Tag: Blogging
Sep
04
Homeschooling Entrepreneur Idea of the Week!
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.
Aug
15
Blogging Help From a Mom That’s Done It!
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.
Jul
13
All WordPress Apps Are NOT Created Equal!
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!
Jun
07
Great Blogging Tutorials
Today I watched over half of the blogging tutorials that Yaro Starak has posted online to see if they were worthwhile, and was really impressed! I’ve gotten Yaro’s blog Entrepreneur’s Journey via RSS for awhile now, and it’s not the best of the entrepreneur blogs, but he does have alot of good information. The biggest downfall of his blog, IMHO, is he is too wordy. They say you are bothered the most by faults in other people that you struggle with personally….so be it.
These tutorials at Become a Blogger.com are a little annoying because they cover every little detail, right down to how to type in an url and fill out a form. I can deal with it though, because I know there are people that are very new to everything online, and, well, been there, done that! Ideal for the ground zero newbie, there was also good material on how to put an RSS feed on your blog, which I had been anquishing over the last 3 days. Every place I went to assumed I knew MUCH more than I did, or was teaching you how to place someone else’s feed on your site. This alone has endeared these tutorials to my heart. Thank you, Yaro!
Starting with reasons to use WordPress hosted on your own domain, moving on to getting your own domain name to signing up with a web host, I have a big money saver to add to his suggestions: use wordpress.com (it’s free) with your own domain name. You can get domains for $6.99 at One & One, and it’s very easy to navigate their site to make the changes, and if you can’t figure it out, they have fairly quick tech support.
If you do want to sign up for a web host because you are in this for the big bucks, then be sure to get the coupon codes on this site to save substantial moola. I try to keep them current, and if you can’t find them, just do a search in the search box (at top of page) for “Host Gator”. You can always email me, if you still can’t find it, it’ll be worth your time, I promise! Host Gator is being recommended more and more by the online ‘gurus’, and for good reason. They are feature-rich, reliable and no gimmicks! And their support is in-house! Anyway, this post isn’t about Host Gator…sorry.
So, other than disagreeing with Yaro’s domain and hosting recommendations, these videos are perfect for anyone just getting started. I think I’m going to do a separate post on how to figure out the RSS post via these videos, just so others don’t have to go through what I did trying to find info on it.
Find the videos at: Become a Blogger
or on Yaro’s blog: Entrepreneurs-Journey
Have a great weekend!
More From HomeschoolEntrepreneur
Jun
06
How To Make Money Blogging-Part 4
Ok, now the last 3 blogging “lessons” have been on getting your blog set up, and hopefully you have found a comfortable home for your blog. I have hopped around looking at and trying different platforms and it’s such a pain to move your blog once you’ve started, be ABSOLUTELY sure you are happy where you’re at before you get started and you will save yourself alot of time and frustration.
There are two books that I have bought and will try to pass along the essentials to you. One of the books is a Startup Guide by Entrepreneur Press called Start Your Own Blogging Business (Startup)
My favorite part of the entire book is a little story they tell at the very beginning that I think you find encouragement in also. It’s a story about Caroline, who publishes a blog on everything about iPods, her favorite thing in the world. Currently, her blog receives an average of 15,000 visitors per day-reportedly a modest amount of traffic for her chosen topic, receiving the “typical” amount of ad revenue of $.80-$1 per click from her readers. If only 1% of her daily traffic of 15,000 (150) click on her ads, she will earn between $120-$150/day in ad revenue. That’s $4500/month, or $54,000/year with very little business expense, which isn’t bad at all considering she is doing something she loves!
This gets better… NOW…if Caroline increases her traffic, let’s say to 150,000/per day with the same daily percentage of 1% clicking the same ads at $1/click …that’s $1500/day or just over a half million dollars per year.
Seem a little outrageous? Not really. 1% is a low percentage as well as $1/click is a low estimate, too. As your traffic increases, your advertisers pay you more to advertise for them. Granted, 150,000/day visitor traffic will take a bit of work (duh), but it is not an unrealistic goal if your subject matter is a popular one.
If you’re thinking that you could never acheive 150,000/day traffic to your blog, there are a variety of opinions on this. In the reviews of ProBlogger’s new book, ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income
What is the final lesson here? It’s two-fold: choose your topic carefully, and really work at building your traffic. Go to the website Problogger.net for lots of tips and information on building traffic, or check out their new book, ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income
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