Want to Learn that How to Make Money By Blogging !!!!!

There are two major types of business models that entrepreneurs use to make money blogging. The first and most common way to turn a blog into a profit making machine is to sell advertising to different companies and brands who want to reach that blog’s readers. The second kind of money making blog is one that helps a single brand improve its image by creating positive associations between the blog and the product in the mind of consumers. Both kinds of blogs can make a lot of money, especially if the creator has a keen mind for marketing.

If you are blogging with the goal of selling advertising, there are two basic ways that you can go about recruiting sponsors who want to put ads on your site; you can let someone else do all of the legwork, or you can do the work yourself and keep all of the revenue.
Within the first group, many people make money blogging by selling space through Google’s AdSense program. The advantages of this program are numerous, as it requires very little effort on the part of the blogger or webmaster to begin raking in profits. However, most people discover that they make less money through this method than they had hoped that their blog would earn.

Selling advertising directly to companies who want to put banner ads or sponsored links on your blog can take quite a bit of time, but it is often fairly lucrative. If you have a lot of contacts in industries that are related to the topic of your blog, you may want to try to go this route. People who have a strong background in sales and are experienced at pitching proposals can make quite a bit of money by renting blog space to interested companies.
The most serious problem with this model is that you often have to build quite a sizable readership before you can attract advertisers, which can mean that you have to do several months of work before you start to make money blogging.

As blogging becomes a more and more lucrative business, a lot of established companies are considering how they can get into the action. One way that companies are capitalizing on the blog movement is by having blogs that provide a kind of friendly face for their corporation. Often, a company will employ an established blogger to create a weblog designed specifically to appeal to that company’s customers and to create positive associations with the brand in consumers’ minds. More than one writer who never
even dreamed that he or she could make money blogging has been approached by a company and offered quite a pretty penny for this kind of gig.

Income Streams for Bloggers

Advertising Programs - Perhaps the most obvious changes in the past few months have been with the addition of a variety of viable advertising options for bloggers. No longer are bloggers only presented with the Adsense and/or BlogAds choice - instead they now have a massive array to choose from. Getting the most publicity recently have been Chitika’s eMiniMalls of course but there are just so many other options now that also include:

Adgenta, CrispAds, Text Link Ads, Intelli Txt, Peak Click, DoubleClickTribal Fusion, Adbrite, Clicksor, Industry Brains, AdHearUs, Kanoodle, AVN, Pheedo, Adknowledge, YesAdvertising, RevenuePilotTextAds, SearchFeed, Target Point, Bidvertiser, Fastclick Value Click and OneMonkey (to name just some of the options - I’m sure I’ve forgotten some) and there is a smorgasbord of options. Of course there is more to come with MSN Adcenter and YPN both in beta testing and with a variety of other advertising system currently in development (so I hear).

RSS Advertising - The past 12 months have seen some advances in RSS Advertising also. I’m yet to hear of any bloggers making big dollars through it to this point - but as improvements are made to the ad programs exploring this I’m sure we’ll start to see examples of it being profitable.

Sponsorship - In addition to the array of advertising programs that are available to join there is a growing awareness in the business of the value and opportunity that exists for them to advertise directly on blogs. I’m hearing more and more examples of this and have been fortunately to have a couple of ad campaigns of my own in the past month - one with Adobe a couple of weeks ago and another just completed with Ricoh for a new digicam over at my Digital Camera Blog. These are not isolated cases - as I say I know of many blogs exploring sponsorship with advertisers at present and suspect we’ll see more of it in the year ahead. Sponsorship is also happening on a post by post basis with some bloggers being paid to write on certain topics by companies - either in one off or a regular fashion.

Affiliate Programs - There are larger affiliate programs like Amazon, Linkshare, Clickbank and Commission Junction but also literally thousands of others from the large to the very small.

Blog Network Opportunities - with the rise in popularity of Blog Networks - bloggers are also being presented with more places to earn an income from their blogging - by writing for and with others. While it might be difficult to get a writing gig with one of the bigger networks - there are plenty who are always asking for new bloggers to join and who are willing to pay bloggers using a variety of payment models. While there are distinct advantages of blogging for yourself - blogging for an established network who will handle a lot of the set up/promotion/admin/SEO etc has it’s advantages also. More and more bloggers are combining writing for themselves on their own blogs with taking on blog network blogs as additional income streams.

Business Blog Writing Opportunities - as blogging has risen in it’s profile as a medium more and more businesses are starting blogs. Many of these companies have internal staff take on blogging duties - but an increasing number of them are hiring specialist bloggers to come on and run their blogs. I know of a number of bloggers who in the past month or two have been approached for such paid work. Check out Bloggers for Hire if you’re looking for this type of work.

Non Blogging Writing Opportunities - Also becoming more common are bloggers being hired to write in non blogging mediums. Manolo’s recent coup of a column in the Washington Post is just one example of this as bloggers are increasingly being approached to write for newspapers, magazines and other non blog websites. Along side this is the rise of bloggers as published book authors - this is to the extent that one blogger I spoke with this week complained to me that they were one of the few bloggers than they knew who didn’t have a book deal!

Donations - Tip Jars and donation buttons have been a part of blogging for years now but this last year saw a number of bloggers go full time after fundraising drives. Perhaps the most high profile of these was Jason Kottke of kottke.org who through the generosity of his readership was able to quit his job and become a full time blogger.

Flipping Blogs - Also more common in 2005 was the practice of ‘Blog Flipping’ - or selling of blogs. This has happened both on an individual blog level (I can think of about 20 blogs that sold this year) but also on a network level (the most obvious of these being the 8 figure sale of Weblogs Inc to AOL).

Merchandising - My recent attempt to sell ProBlogger.net T-shirts wasn’t a raging success, but it is an example of how an increasing number of bloggers are attempting to make a few extra dollars from their blogs by selling branded products through programs like Cafepress (although I have to say they’ve lost one of my own orders and are being quite unresponsive to my requests to follow it up at present). While I didn’t have a lot of success with merchandising - quite a few larger blogs are seeing significant sales - especially blogs with a cult following. I’m not at liberty to discuss details - but I know of one largish blog which will see sales over $20,000 in merchandise for the calendar year of 2005.

Consulting and Speaking - While it has been popular for established consultants to add blogs to their businesses we’re also starting to see bloggers with no consulting background earning money by charging readers for their time in consulting scenarios BECAUSE of the profile that their blogs have built them. Blogging has the ability to establish people as experts on niche topics and we all know the value of being perceived as an expert. I spoke to one blogger last month who charges himself out at over $200 an hour for speaking and consulting work - his area of expertise was something that he knew little about 18 months ago - but through his blog he’s become a leader in his field and a minor celebrity in his industry.

As time rolls on there are more and more blog earning opportunities opening up. Feel free to suggest your own ideas in comments below.

Open source databases is "SIXTY%" cheaper !!!!!

You know .....that Open source databases can save enterprises up to 60 per cent over proprietary products, according to data collected by
recent searches.

A senior analyst at famous database management systems, estimated that average savings on the total cost of ownership are about 50 per cent. The data is based on surveys and customer interviews.

Open source databases such as Enterprise DB, Ingres and MySQL do not carry licence fees, and management tools. Soit is less expensive than for proprietary databases from Oracle, Microsoft and IBM.

Open source offers especially their proprietary competitors in low-end applications with databases of less than 200GB in size outshininigly .

The one fact os this research is that "Eighty per cent of the applications typically use only 30 per cent of the features found in commercial databases," and "The open source databases deliver those features today."

But the hitch is that open source databases generally lack the features for mission critical applications, trailing behind their proprietary peers in security, uptime, performance and features such as XML support.

Enterprise applications from Oracle and SAP also do not support open source databases today, but right now condition expects that to change "within a couple of years".

Open source database vendors typically do not position their products as low-cost alternatives.

But customers still consider price as the primary benefit of open source, ya this is fact.

"The number one reason why any customer would choose an open source database is cost. That still holds true today" .

But the low price is also enabling companies to set up new projects that would previously have been too expensive, such as data mining of log files and setting up data repositories.

In an attempt to the competition from low-cost open source databases, Oracle launched a free database last year that is essentially a scaled down version of its enterprise grade Oracle Database 10g.

The application targets test deployments for developers and students rather than enterprises.

Web 2.0 and the AJAX

Web 2.0 is a strange thing in that it doesn't really exist. You can't buy Web 2.0; you can't buy a Web 2.0 programming language, and you can't buy Web 2.0 hardware. In many ways, the phrase "Web 2.0" is a marketing phrase like "paradigm shift" or "the big picture". The reason for this vagueness is that Web 2.0 doesn't have a tightly defined definition. What the phrase Web 2.0 tries to express is, that modern websites are so much better than early websites that they'd better be given a different name. So it is down to marketing.

Web developers need to demonstrate that they may use the same Internet, the same web browsers and the same web servers as their competitors, yet their websites are in fact an order of magnitude better. “Our competitors only do websites. We do Web 2.0 websites!"

The client is, of course, hugely impressed that his new website will be a Web 2.0 website. But what should he expect to see for his money? What is the client's view of what Web 2.0 should offer? Is it all smelling of roses or are there some thorny issues too?

I propose that there are in fact three facets to a Web 2.0 website:

1. AJAX

2. Social Networking (Building Communities)

3. Broadband

AJAX is technical and can only be performed by a technically skilled developer, social networking is vague, woolly and is based more on marketing models than web skills, and broadband has been popular for a long time. Even stranger is the fact that AJAX has been available to developers for at least 5 years, and social networking has been around even longer. It is simply the re-branding of these things that is causing the rise in the popularity of these old but current "buzzword" technologies.

AJAX is a mash up of technologies. We've had asynchronous JavaScript and XML for many years, but until somebody said "I name this mash up - AJAX" it remained out of the mainstream. The same goes with social networking. Forums, blogs, and community-based websites have been around for many years, but giving it a title like "social networking" combined with the success of websites such as www.Youtube.com and www.Linkedin.com makes it mainstream and popular. And to cap it all, the new names invented to re-brand existing technologies are combined into the all encompassing name of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is simply rebranding the rebranded.

In summary, we've had the ability to create Web 2.0 websites for years. It is not new technology; it is simply the renaming and repackaging of something we already have and enjoy. Marketing has made buzzwords of what we already knew and the public and developers are lapping it up.

The third facet of Web 2.0 was broadband, or as I prefer to call it, broadband abuse. Many developers believe that Web 2.0 is defined by how long it takes to download a website or the size of the broadband connection required to view the site comfortably. They believe that the bigger the connection required or the longer the website takes to download, the more Web 2.0ish the website must be. In my opinion, however, adding vast images, video footage, badly implemented rounded corners and streaming music does not make a Web 2.0 website. It simply makes a regular website that is bloated and annoying.

Presuming that you understand what makes a Web 2.0 website and you are keen to build one, there is an important area that you should consider before you start. And that is the area of Search Engine Optimisation.

So what about search engines? Do Web 2.0 websites perform well on search engines? Do search engines need to change to keep pace with development? If we ignore the broadband abusers and look at the two key facets of Web 2.0, AJAX, and social networking we get two very different answers.

Working somewhat in reverse here, the conclusion is that AJAX is a search engine killer. Adding AJAX functionality to your website is like pulling the plug on your search engine strategy. Social networking sites on the other hand typically perform exceptionally well on search engines due to their vast amount of visitor provided content.

The reason AJAX is a search engine killer is pretty obvious once you know how the technology works, and at the risk of offending all the people who know this already, I'll recap in a brief paragraph.

Simply put, AJAX removes the need to refresh a page in a browser. Say for example, you are on the product-finding page of a website, you can type in a search phrase for the product you want to find and press the submit button. Without refreshing the page, the asynchronous JavaScript runs off, grabs the results of the search, and inserts the details of the found products into the very same page as you sit and look at it.

For the website user this addition of AJAX to the website feels fantastic. No page reloads, no browser flicker, no click noise, but sheer joy. And so the rush for AJAX websites begins, because the visitors will love it.

But what about the search engines, what will they make of web pages that use AJAX to find content? Importantly, search engines don't run JavaScript. Oh no, not ever, no way José. So the search engine will never run your AJAX. To the search engine, huge areas of your website content are now hidden, never to be spidered, indexed, or found. This really limits the usefulness of AJAX in many applications.

An ideal application of AJAX is Google Maps, where as you drag the map around the browser window, the newly exposed areas of the map are retrieved and shown on the page without a page refresh—smooth, seamless, and very impressive. Does Google care if the single map page gets found by searching? Certainly not!

A very poor application of AJAX is the product portfolio where you can find and view product details for hundreds of products without ever refreshing the page. Nice to use? Yes. Navigation friendly? No—try hitting the back button when the browser ignores your last 20 clicks because you have remained on the same page! Search engine friendly? Forget it. You are invisible.

So what is the solution to the AJAX invisibility cloak that Master Harry Potter himself would be proud of? There are 5 options:

1. Build two websites, one using AJAX that is lovely for visitors and another using more traditional techniques for search engine spiders to find. If you can find a client to finance both, you have found a client with too much money!
2. Drop AJAX. Let the visitors suffer the page refresh.
3. Run with AJAX anyway and just put up with the fact that your perfectly formed website will receive no search engine visitors.
4. Lobby the major search engines to rebuild their spidering algorithms to take into account AJAX pages and to run JavaScript on the pages they index. This option might take some time :-)
5. Increase your Google Ad words payments and ramp up traditional advertising to counteract the missing website traffic from the search engines.

And so, a bleak picture of AJAX is painted and by implication of Web 2.0 as well. The good applications of AJAX and Web 2.0 are few and far between, but when you do find them they are fantastic. Do you remember that feeling when you fist used Google Maps? Do you find that all other mapping websites now feel old fashioned? I would go as far as to say that it was Google Maps that single-handedly bought the technology of AJAX to the masses.

The second most impressive application of AJAX is another Google idea, where when typing in the search field on the Google website, AJAX is used to find results even as you type the words—incredibly quick to use, fantastic for the website visitor, and really demonstrating the technology in a great light.

Isn't it hugely ironic then that the one website that demonstrates so well the very technology that, if used on our own websites, will force us to spend more on Google Ad words, is in fact Google.