are relevant to my readers while setting my own price.

Text-Link-Ads.com $188.64. What’s not to like about earning money that requires very little work on my part?

Others, including private advertising: $155.55.

Online freelance writing: $850.00. (This income is directly related to having established regular readership at my other blogs where my writing on certain topics served to interest various online magazine editors.)

Total: $2429.23. Yes, that’s about 1/2 of what I’d previously been making but without the stress, worry and struggle of trying to come up with good content despite cruddy opps. As soon as I became more selective about the assignments and paid opportunities I was willing to take on I began blogging more, which led to an increase of traffic and that, in turn, led to an increase in offers from advertisers.

Not bad for doing something I love and would be doing for free anyway!

If your daily web habits are anything like mine you’re using a search engine at least a dozen times a day. Often more. What if you could do something to help others with all of those searches? That’s the purpose of a rapidly expanding type of search engine: those which donate a portion of their advertising income to charitable purposes.

How do they work?

You use a charitable search engine just like you’d use Google. Alongside your search results, the engine will display context-related ads. The search engine earns money from those ads and turns around and donates a percentage of it to charity. The precise percentage varies from 30% for some to 100% for others.

Can I pick my charity?

Yes, maybe and no. Some charitable search engines do allow a user to designate a specific charitable purpose. For instance, GoodSearch specifically asks users to enter the charity they want to support and verifies its existence. (There are also easy steps to make GoodSearch your default search engine in IE, Firefox or on your Mac.) Other charitable search engines either rotate donations through their own list of selected charities or ask their user community to select a new charity each month.

What charitable search engines do you recommend?

I’m a big fan of GoodSearch primarily because it’s an attractive interface that returns highly relevant results. Other favorites include:

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Every blogger knows that the best way to generate comments is to reply to comments. Smart bloggers know to reply to comments in their comment section, rather than via a private email. Not only does this encourage a repeat visit — particularly if you’ve installed a plug-in that lets users subscribe to comments — but it demonstrates to other potential commenters that you’re interested, interactive and engaged.

But let’s face it, sometimes those comments hit your InBox when you’re just too busy to reply. What then?

Then, my friends, you use Hit Me Later which acts like a snooze button for your InBox. All you have to do is forward the comment to X@hitmelater.com, replacing X with the number of hours — or the day of the week — when you want that comment sent back to you. Voila, it goes away and returns at a time of your choosing.

So let’s say you’re sitting at your computer at 1 o’clock in the afternoon but really prefer to start your mornings around 7 a.m. by replying to commenters while your creative juices awaken? Forward the day’s comments to 18@hitmelater.com and you’ll clean up your InBox for that afternoon while scheduling your replies to suit your morning mail routine. The service is free, there’s no registration required, and both your email address and the original senders remain private.

Gawd, I just lurves the internet.

We’ve all seen them: those anti-spam measures displaying garbled words we’re to type to verify we’re human. Known as Captchas (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), they’re used around 100 million times per day across the internet.

Bloggers using Captchas swear by them as a means of thwarting spam comments, but readers often feel they’re more of a hassle than they’re worth.

Now, all that time and typing is being put to good use thanks to the Recaptcha project. Instead of random words, sites participating in the project are using Captchas featuring words from old manuscripts and scanned archives that were marked as unreadable by scanners. When those words are displayed to a human user, who then types them in, the responses are added to a database, much of which is reviewed by humans to ensure accuracy prior to modifying the scanned archive.

Currently around 40,000 sites have signed up to be Recaptcha partners with over 4 million word responses being logged every day. In the last year alone the project has helped decipher over 400 million words, including digitization of the NY Times archive from 1908.

Suddenly, those little screens don’t seem nearly as annoying, do they?

(Source)

Oh for crying out loud! I just twigged that I have not updated this since people stopped clapping and Tinkerbell died… You would not believe how much more of a drama I could make that. But I’m sorry you’ll just have to take my word for it.

I am distracted with cutting my toe nails, spending my husband’s money, and just generally being a nuisance to anyone unfortunate to cross my path. My day is passing in a blur from the moment my children manage to unlock my bedroom door and use me as a jumping castle to the point where I am begging my kid to go to sleep or so help me God that kid will be decorating my wall: “Duct Tape Still Life’. I am not complaining though. Life happens.

I won’t promise anything to you but I won’t blog until the next time booze prices go up and I have to get sober. Seriously! Don’t hold your breath though, you’re likely to turn blue.

(And in case you’re wondering, I didn’t write a single word of this entry. The Lazy Bloggers Post Generator, found via Void Where Prohibited, did it all for me. Now if I could only figure out a way to monetize this post.)

Recently, I’ve noticed that I don’t enjoy blogging on this site as much as I enjoy my other four.

Hence I’m putting this one on hiatus. I’m not saying that I won’t blog again at some point but, the way I see it, if I’m bored with it then readers must be, too. So find me over at Electric Venom or I Think Therefore I Blog or Chubby Mommy or Queen of Snark, or even at Pajamas Media, where the blogging’s infinitely more fun.

Update 08192008: I’m baaack.

One of the more common questions I’m asked is whether it’s necessary to switch from free hosting sites (like Blogger or WordPress.com) to make money blogging. The short answer is: absolutely. No one likes to hear that, though. Finding a reputable and affordable hosting company seems like a daunting task, and people don’t like the thought of sinking money into an endeavor without knowing for certain it’s going to pay off.

So let me put it this way: with many of the great companies I recommend (see the link at the top of the page), you’re 100% guaranteed not to make one thin dime if you’re using a free hosting site.

Why? Because you — the blogger — have absolutely no control over the content you put up there. Most free sites prohibit bloggers from using paid links, and there are plenty of stories on the internet about bloggers who’ve learned about this the hard way when their blogs were taken down. Worse yet, free hosts don’t even have to have a valid reason to delete your content: it’s been known to happen for no other reason than because a competitor or malicious person “flagged” a site as offensive. So if you’re serious about making money with your blog then you need your own host. Now.

How do you choose web hosting? There are a number of important factors to consider: including bandwidth, features, reliability, customer service and, of course, price.

1. Bandwidth - Since bandwidth reflects the amount of data transferred, so your needs depend largely on how much traffic your blog has and what kind of data you’re making available. New bloggers, who’ve yet to establish a large audience, obviously don’t need as much bandwidth as a site getting tens of thousands of hits per day. But even a new site can use a lot of bandwidth if it’s crammed with downloadable files, podcasts and bloated images. The general rule of thumb is to find a host that offers smaller bandwidth packages for lower monthly fees to begin with, then upgrade your hosting plan as needed.

2. Features - As the folks at WebHostingBluebook.org explain, it’s a good idea to list out your plans for your site before you start shopping for hosts. Do you intend to run numerous scripts? Will you need a large database? What about forums? Compile the list of your planned (or even hoped-for) features before you begin shopping around for a host to ensure you’ll find one that can meet your future needs, too.

3. Reliability - Anyone who’s been blogging for a while can tell you nightmares about finding their site’s not responding shortly after they’ve been linked by a high-profile blogger. Or having their data lost due to a massive server failure. (All too often bloggers learn the hard way why backing up one’s own data regularly is the most important blog-related task.) But don’t just take the company’s word about their up-time: do some research to find out what others have to say. One good place to start is the web hosting bluebook which rates and reviews in detail the top 10 hosting sites.

4. Customer Service - Although this is usually addressed in company reviews, your own experience is important, too. Any company which takes more than 24 hours to initiate a new account after you’ve signed up is almost guaranteed to take that long when you’re a paying customer having problems. So remember: until your data’s on their server it’s still an easy thing to find a different, more customer-oriented host.

5. Price - Even a quick glance at those hosting reviews shows that prices for basic monthly hosting are all over the board. I’ve seen bloggers moving from free hosting tend to make one of two mistakes. Some go for the company with the cheapest hosting prices only to find themselves dissatisfied a few weeks later when they discover the service isn’t reliable, the server’s speed is slow and their requests for help are never answered. Or they go top-dollar in the belief that their site is going to make it big right away. Personally, I’d recommend a more middle of the road approach: $5 to $6 per month is a fair price for a reliable hosting site with good customer service, plenty of bandwidth and a number of features.

Yes, making the move away from a free hosting company will cost you money in the beginning. But it’s also necessary if you plan to make money in the future. As the saying goes, you’ve got to spend money to make money… but when it comes to hosting fees you don’t necessarily need to spend a lot if you know what you’re looking for to begin with. Good luck!

I’ve been actively blogging for over 5 years now, and by “active” I mean that at one point I generated well over 20 blog entries per day. Original content, too. I was younger, then, and as anyone who’s crossed that magical 40th birthday line understands, I had a heck of a lot more energy in those days, too.

One thing I didn’t have back then: an income to show for my blogging. Naturally, this led to quite a few sighs from my husband when he heard things like “Oh, sorry I didn’t get dinner started yet. There was a breaking news story I wanted to blog about.” Likewise, my mother-in-law would cluck and grumble to herself that I was frittering away my time unproductively but, since she clucks disapprovingly over just about anything I do, I didn’t pay her much attention.

My friends’ incredulity would get to me, though. They simply couldn’t understand why I wanted to spend my time building up backlinks, establishing a solid and loyal readership, and constantly pursuing the day when I’d be able to pay some (if not all) of my bills with my blog(s). “Come lay out by the pool,” they’d urge me in summer. “Come skiing with us,” they’d beckon in colder months. But, although I did take them up on their offers now and again, I maintained a belief that I needed to put in a certain number of hours per day online.

Five years later, that’s paying off. My husband saw it when I announced — a year early — that we’d paid off his car. My mother-in-law sees it (though she pretends not to) now that we can afford to visit her almost half as often as she expects. My friends? Well, so many of them have lost their jobs to outsourcing, layoffs and business closings in the past year. Now they’re coming to realize how much more “secure” my hobby-turned-job is than theirs ever was, and that maybe I wasn’t so foolish for passing by those (expensive) days at the pool or on the slopes.

Which is not to say that any of them actually get the fact that if your name isn’t John Chow or Darren Rouse you aren’t going to be earning Big Bucks while on vacay. (Though, to be fair, both gentlemen put in their dues and sweat-equity, too. I’m just jealous.) If you’re a little guy, or a gal like me or a big (in internet-weight only) gal like Barbara Ling, you’ve still got to put in time at the keyboard. And despite seeing that such time translates into money, friends and family still don’t always get that fact.

This week, for instance, I’ve sold two articles to Pajamas Media, a half-dozen high-paying paid reviews written elsewhere, designed sites for three bloggers, monetized two others as part of my blog-consulting business and made my standard earnings from the paid blogging companies I work with, along with regular AdSense earnings, too. The result: I out-earned my husband. Twice over.

Does that mean he’s been any more understanding when, say, I’ve suggested I’d rather pick up Subway than spend an hour cooking dinner? Or that my son, who has a new basketball and hoop to occupy him while Mommy works on her laptop on the deck, gets it that I can’t stop what I’m doing to hear yet another knock-knock joke? Do friends (who want me to set them up a blog, then design their blog, then teach them how to blog and to monetize their blog… for free) understand when I decline an invitation to the movies or karaoke at the local bar?

No, no they do not.

Fortunately, I’ve worked up a short list of sure-fire ways to circumvent these problems now (well, with everyone but my son — and since I’ve managed to get the others off my back I actually have more time for him as a result).

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If you’re struggling to handle comments left solely to help someone else’s SEO, the solution is one click away. Alex King, the author of so many indispensable WordPress plug-ins, has come up with another nifty one: De-Link Comment Author.

Although the plug-in isn’t officially supported, I’ve installed it on all of my blogs and have been quite pleased. The plug-in adds a new line to email notifications and to the comment-moderation screen. Both have worked fine in WP 2.5 and 2.5.1, although I don’t know about previous versions.

One advantage of using the plug-in: you can leave the comment body intact. With comment authors using paid links as their URLs as part of a money-making link-building campaign you can keep their supposedly “helpful” comments without worrying their links might be making your blog spammy.

If you’re one of the bloggers who’ve installed the “do_follow” plug-in (which passes PageRank to commenters URLs), you’ve probably seen a surge in the number of senseless comments left by people who obviously aren’t regular readers. Did you know those comments might actually be paid links?

That’s right: some people are making money via link-building services using blog comments, and they’re making anywhere from $1 to $15 per link. On your blog. The attraction is obvious: not only do the companies paying for such links get a “do_follow” link, but they get one that’s likely to be permanent.

The downside for bloggers is obvious, too: it might look to human readers like you have a popular blog thanks to the high number of comments your entries receive, but search engines may interpret those subsidized comments as paid entries and penalize you.

After trying several different email and calendar programs, including Google’s, I’ve yet to find one that I consider as functional as Outlook. The only problem is that cycling through umpteen running applications just so I can add an appointment to my calendar or a task to my To Do list is a real pain in the neck. So more often than not I promise myself that I’ll remember to add it later… and then, of course, I forget about it.

Today, though, I ran across Microsoft’s list of command-line switches for Outlook and realized I could easily create shortcuts in my Quick Launch bar to accomplish those things with just one click. If you’re using Outlook, too, you’ll find this a surprisingly easy yet helpful little trick.

Here’s how to do it:
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Although I’m far from a tech head, I consider myself a pretty savvy internet user. My browser’s tricked out, I can execute keyboard shortcuts in my sleep, and now that I’ve switched to using dual monitors with my laptop (when I’m not blogging from my treadmill) I’ve become even more of a web-head than ever.

So I really didn’t expect to learn much from Mark Frauenfelder’s book Rule the Web: How to Do Anything and Everything on the Internet—Better, Faster, Easier. But here it is, just a week after I picked up a copy in the hope of providing my husband with a resource (other than me) to answer his never-ending “How do I…?” questions about using the internet.

Before giving it to him, I figured I’d sit down and browse through a few pages and maybe find one or two tips on things I didn’t know. Then one or two became one or two dozen, and soon I’d dog-eared the book so much that I realized I needed my own copy. So, I kept that one and bought a second one for my husband’s use.

Not long after that, we got a call from my mother-in-law which began with “I’m having problems with IE 7.0. How do I…?” and, while my husband walked her through the explanation, I hopped online and ordered her a copy, too.

Sure, there’s plenty of information that’s going to seem rudimentary to some folks: how to use eBay and Google, how to subscribe to RSS feeds, etc. But there’s also plenty of information that even long-time internet users don’t always know (or might have forgotten). Whether it’s personal productivity or system maintenance, finding new sources for news or safe places to download free software, Fraunfelder’s covered it in simple, straight-forward language that even my mother-in-law can understand.

Which means, if I’m very lucky, she might just stop calling here every two days at dinner time in search of free computer help. At $10.17 for her own copy of Rule the Web, I think that’s worth every penny.