During the early part of this year I was doing good business through Smorty being paid to post. It was a good service with prompt payment and lots of good opportunities but for the last two months not one offered opportunity at that site. What's up with Smorty?

Pais posts appear to have dried up generally in fact. I have made only 3 paid posts in the last two months from all sources. Perhaps paid posting is out of favor at the moment or maybe its the US economy? Who knows?

Social Spark is the latest offering from IZEA and I detest it. Here is why. First, the website has issues. You do a search for 'open' and 'qualified' opportunities, select one and then go back and guess what? Yep, it lost your criteria and you have to start again - and thats just one annoying issue with that site.

Next, you don't get paid until you have earned $20. So you make 4-5 posts waiting 30-days after each posting before you can get a nickel out of them. That's just not fair.

Third, often they want you to add a disclosure banner but for certain sites that disclosure banner doesn't work and as a result, their automated check rejects your post. They claim to be working on the problem but I have three posts stuck in that hell that have been up over a month and no sign of payment.

Even worse, you can't use any other advertising in those posts so if you have google ads auto inserted into posts - forget it.

Frankly, SocialSpark sucks and is a big disappointment.

One way to make money blogging is via paid post services like Smorty, Payperpost, Sponsoredreviews and SocialSpark and so I do. The problem with these services is that sometimes opportunities just seem to dry up and there are too many bloggers chasing too few posting opportunities. There are several other services available in this category too outside of the four mentioned which are the ones I use (see reviews of each service posted on this site).

Partly the issue is that to qualify for a good stream of opportunities you need highly ranked blogs and that comes back to traffic - the more traffic you have, the more highly ranked your blog becomes.

But when the opportunities dry up what can a blogger do to make some money? Well, there are several ideas posted on this blog including selling matched advertising via Matched or using click through advertising services like Google. Again, with the latter, it's all about traffic too. The more traffic, the more click throughs and the more money you will make.

I'm beginning to think that looking for assignments on Payperpost is a bit like fishing. You keep setting your bait and every now and then you get a bite. However, I have managed to get on opportunity per day for the last week and a half so its going to be a good month.

It is frustrating though having to constantly go to the site to see if there are opportunities available. And when there are, you had better answer the test question really fast because one time in two by the time I have the opportunity is fully subscribed!

After days and days of logging on and trying many different strategies to obtain a Payperpost assignment I suddenly have had a good deal of luck and landed several assignments one after the other the best paying $25. I can only surmise that Payperpost has got more assignments recently or I simply have discovered the best times to login. I am not sure.

Anyway, this is great news because it means April will almost certainly be a record revenue month for this enterprise...

Much of the money I make across my sites is from paid to post articles. In the past I have reviewed three of the four sites/services that I use. (See Payperpost review, Sponsored Reviews and Smorty reviews.)

After another month or so of using these services, let's re-review the pros and cons of each.

Payperpost

I just signed up as an affiliate for Storze. They'll pay you $20 just for signing up as an affiliate and then 80 cents per click through which if they actually deliver is pretty good money for any program.

To be honest, I'm a bit puzzled as to who they are and what they actually do but all you have to do is put a banner on your site and off you go. So I'll keep you posted if I actually get paid or not...

Meanwhile, if you are a merchant and would like to sell through the program, then click on this banner....

If you just want your $20 and to be an affiliate, then click through this banner....

After several tries I finally got one of my blogs accepted by PayPerPost. It took several attempts and involved correspondence with their support staff to try to figure out why I kept being rejected. I must say though that their support staff were really good - prompt, honest and effective. A positive right there.

After my blog was actually approved, there was a job waiting for me - to write about PayPerPost. I took the assignment and in 24 hours the post was approved. Great stuff.

The PayPerPost website is clean, intuitive and very easy to use. Their referral program well designed and easy to use... overall, very professional. I am impressed.

The only downside I have so far seen is that there don't appear to be many opportunities for a newbie like me and those that are there are over subscribed before I ever get to them. Hopefully, over time, this will change as my blog rank improves and get some points for doing a good job posting articles. We will see.

Before starting this, I'm not going to lie to you and tell you that I make a fortune blogging. I don't.

Several years ago I started a website that eventually turned in to a blog. after a while, I got hooked and started another blog and then another etc. until today I have five in total - and that is enough...

I didn't even start out trying to make any money. Yes - I did use some Google ads on the original site but that was it. I didn't promote the site either. For the last three months, I have been promoting my blogs in my spare time and investigating money making schemes on the Internet. This blog is my latest and it was created to discuss what I learned. I will tell you the truth about making money on the web....

The way I make money is mainly via paid posts. I use the following schemes;

Smorty - see my review here

PayPerPost is running a campaign to sign up new bloggers. Essentially, you click on the small banner below that states "Review my post" and that takes you to their website. You sign up your blog there and if it is approved there will be an offer waiting for you that pays $7.50.

I have to say that I think thats a really well thought out campaign on their part. It rewards everyone involved and ought to have high take up.

On the other side of the coin, I have yet to have any of my blogs approved by PaPerPost largely down to the fact that so many of them are not yet 3-months old.

Nonetheless, I keep trying.

Google Adsense is perhaps the mainstay of advertising on the Internet but frankly, I don't really know why. Yes - its convenient and its easy to use but it barely makes me any money at all.

Ah - I hear you say - that's because I am doing something wrong. Well, I have been using it for 6-years across all of my sites and I have tried everything. Different ad colors, sizes, locations, ad types... you name it, I have done it.

This site hasn't been around for a long time and gets some traffic - nothing to get excited about - but it does get some. Google Adsense revenues - $0.00 to date! Not a single click.

Another site I own that gets a lot of traffic is is a sort of humor and rant blog and has made maybe $10 this last two months on Google Adsense - again, very few clicks at all.

So, I wonder if Google Adsense isn't just all too pervasive these days and everyone has become very used to it to the point it's largely ignored?

If you have a blog and want to earn money with it or even simply want to explore the possibilities of making money on the Internet then my guess is you have heard of John Chow? Simply do a search on terms like 'blogging for money' and you will see his Google ads or pull up links to his site. He seems to be a demiGod on the Internet almost worshiped by his admirers. He likes to call himself a dotcom mogul and 'all around nice guy' and his website shows pictures of a very expensive car - I guess his. Well, let's explode a few myths about this guy shall we?

Chow loves to tell you how much money he makes from his website. The implication is that you too can make that kind of cash. By telling you how much money he makes ($28k a month by the way), he can then disclose the secrets of his success to you - his devoted audience.

Search the web for terms like blogging for money and you will find hundreds of websites, blogs and money making schemes to chose advice from. But the reality is that it is hard to make money from a blog. If you are just now considering it then you arrived several years too late!

I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm just saying that it is a crowded an competitive place to be and you had better have a great plan to build traffic, a good strategy around developing unique quality content and a really good idea of who your target audience is. If you don't then please read this first.

OK. You cannot be convinced otherwise and you still want to give it a try?

Google Adsense

The two paid to blog services I use are Sponsored Reviews and Smorty.

Smorty is radically different to Sponsored Reviews. First, you don't see what advertisers are out there and bid on them. Smorty does that for you and simply places advertisers it has selected for you in your work area. That means you have to go and look there quite frequently to see what opportunities they have allocated to you and your blogs. Having said that, they will email you if a new opportunity arises. Additionally, at Smorty, as soon as you accept an assignment you have to complete it in 3-days before you can accept another.

A further difference is that Smorty seems to pay a little more than Sponsored Reviews. As I stated above, you don't bid and Smorty tells you how much they will pay you for an assignment. Smorty pays weekly by paypal too which is quite nice.

You have already probably seen the furor created over a new opportunity to make money from your website or blog via audio advertising? Well, if you havn't, the program has now gone semi-live after February 1st and currently, the program is stating that they are "running about 100,000 ads a day, spread randomly across member sites as they check out all of our reporting and financial processes. They expect to be testing ad placements throughout the next two to three weeks."

The general idea is that you sign up for the program here, place a code snippet on your website and they start delivering audio ads to your visitors. You get paid of course for the audio ads that run on your site. Recently, they modified the code snippet to allow you to actually target ads to your site by category. It's plainly still in test mode but I think it does offer a new potential revenue source for bloggers and webmasters - we will see.

There are a number of services available these days to bloggers who want to make a little pocket money doing what they do - blog! One such service is Sponsored Reviews.

After several years of blogging and running several blogs, I have come to a conclusion and that is that the way to make money blogging is to join money making schemes that have affiliate programs and then push those affiliate programs hard. That's for sure how many of the big name bloggers make their money and it is the subject of several of my articles on this website.

The problem is that to make money via google adsense, bidvertiser or other PPC programs or through writing programs like Smorty and Sponsored Reviews, you simply have to have a great deal of traffic. And building traffic is simply hard work. There are no magic tricks and, barring some amazing luck, it truly takes time - lots of time - to build a website or blog with lots of traffic.

One way that the John Chow's of this world make money is through schemes like Dealdotcom. I will say that Dealdotcom isn't a scam but its selling methods are very much pyramidal.

Here is the idea behind Dealdotcom
Every day, dealdotcom has a sale of some item - it could be software, a book, a gadget - whatever but everyday they have a deal for you and when all items are sold, it's over for that day. In itself, this is a good idea and nothing much wrong with it.

But how do they drive you to their website for their deal of the day? By an affiliate program. It's a two-tiered affiliate program too. Here is what they say about it...(my bold);