Just came across a site that matches moms that review products with companies that will pay you to review their products. You need to be somewhat established, they will ask for your page rank, and how many Twitter-followers you have. Naturally, the better your ranking, the better the pay . . . but if you are new, you could offer reviews for a dirt cheap price to get your foot in the door-everyone starts somewhere!

Check it out:

http://momtent.com/for-bloggers/

If you write a blog for a living, hopefully you are always watching for new buzz topics to write about. I’m sure you’ve noticed how some of your blog posts seem to spike your traffic while other barely create a blip in the radar. Blog Energizer is a blog written specifically for bloggers to do just what her name says: to energize your blog.

Lynette’s energetic style is truly a reflection of her name, and you will want to bookmark this one or sign up for the updates like I did to keep posted on all she has to offer. She offers a premium service, which I have not checked out yet so I can’t speak for it, but she offers enough for free I haven’t found the need for it. . .(sorry, Lynette).

Some of the free items you can pick up on Blog Energizer are:

-Downloads: The 12 Topics You Need To Blog About Now, A Blogging Planner, A Blog Calendar & Traffic Generating Ideas (All separate downloads, free-well, at least for the sacrifice of your email address!)

-A free recipe book you can offer your readers

-25 quick and easy crafts for the holidays

-Free Ebooks from Barnes & Noble

-2010 Cartoon Calendar to offer your readers

-Learning with Lego magazines to giveaway (or keep!)

You’ll also find occasional ads for guest blog posts. There’s much more, but I think that’s enough to motivate you check out Blog Energizer to get some ideas to spice up your blog.

Happy November!

photo credit: Ninjanna

Here’s a way to combine a great homeschool learning experience with volunteer service and make a business out of it! I got the idea when I stumbled on the site LibraVox, which is a non-profit site that is attempting to put all public domain books on audio for the public. They are looking for volunteers to read books aloud onto their provided software (free, of course!) and release it onto their public domain site for anyone to listen to.

What if…..you volunteered to read, chose books of a particular subject that enhance your current homeschool studies, and also posted them on your site? You don’t want to charge for these audio, because they were created on software you received free for the purpose of creating public domain material. However, a website that has free audio downloads of a focused subject, you could put adsense on that site, and put the books you are reading aloud for sale through an Amazon affiliate link. This site won’t make you rich, but as you read different subjects, you could start different subject sites. Keeping your sites focused on one subject will give you an edge in the search engines.

As you learn your subjects that you’re reading aloud for LibraVox, you could also start Squidoo lenses on the subjects and earn additional revenue from that….and increase your traffic to your new sites.

Steps to start your online audio download biz:

1. Apply for Adsense with Google. This can take a week or two to get approved.

2. Start your volunteer service with LibraVox and start reading!

3. Sign up as an associate with Amazon. Follow our link or find the link at the bottom of any Amazon page, it says “Join Associates”.

4. Decide how you want to start a web page. The easiest option, which is also free, would be to start a blog with Blogger. More and more beginning website builders are starting out with a free blog as their website. Since Blogger is owned by Google, it makes it that much easier to put adsense (also owned by Google..) on it. If you want to get started right from the beginning with your own webhost, etc, BlueHost is the most recommended host, and has great tech support and comes with a free domain. They also have a good set up if you want to start a blog on Wordpress, and they will (patiently) walk you through set up. The advantage to having your own site versus Blogger is the ever-present danger of shut down. If you are making a profit on your site, yet hosted on a free service of any kind, there is that fine line that only the free service knows between allowed advertising and too much. Wordpress.com will usually at least give you a warning and tell you to remove all the links, but Blogger has been known to just remove your site. That can be devastating if you have put months or years of work into something that is now making a nice income and one day you wake up and it’s completely GONE. Google works hard at protecting their good reputation and the people they represent, but are very powerful and have little tolerance or patience for any infractions. What some people will do is get started free while doing all the footwork towards their own site and switch it all later. You can learn more about this process at our main site, Homeschool-Entrepreneur.com

What will they learn from this …looks harder than it is…project? LOTS!

1. The books they are reading will take on new meaning!

2. The writing skills putting a website and maybe a Squidoo site together.

3. Business skills for their new business.

4. Accounting skills running their business finances

5. Website, SEO, and online marketing skills

6. The value of doing something good by contributing to public domain works.

Have fun! Be sure to email us and let us know how it worked for you.

Wendy Piersall is not a homeschool mom as far as I know, but she is a WAHM that has helped many moms (& dads!) start and develop a successful home business.

Only 2 years ago, Wendy was working on starting a different online business, and decided to blog about all the research she was doing to help others do the same. She discovered that her new blog was more profitable than her other business, so she quit that business and put all her efforts into her blog.  The rest is blogging history.

You can watch a video interview here…

And get her FREE “Better Blogging” Course here.

Here we go again, moving from one place to another….it would be really frustrating were it not for the hope of helping others learn from ALL my many mistakes. I may not know what to tell you what to do, but i sure have some things to tell you NOT to do!

For those of you that haven’t followed us from the beginning, we started this blog with Wordpress that was hosted on another webhost. That webhost had Wordpress available in their Fantastico, and being somewhat new with Wordpress, thought I had arrived!

What I didn’t realize, was that different webhosts put Wordpress on their server differently. I found I couldn’t add any plugins or html of any kind, which may seem outrageous, but that is what their tech support confirmed for me, so I wasn’t sure where to go from there. Having had more experience with Wordpress, I question that, but at the time, what tech support says is all I knew.

So I ventured over to Wordpress.com, and found it incredibly easy to set up. Once again, I thought I had arrived (whatever THAT means!) . That is, until I got a friendly email from the Wordpress staff that I had too many ads on my site. I emailed them back and asked them if they were sure (I really didn’t have that many, surely not as many as SOME WP blogs…) and asked them “isn’t making money the main reason most people blog??”

Their response was kindly, and told me, yes indeed, most people did want to make money blogging, which is why they offer their program free to anyone who wants to host their own site. I guess if they are paying for the blog, they don’t want to pay for it. Makes sense, I just wish I had figured this out to begin with! I had read enormous amounts on blogging for profit before I started, but didn’t really read much written on who, how or what to blog ON.

This is the purpose of this post …..to let you know that it DOES matter where you set up your blog. There are way too many choices, but that’s free enterprise for you. So people like me waste hours and hours of time to look at every option only to arrive at what over 75% of bloggers decide-self-hosted Wordpress!

I love ProBlogger…purely platonic, I promise….but he has a chart posted with all the options you can look at, and tons of other tips and helps. Yaro Starek in his Entrepreneur’s Journey also has videos that are lifesavers that I have mentioned before. But Wordpress gets the prize for selfless offerings in blogging software. It’s completely free, and there’s a directory of all the plugins you can add and a bottomless pit of online support. If you are somewhat new at all this like I was, plan on spending a little time learning it all, but it feels sooooo good when you finally get it right!

I definitely can’t say I have ‘arrived’ yet, but I can share what NOT to do if you are trying to make a living blogging. It’s definitely one of the best homeschool projects there is!