AlltheInterweb Blogs

How to make money online by blogging

If you’re reading this, you may already know what a blog is. If not, then a blog can be used to write a personal diary or as a platform to write online articles similar to the kind of thing that’ve been appearing in Newspapers & Magazines for years.

Many people do this, and don’t earn s***, probably because they aren’t that fussed about earning from their blog, but in other cases they just don’t really know how to do it properly, or they just don’t put the effort in.

There are other people who do this, who claim to make $1000’s doing it, and even write books to boast about it and tell other people how to go about doing it. I’ve had a flick through many of these books recently, and they pretty much all say the same thing without being maybe as truly helpful as they could.

There are even people who have become millionaires from blogging, and it may be possible for you to do the same, but you’ll have a hell of alot of work ahead of you laying the foundation stones to be able to get there.

If you want to have a go at this yourself, you will need the following things:

1) An idea about what you want to write about, think of a topic that you’re actually interested in, know about enough to not look like a moron when you’re writing about it, and have the willpower to write about on a regular basis.

Most of these books about blogging suggest trying to find a specific niche on the topic to write about, but not one so weird there’d be a very limited people wanting to read it. For instance “How to make money blogging” is probably more likely to attract readers than “How to make money by giving elephants nipple piercings”.

2) Energy….. if you’re totally knackered you’re gonna have quite a struggle engaging your brain to assemble words to use in your blog posts in a way that makes sense, if any at all.

3) Time… let’s face it, writing takes a while to do…… but you can also write a crapload of blogs at once (providing you don’t over-burden yourself to the point you get bits of them mixed up), and set the blog website to release them to the world at a set time if needs be.

4) A blogging platform…. there are numerous options, with Free WordPress, Blogger/Blogspot + WordPress hosted via paid webhosting among the most popular.

5) Advertising to make money from your blog posts by monetising them. The most popular choices are Google AdSense + Amazon Associates, which I’ve also found to be the most reliable for payouts.

6) SEO & PPC Advertising Skills, to bring people to your blog to click on the adverts that will earn you money.

SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimisation”, and is the dark art of tweaking your website to play nicely with the search engine robots when they come to visit your website to gather information to add your pages to the listings on the various Search Engines.

PPC stands for “Pay Per Click”, and is a form of advertising where the owner of the pages an advert is displayed on gets paid when someone clicks on it. Just as you need it to earn money on your own pages, you also need to run adverts through it to display adverts to your blog site on other people’s websites to bring people to your site in the hopes they will click on your adverts.

There are popular options including Google AdWords, Facebook Ads + Bing Ads. It can cost from as little as a tenner a month, through to well over $300/£300+ a month.

7) Social Media accounts to promote the blog and lure people in to read your content. All the usual suspects: Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, etc.

8) Software, to make running the blog more painless & look more professional…….. you may want to consider graphics software, image editing software, video editing software + SEO Software for starters.

If you liked this article, check out our one on Youtubing, which you can use to earn an extra stream of online cash alongside your Blog.

Also, don’t forget to share the crap out of this article using the buttons below if you found it useful.

Nokia Lumia 530 – Quick review

I bought one of these things last year, as my old iPhone 3GS had run into a few technical gremlins that were starting to piss me off. For starters the sound had quit working when it rang + the power button had fallen off. Also I couldn’t use the latest Apps on it ‘cos of the age of the OS on it.

When I bought it, the Nokia Lumia 530 was still selling for around £69, but could be picked up for around £40 if you weren’t too fussy about the case colour. I largely bought it ‘cos of the price + I thought the Windows interface looked craploads better than the newer iOS interface. I ended up with a lurid green cased one.

The smooth rounding of the case makes this phone a rather slippery sucker, and all too easy to drop / accidently smash yourself in the face with it while tinkering with it in bed.

It uses a Nano-SIM, which means I couldn’t transfer my number over to it, and being on Vodafone Pay-as-you-Go making it more seriously awks still.

But at least unlike an iPhone, it has a slot inside the case for a Micro-SD card. The 64GB Micro-SD card I bought for it wouldn’t work, so I’ve started using that in my SatNav instead, and I’ve started using a 32GB Kingston Micro-SD card instead which works fine. Removing the case to insert that + the SIM card is a fairly simple job of holding the top corner of the screen while pushing against the camera lens.

The phone didn’t come with a USB to synch music or charge it, but came with a funny looking mains charger with a collapsible earth pin.

Windowsphones generally get slagged off for not having as great a number of apps for them as iOS or Android devices, but you’ll find apps for the things the cool kids hang out on: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Vine (shit), Tinder, Amazon Kindle, Candy Crush, Blackberry Messenger, Skype, etc.

Battery life, generally needs charging every 24-48hrs.

Worth getting if you need a cheap smartphone to take places you’d rather not take your expensive one, or want a smartphone but don’t want to auction off a kidney in order to be able to afford one.

How to use AlltheInterweb Pixels to promote your website

This part of our site is ideal for promoting your website via banner / link exchange by posting it to one of our grids, and is based on the Million Dollar Homepage, a Pixel Advertising website created by Alex Tew a number of years back.

In order to place your advert on the website……
1) Create an account so you can create & edit your advert(s)

2) Click the Get Pixels link at the top of the page.

3) Click the “Buy Pixels” button associated with the particular grid you want to place your advert on

4) Click & Drag on the area you want to place your advertising image on, the area you select doesn’t have to be the size of your image (e.g. standard 768×90, 468×60, 300×300, 300×250 advertising banners), as the script that makes this site work will scale it down to the size of the grid area you selected automatically upon completion of your order…………. Then click “Continue”

5) Select or Upload your image

6) Fill out the information requested to link the advertising image back to your website.

7) After that it’s pretty self explainatory… any payments will be processed via Paypal, or if you selected the Freebie Pixels grid, select one of our advertising banners from the Link to Us page by copy & pasting the HTML code into the webpage you’re linking your banner advert to.

8) After your advert gets activated, it will be displayed on our website for 90 days and will be shown via the following URLs on AlltheInterweb & our sister websites……

http://www.alltheinterweb.co.uk/pixels/index.php

http://www.webdesignchitchat.co.uk/Advertise_Your_Site/advertise_your_site.html

http://britishangling.co.uk/html/advertise.html

http://www.yorkshire-holidays.co.uk/Advertise/advertise.html

How to get started Youtubing

This popular video site sharing website has been around for over 10 years now, and gone from short crappy quality clips of pets & people doing the sort of stuff you’d see on You’ve Been Framed, to High quality HD footage of the same stuff + even people having a crack at doing their own “Online TV Shows”.

These range from things like Tech Reviews to DIY Electronics + Prank Shows, some of which are better than mainstream shows like Beadle’s About or Candid Camera managed to pull off.

There seems to be more & more people wanting to have a crack at it (not just because you can earn money online by Youtubing), but not quite sure how to get started, so lets see what I can do to help……….

The first thing you’ll need is a camera. It doesn’t have to be anything too special, but basically helps if you use pretty much any camera made in the last 7yrs or so that’s capable of recording in 720p or 1080p High Definition (HD).

A Digital SLR Camera (DSLR) or a “Bridge” camera is likely to be too big & heavy to lug around if vLogging (video blogging) on the move like Roman Atwood (and others) do on a regular basis, and you’re best off with either a Digital Compact camera, or a small handheld video camera such as from the Sony Bloggie range, and their equivalents from other manufacturers such as Panasonic.

A proper camcorder such as my Panasonic is acceptable and not too bad to carry around with you all day too (and the quality is quite stunning).

My long time favourite for digital compact cameras is Fujifilm, but last time I looked it appeared they’d slimmed their range down to a selection of “Bridge” cameras + some very expensive compact system cameras with interchangable lenses. They’ve got exceedingly good colour reproduction qualities though.

Most the top Youtubers appear to be using Canon + Sony Digital Compacts at the moment, and GoPro cameras for when things get a bit more sweat inducing, such as ziplining or messing about in water.

The next stage (assuming you’ve already set-up your youtube account), is to shoot some video…. that’s easy enough, just point the camera at want you want to film, and press the record button, etc.

After that, you’ll probably want to edit the video, and for that you’ll need video editing software. Some of this you can get for free (e.g. Windows Movie Maker), other higher end software can end up costing you as much as the camera did. If you’re a Mac user, you’ll probably be using iMovie. For Windows users like myself, my current personal favourite is Corel VideoStudio Pro X5, which has been succeeded by a number of newer versions, it’s up to VideoStudio Pro X8 now I think. You can buy it either as a standalone product, or bundled together with my favourite photo editing software Corel Paintshop Pro X*.

Editing isn’t really too complicated if you’ve never done it before, it’s basically just a matter of dropping the video file onto the timeline at the bottom of the software, and adding the various bits & bobs like captions as and where needed.

When you’ve finished editing, you’ll need to save the finished video file, then wait for it to start rendering. This may take a while, and it helps if you’ve got a fair bit of RAM installed in your computer….. it’ll do it, but very slowly if you’ve got the minimum 2GB of RAM needed to run Windows… and it’s best to have at least 4GB of RAM installed, and perhaps even make use of Windows ReadyBoost.

Once done, you can then start uploading the video to Youtube. This also takes what feels like forever. While that’s in progress you can add a video title, keyword tags, opt to monetise the vid (if you’ve enabled that) + put a place tag on a map to show where you shot it (though you may want to give that a miss in some circumstances).

And that’s got you started Youtubing, I hope.

Though there’s still more to do yet… you may want to gain followers & views on Youtube by promoting your video via other Social Media outlets such as Twitter + Facebook + Instagram (among others), and collaborations with other Youtubers via sites such as ChannelPages, and checking your Video Stats via Youtube + elsewhere.

Check out our favourite Youtube Vids, or read our free guide on how to start blogging for money that could help you earn extra money online in addition to posting stuff on Youtube.

If you liked this article, don’t forget to hit the SHARE buttons to show your friends on Facebook / Twitter / Google+ / Tumblr, etc

Vine sucks

Vine is a social media site for posting short vids from your mobile devices.

I’ve decided I absolutely hate it with a passion you cannot imagine based purely on the fact the videos immediately AutoPlay, complete with sound, which is “seriously awks” when randomly looking through it via your WindowsPhone from bed, forgetting where the volume is set to: Resulting in a mini heart attack as you’re subjected to a loud burst of shit music you cant get out of your fucking head (followed by a pissy mood because this happened.

Seriously, if you want to post vids online, stick to Youtube.

USB Desk fans

Well it’s Summertime once again, and that usually means hot weather.

When you’re stuck at the computer there’s no better way to do it comfortably than to have a fan (except maybe having air conditioning), but what if you don’t have a free electrical socket, or your boss is a bit narky about energy usage?

No sweat, as the USB port on your computer can also be used as a power outlet as well as for data transfer, and hence the invention of desk fans you can plug into a spare USB socket.

The one I use is currently no longer available, but there are loads of others to choose from as well as a variety of more snazzy designs.

Their use isn’t limited just for the summer months, as having the cool air from one of these fans blowing into your face can also be quite helpful to reduce the effects of feeling drowsy while trying to plug away at some of the more tedious things you can end up having to do at a computer (such as while doing a computer course teaching you how to use MS Word / Excel / PowerPoint that’s teaching you pretty much exactly the same stuff you’ve been taught about them on previous computer courses and the only thing that appears to have been changed is the course title + qualification level on the certificate) + also if your sinuses are feeling a bit stuffy.

Best free software to keep your computer going

I did a “best free software” thing like that over at the now half-dead AlltheSocialnet social networking site I had a crack at running, so thought to kick off AlltheInterweb’s new blog I’d do a series of similiar articles.

1) AVIRA Free Anti-Virus (Click Here)
Regarded as the best free Anti-virus software for your Windows based PC, and I’ve only just recently switched back to it after a year or two of using ZoneAlarm Free Anti-Virus & Firewall.

2) Comodo Free Firewall (Click Here)
According to other sources this is the strongest free firewall you can get, I’d used it in the past, and have just switched back to using it again after my long time favourite ZoneAlarm Free Firewall had gotten too annoying in it’s most recent versions.

3) Spybot: Search & Destroy (Click Here)
Protects your PC from spyware & browser hijackers, etc + has other tools built into it too.

4) Ashampoo WinOptimizer (Click Here)
Has a number of tools for maintaining your PC, and keeping it running quick.

5) DeFraggler (Click Here)
Defragmenting tool from the creators of CCLEANER

6) Recuva (Click Here)
Tool for recovering accidently deleted files, from the creators of CCLEANER + DeFraggler.

7) Malwarebytes (Click Here)
Another free software to remove nasties from your PC

8) HitMan Pro (Click Here)
Another brilliant piece of software to scan your PC for crap that shouldn’t be on it.