I’ve been a bad, bad blogger.  I swear I have been trying to keep everything updated here, but I have been super busy.  Now that I have a few minutes, I will be doing a ton of posting across all five of my blogs but I may end up with five or six posts for today on this one!

Why do I keep up with this?  I love blogging.  I love being able to connect with people across the world.  I love having friends that I have  never met in person, but I know will go to the ends of the world for me.  I love that if I have a problem or an issue, and that another blogger can help.  I love that some of the hardships that I have blogged about have helped others.

Now, I do suggest getting your own domain if you ever want to do blogging for pay.  Now, if that isn’t in the cards for you, I highly recommend looking at some of the Free Blog services out there like Thoughts.com. Some things that I like about this particular service is that they allow you to decide for each post if you want it to be public, private, or only viewable by certain people. You are able to upload pictures, podcast, and videos. They even have their own community forums! I also love that they have free unlimited bandwidth. This way, if you get a lot of traffic you don’t have to worry about your site going down or getting charged for it!

If you want to get involved in this wonderful community of online blogs, what are you waiting for? Go get yourself a blog!

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I have been wanting to post this since Monday.  No worries — I am not pregnant and nobody here needs a medical bracelet or anything like that.  Since my husband has had to work late the last two night, we haven’t had a chance to go do this yet.  Figured it out yet?  Well, I’ve blogged about it and asked everyone to tell my husband why we should get one of these.  No idea, yet?  Well, Bill decided (unless he changes his mind again which then I will have to kill him) that we are going to go put a deposit down on a Prius!  We test drove my sister’s car.  My only complaints have to do with things that I will just have to get use to.  As soon as we put our deposit down, then we go on a 4-6 month waiting list.  Unfortunately, we don’t get it right away, but it’ll allow us some time to save.  I really didn’t want two car payments at the same time, but what are you going to do?  The Jeep’s 20 miles per gallon is killing us when gas is so darn expensive.

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Want to get paid to talk about the things you love (and some that you don’t like quite as much)? Well, Izea (the company that brought you PayPerPost) will be shortly offering a new service called SocialSpark. This brings in a new era of blogging for advertisers and bloggers alike. SocialSpark is both a social networking site and a place to find things to write about. I had a sneak peak at it, and I am impressed by what I have seen so far. Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot I can tell you since it hasn’t been released yet!

My Story

I often have been asked why I do this. Now, if you are a regular reader of mine, you may want to skip this section since you know all about my family and I. I have two kids. When I started blogging, we only had Madison (who’s 4 now). I was using my blog to keep in touch with my friends and family in Green Bay, WI. While blogging I became pregnant with my son Will (who’s 9 months now!). I am stay at home mom and am always looking at how to make extra money from home. We live in the Chicagoland area which means my husband commutes to work long distances and daycare is outrageous! Trust me, I have tried almost everything out there to make some extra money so I didn’t have to go work fast food or retail (no offense to anybody working in those positions. I have done it in the past and it sucks!). My husband is never home at the same time every night which makes things even more difficult to get a regular job of any kind!

Show Me The Money!

Onto the part that you really want to know about! Is there money really to be made doing this? YES! I don’t tell people what I make blogging, since it really isn’t anybody’s business. However, since you want to know, I can honestly tell you a pulled in around $7,000 last year from blogging. Now, I was able to do this on my own time be it midnight or noon. If I don’t feel like writing about a topic, I don’t. As many of you know, I do freelance work also, and I can easily work this around my freelance work and my kids. I don’t have to wait for my husband to get home from work either! For my family, this has been heaven sent.

What have we spent my earnings on? This year I was able to take the money I earned and enroll Madison in preschool. We used the money towards the vacation Bill and I took to Arizona. It is helping to remodel our basement, and we used it a lot last summer on house repairs. What do you need extra money for?

This sounds good. How do I sign up?

Currently, SocialSpark is still in Alpha testing. However, if you click the link, it’ll take you to a site that you can sign up for an email when SocialSpark goes live. Then you can be one of the first to try out this new platform and make some extra cash doing so!

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I spent today trying to find a new oven online. My oven has decided to have a mind of its own. Sometimes it is twenty five degrees below what I set it; sometimes it is twenty five over. The thing can’t make up its mind, and it is getting increasingly more difficult to cook. What does this have to do with Izea?

The Rankspank

Well, several months ago, many bloggers who get paid to write posts were RankSpanked. What this means is that we once had PR, and we no longer do. PR is the holy grail to most bloggers who do any sort of paid work. The higher your PR, the more money you were able to charge. You’ll even see this badge on a lot of sites out there:

PR and other measures

Up until recently, there really wasn’t a good measure of a blogs worth. PR wasn’t even all that great. Yes, blogs with PR had backlinks, but you never really knew what kind of traffic they were getting. Alexa is another service out there. Your traffic with them only counted if you visitor had the Alexa toolbar, so that was not too good of a measure either.

At this point, Google seems to be changing the rules as they go. It is getting to the point you need a degree online to figure out how they are designing their algorithm.  You use to need lots of backlinks to get PR. Now, it is anyone’s guess. At this time, you can have all the backlinks in the world, and if Google thinks you are doing any sort of blogging for pay, they will knock you to zero. They have knocked down sites that don’t do it. I have seen a lot of guilty by acquaintance. You mention one of your other blogs on a rankspanked blog — that new blog won’t get PR either. I know that because I have two sites that should have gotten some PR and didn’t. I’ll be honest, I hadn’t planned on including my cooking blog at all in any sort of blogging for pay. However, since I am not going to get PR anyway, I figured why not! Every so often you hear that people got their PR back and did nothing different to get it back. I wish I was one of those people. However, I am not.

How can you know what to do with the rules constantly changing and you have no idea what the rules really are?

The Answer

The answer to my stove problem is the thermostat. We either need to replace that or buy a new stove. The answer to the PR problem is that we either need to replace part of it or come up with a whole new ranking system. Since we have no control over Google, the best bet out there is the new measure IzeaRanks. IzeaRanks allows you to measure your RealRank, your pageviews, and your uniques. Something I have learned about bloggers is the last couple of years or so is that we are all stat junkies. We love to have multiple places to see where we rank.

How do I get it?

Getting it is super simple. You just go to IzeaRanks and fill out some information about your blog. You then are given a code to put into your footer. Now, you don’t have to do any sort blogging for pay to be involved in this. I think the majority of the blogs listed aren’t part of any service. To get your real rank, the system weights blogs 70% on daily unique visitors, 20% by daily active inbound links and 10% by daily page views. Here’s sneak peak of what the graphs look like:

Now, you will see 4 different lines on there. I used my 4 blogs to make the graph. You can use your blogs or any blogs in the system to compare stats. You can also graph pageviews and uniques too. Finally, a true measure of where you are at.

This is free to use, so you have nothing to lose trying it. What are you waiting for?

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This Weeks Hero Was Suggested by Kathi

This post is part of the Wednesday Hero Blogroll. For more information about Wednesday Hero, or if you would like to post it on your site, you can go here.

Copyright © 2011 My Thoughts, Ideas, and Ramblings. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact mythoughtsideasandramblings.com @ gmail.com so we can take legal action immediately.