How i got My first $100 by blogging

This week I just got my first $100 from Google and celebrated it with a Junior Whooper from Burger King. I've started blogging a few months ago but haven't been very consistent about it until very recently. I've learned how to monetize, get more traffic and post contents as often as I can. I've also taught all this to my brother Chev who's having a great time blogging. In a few more months I bet he'll start making more money online than I am since he spends more time online than I do. This is how I did it.

I did lots of research online and I've broke it to 3 simple steps:

Need Content
This is the first thing you need to have to make money through blogging. You'll need to have online content. A website, a blog, a picture gallery, anything that you can put online. A popular phrase among blogger is "content is king". This should be for most people in the Philippines who are active online and have their own Facebook or Friendster account. We spend a lot of time updating our pitures, our Walls and daily activities. If you start to build your own website or create an online blog. It'll be same as doing it with facebook. Plus you'll get a chance to make money from it someday. There are several ways you can setup a blog online. Some of them are even free like blogspot. So if you're active online, do it with a blog instead.

Get Traffic
So you have an online blog. What now? Well, like any publication you'll need readers. People won't start going to you blog just because you set it up. you'll need to advertise. make your self known. This is where your social network sites would come in handy. Get all your 500+ friends in friendster and facebook to go to your site and visit your blog. Get them to subscribe to your feedburner and they'll get regular email from you everytime you put up something new in your website. Personally I ask my customers at work to visit my site. It probably isn't the most popular way to promote a site but it works for me. For the mean time atleast. http://www.blogtrafficexchange.com/blog/ give you juicy tips how to increase your readership and keep them. What's a blog for if nobody visits them right?

Monetize
Doing my reasearch in blogging made me aware of a lot of blog jargon like Monetize. This means making money from your blog. There are tons of ways to earn from your blog but the most popular one is Ad Publishing. Like your daily newspaper that has ads on every page, a blog can also earn money by putting up ads on them. I do it through my Google Adsense. Don't be fooled if you think it'll be a piece of cake. You'll actually need a lot of hard work and tough research. I still have a long way to go myself. Getting my first pay is just the beginning. Some people actually earn $1500, $4000, and the maximum payout that adsense can actually give out per month is $10,000!

Now these are just the basics. There's a lot more into blogging than what I've written here. I'm actually still learning stuff myself. Between my 8 hour job and raising my kids and being a good husband, blogging is just one of the many things I have to juggle in between. I plan to be a blogger full-time and make my earnings enough to make a living. Believe me a lot of people are making lots of money online. I just proved that myself when I got my first $100! So if your thinking of getting a part-time job or changing careers, blogging might just be thing for you. You never know until you try.

A 500 Pesos Cofee Mug

On my latest adventure to the wonderful world of SM Department store, I found this unusual item. A 500 pesos Coffee mug. No, it's not worth 500 pesos. It's just the design. The actual price is only 49 Pesos. I gave it to my mother-in-law who lives with us. She's very fond of coffee in the morning and she's got very excited when we gave her this mug. Coffee also helps her calm down especially when taking care of our two kulit kids. Hehehe!

Facebook and twitter

   Everyone has a facebook account, and twitter is becoming an essential for serious bloggers. So I have no choice but to join the borg collective. I recently started out my facebook and twitter acount. I've been having doubts wether to get involved in facebook and twitter. I've never been the type to do things that are popular. So now I've finally got my Facebook account and Twitter. But on my first day I get this message.

So I'm off to a great start I suppose.

   My facebook is also attracting relatives and and old friends as well. I'm having a bit of a problem with   navigating through the site but I'm sure I'll get a hang on it sooner or later. So just feel free to invite me to facebook and  your twitter if you have one. Hehehe!

Duplicate yourself

I just read an email today from Mr. Bo Sanchez about Duplicating yourself to be more successful. I thought to myself, duplicating is easier said than done. I can't recall how many times I've tried. Maybe I was just doing it the wrong way.

Anyway I finally got my bro started on blogging. See he works in an Internet Shop owned by our parents so most of his time is spent on the internet. His work is perfect for blogging I thought. So I taught him the basics.. That was just last week. Now I think his blogs look better than mine and the content seems more interesting than mine!

Check out his blogs. He's already managing 3 in just 1 week!

http://laschev.blogspot.com/ = his novel blog
http://finchev.blogspot.com/ = his Otaku blog
http://weisschev.blogspot.com/ = his personal blog

I always thought of blogging as an RPG game. Writing content is like fighting monsters to level up, and all the other blogging tools are weapons you can use to level up faster. My bro is a genius when it comes to RPG video games. I should've expected him to get the hang of this faster than I did when I first started blogging. The way he's going, he'll have more content and a better looking blog than I do. Geez.. Talk about beating your own mentor. Lol!

My bro's secret identity... don't tell anyone okay?

I wish I could write like this

The following is an excerpt from a blog of a friend. Although she decided to take on a different career, I'm still big fan of her writing. I wish I could write like this..

FROM: http://thespacebetweentwoboxes.blogspot.com/

"At first I thought, okay this is really wrong. How can you categorize or schedule the elements of grief? How can you even name the elements of grief? It's different for everyone. But then the good Wikipedia article on Ross stated that these stages can actually happen in any order. It makes sense."

"Some of us are strong enough to accept reality as soon as loss looms its miserable head, but also fickle enough to wake up the next morning and wish that everything was just a nightmare. Some of us bargain first--would you stay if I changed? or just give me time and I'll figure things out."

"I'm tired of watching the movies of my age. I'm tired of the stereotypical storylines. These movies today, they bank on either special effects or on the hype, and I'm just thirsty for some really good and un-"Hollywoodized" movies.
So I figured I'd take a look back and check out the movie "greats"-- before we became a "look-at-me" society, before we got too hooked up on the leading lady's figure, before film makers cared too much about their target audiences."

Sigh... someday my blog posts will magically become that good! Hehehe!

Percy Jackson: Clash of the Teen Titans

We were supposed to watch Alice in Wonderland, but then my wife and I were debating wether to watch a cheezy John Lloyd movie, or a Disney's Alice in 3D land. I don't know where our argument lead to but we ended up watching Percy Jackson. I wasn't too excited about it at first. I thought it'll be another cheap movie. But whoa, was I so wrong.

The movie was an exciting adventure. And since I was a fan of greek and roman mythology myself the plot of the movie did not disappoint me at all. Aside from being a mythology fan I was also a James Bond fan, so having Pierce Brosnan in the movie (I had no idea he would be in it) was more than a plus!

Overall Percy Jackson is one of the best I've seen this year. The humor, the adventure, and the concept of teenage demigods in modern times is a great combination. People might hate me for saying this, but I thought that Percy Jackson is way, way better than any Potter movie I've seen.

Funny Dell Customer Service Call

This is a really funny customer service call I found in Youtube. I work in Teletech under a Dell account and I get this kind of customer all the time. LOL! I deal with these kind of calls differently though.

NOTE: This call was recorded and uploaded to Youtube April 2007 before I even started working for a DELL account and even before Teletech NOva had a DELL account.


LOL again!

Pinoy Hangaroo Re-post

I didn't expect people to actually like this game so much. I'm re-posting it again then.

TELETECH FIRE

The other day, my shift started 12 midnight. Not too many people were calling. It was 5 minutes into the shift when I started to smell a burning odor. It smelled like burnt electronics so the first place I looked was the back of my computer, there was nothing there. I looked under my desk, everything looked fine. But I couldn't just ignore a burning odor like that so I stood up from my seat and called out to my supervisor and told her I smelled something burning. In a few minutes it wasn't just me anymore. The entire floor began noticing it. Some were already taking calls. Then smoke began filling the building. There was no fire in sight though.
I was waiting for my boss to tell us what to do but when I looked she was on her way out the door. So much for leadership. I told the rest of my team to just logout and get out of the building. The other teams were still waiting for instructions from the manager, who by the way wouldn't be in until 3am. It seems Teletech doesn't have an SOP for fire emergencies. Anyway me and my team were on our way out the door when the rest of the floor finally decided they didn't want to die and started leaving as well. Most of us even brought out our headsets. We'd have to pay for it if got wet, geez. I also noticed there was no fire alarm or sprinklers that came on. Teletech was apparently more concerned about their computers getting wet than the safety of the building and its employees. Everyone was finally out. We work on the first floor but we noticed the people from the second floor were not going out. We stayed outside for about an hour when the guard finally came out and told us there was no fire, just some electronic equipment got burnt. We were told to go upstairs and stay at the training rooms and await further instructions.
The Team Leads were useless. The manager finally arrived around 2am and told us we could go back to work ow and that the building is safe. When we entered we could still smell the burnt odor coupled with a strong annoying scent of air freshner. I think I became unconcious (maybe I just fell asleep) after a few minutes of breathing the toxic air. After the shift I was too tired to try to look for the source of the fire. I wish my company had a better policy with emergency situations. I mean, what if there was a real fire, or what if an earthquake hits us? Tsk tsk...