5 sites that pay you to blog

If you are a blogger who has struggled to make money, you may be wondering how other bloggers do it. Most of my blogging income comes from affiliate programs, but I do pay posts on a regular basis as well. I don't mind doing them because I get to be creative in my writing.

There are many web services that pay you to write and market their product. I belong to some, but I'm really picky who I sign up for. I've compiled together five sites that I recommend.

1. Sponsored Reviews

Earn cash by writing reviews about advertiser’s products and services. You can choose what advertisers you want to do reviews on. Pay depends on how high your PR is.

2.Get Reviewed

Get paid $20 – $200 to review products and services on your site. I like that you have the opportunity to make more per post.

3. Shvoong

The more abstracts you post at Shvoong, the more chances to attract readers. Create link to your abstract elsewhere(on blogs, forums, your personal homepage, or other sites).

4. Blogvertise

My favorite! The higher your PR, the higher you get offered.

5. Pay U 2 Blog

New to this one, but average payout is $5-I'll post more later about this program.

Do You Give Good Comment?

Comments are a big part of blogging. Some bloggers may determine the worth of their blog by how many comments they receive daily. Some are even obsessed by it, visiting other blogs just to see how many comments they get and getting jealous when they see that a certain blogger gets twice as many comments as they do on their blog. What is so important about comments? Should we as bloggers, be so concerned with them?

Sure, it's great to get comments, but comments can play a different role in determining the popularity of your blog. According to the Blog Herald, there are 70 million blogs out in Internet land. With so many blogs, the only way to to be found may be by commenting. And commenting. And commenting. Bloggers have a lot of blogs to choose from these days, so many tend to visit bloggers that visit them-basically, because they don't have time to go searching.

Is this fair? Not really. Especially when some bloggers don't necessarily have a great blog, but get tons of comments. It can make one wonder if comments on blogs are sincere ones, or are they just being nice because the blogger visited their blog?

Returning a comment is good blogging manners. Visiting a blogger's blog that left you a comment is a common courtesy. You should always leave them a "thanks for visiting" comment, but there needs to be a line drawn between when we comment back, and when we don't.

So, do you give great comment? What's great comment? Great comment should be one that was left on a blog that you truly like, not JUST to get a comment back. Leaving a comment on a blog that you would enjoy coming back time after time, makes you a sincere commenter, unlike a fake commenter, who is just looking to get comments back. This way, you can build your reader base honestly, and you can feel good about returning the favor when they leave you a comment.

How can I make money blogging?

A blogger that has worked hard to bring in readers and networked with the blogger community to raise their page rank level may have fun blogging about their family, products, or whatever may cross their mind. But maybe they are ready to expand their horizons and find a new use for their blog. Or, maybe they might want to find a way to supplement or even replace their present income. What opportunities are out there for bloggers who want to earn an income from their blog?
In the article, Make Money Blogging for Profit , one way is to do paid posts. What is a paid post? Basically, it's what it states; you post about a product or company and you get paid for it. Some bloggers don't agree with this type of writing, but some see it as an opportunity to get paid for your opinion. Most companies have a list of opportunities for you to choose from, so you aren't forced to write about something that you don't agree with. Others send you offers and you can decide if you choose to write about it or not.

Payment is usually once a month, but some pay on the spot or weekly. Paypal is also the usual way most send you your money and that way you don't have to wait forever for a check.

Connecting with Facebook and MySpace might lead to paid posts also. In the article How to create a MySpace profile to build your Social networking experience you can learn how to set up a page to link your blog to it to bring in more traffic without the expense.

Do web directories help?

As part of my new offerings to my blog, I am including different topics that I will be posting about weekly. One of them is learning how to blog for money and getting traffic to your blog/site.

SEO and Web Directories
I'm sure that everyone has come across a Web Directory at one time or another. If you don't know what exactly a Web Directory is, they are not search engines, but basically a big catalog of websites that is edited and managed by people. By submitting your website to a web directory, you can help you boost your search engine visibility. Sounds like a great deal, right? Maybe. But like anything else online, directories range from quality to a waste of time.

How does a web directory help you improve your search engine rankings? How are they different from a regular search engine? It is very important to understand how they work. Directories have databases full of websites and a search field where you can enter phrases-just like a search engine would, but they are so different in every way else.

Search engines have robots or "spiders" to find websites and add them to the search engine's database. In a directory, human editors find websites and screen them for quality and relevance before adding them to the directory's database.The human review process is the main factor between a web directory and a search engine.

Take Yahoo for instances. They are partly a directory. Look at the directory portion of Yahoo. This system is used to organize websites into categories and sub-categories, and is done by humans to make it easier for people to find what they are looking for. Business.com is similar in how they run too.

So, how do Web Directories Help Your Search Engine Ranking?
What is the connection between a business web directory and SEO? One benefit of listing your website in a web directory is that people can find your site when they search there. Another is that Google will rank you high because when you are listed in the directory, you gain a one-way link to your website. This helps to increase back linking, which in turn helps to boost your search engine visibility.

My favorite is Yahoo, because it is a high-quality directory and can help you score more "points" with a search engine like Google. Since Web Directories use human editors— not a robotic crawler — it tells the search engine that your website has some degree of quality, legitimacy and relevance.