Put up a blog, write 5-10 posts about anything a day, make money.

Here’s the reality. You could put up 1,000 posts a day and still not make any money. The reason is because you need to be writing about things that matter to people or things that people actually search for. Writing tons of posts about your cat just isn’t going to produce enough interest to drive visitors to your site.

When it comes to making money with a blog, it’s all about getting the right traffic. This brings me to the next mistake that many bloggers do which is relying too much on social traffic like Stumble Upon, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. Although you can get tons of traffic from these sites, most of the traffic you’ll be getting won’t be targeted.

If you want to make money, you first need to choose a niche in order to write about something specific that already has a lot of people searching for the topic. Next, you need to focus on getting targeted traffic. This can be done in various ways.

Search Engines

This is currently one of the best ways to get free, targeted traffic. The higher you rank up in the search engines for your keywords, the more traffic you’ll get and the more money you’ll make. In order to do this, it will require some SEO knowledge. There is enough information on this subject to drive you mad. The bottom line of SEO is this: get links. The more correctly anchored links you get to your site, the better you’ll do in the search engines.

Guest Posting

This involves writing a post for another blogger to post on their site. The benefit of doing this is that you will get a link pointing back to your site as well as traffic from interested readers of the other person’s blog. The way you do this is to basically find blogs that are related to your niche and simply email and ask them if you can do a guest post for them. Not everyone will accept your posts so you’ll want to contact many bloggers. It’s a numbers game. Some are bound to say yes.

Monetizing

Now once you get the traffic, you’ll need to make money from the traffic somehow. There are a few things you can do. The first is to use Adsense. These are ads that are placed on your blog that make you money when genuine visitors come to your site and click on the ads.

The next is to use affiliate programs. If you have a blog about photography for example, you could recommend various cameras and get a commission when people make a purchase due to your recommendation. By far, the most popular affiliate program is Amazon.

Another option is to get people to pay you to put ads and banners on your site. You will typically either get paid on a monthly basis or for a set period of time. The income can be anywhere from $5 a month to a couple of hundred a month depending on how much traffic you get to your blog.

Recap

The most important thing when it comes to making money blogging is to create good content and drive targeted traffic to that content. Although it may sound like the easiest gig in the world, blogging isn’t all that glamorous. It requires a lot of work and discipline to hit a decent income level and even then, it may take you a couple of years to get to that point.

What to do now?

Before JS-Kit supplied a clear upgrade path from SezWho, I’ve experimented with Disqus and Intense Debate.  They both have comparable features, but here are a few different things that make me prefer each service over the other:

Disqus

Disqus comment system is definitely the faster of the two systems.  I’m not sure if the reason is code optimization or just pure bandwidth, but it definitely felt faster than Intense Debate.  Another thing I like about Disqus is that I never saw any orphaned  comments (i.e. a comment that shows up in my WordPress admin, but doesn’t show up in the Disqus framework).

Intense Debate

Though performance is not as good as Disqus and I occasionally find orphaned comments, I still like Intense Debate for the extra bells and whistles it has.

• Community friendly profile pages
• Many comment thread display options
• Server side Akismet and proprietary Intense Debate spam filter
• Profanity filter
• More widgets
• Support for Intense Debate plugins

What did I choose?

As you can tell, I have chosen Intense Debate as my choice, but I am not completely happy with it yet.  I feel that Intense Debate has more potential to grow especially since they are now part of  Automattic.  I will be satisfied as soon as they work out the performance and synchronization kinks and ship it with the standard WordPress installation.

What should you choose?

That really depends on what you need.  If you don’t mind dealing with the occasional orphaned comment and decent performance then go with Intense Debate.  If you absolutely have to have those things then go for Disqus.

First Place Winner

• Frederick Ding wins a custom banner design from buytemplates.net.

Second Place Winners

• BFG 9000 wins a 125×125 do-follow ad spot on OMNINOGGIN for 30 days.
• Ajay wins a 125×125 do-follow ad spot on OMNINOGGIN for 30 days.

Third Place Winners

• Kathy wins a do-follow blogroll link on OMNINOGGIN for 30 days.
• Mek wins a do-follow blogroll link on OMNINOGGIN for 30 days.

How do I claim my prize?

The I will be contacting everybody via email about the 185 icons pack download link along with their prizes.

Darn! I lost!

Don’t worry! I am working on another contest that is due to come out soon. The prizes in the upcoming contest will be fully sponsored by me so I will be automatically including people who did not win here into that contest! Please stay tuned!

Recently my good friend Artem Russakovskii wrote an awesomely massive post introducing me to some very slick Twitter hacks.

Here are some of my favorite hacks out of his extensive list:

• Friend autocomplete
• Search bar with favorite searches
• Auto expander of short URLs
• Auto pagination
• Auto media embed expander
• Retweet button
• Nested replies

I think just the only tool missing from this hacks-kit is the ability to auto-shorten your tweet if it exceeds 140 characters (something that works like 140it bookmarklet). Nevertheless, there is no harm in having both hacks installed.

Great post Artem! Keep up the good work!

Prizes

• One 1st place winner will get one custom banner design from buytemplates.net ($149 value)
• Two 2nd place winners will each get one 125×125 do-follow ad spot on OMNINOGGIN for 30 days ($30 total value)
• Two 3rd place winners will each get a do-follow blogroll link on OMNINOGGIN for 30 days ($20 total value)
• Every contestant will get a 185 icons pack at the end of the contest from icongalore.com ($134 value)
  
• Every contestant will get 10 premium exclusive templates immediate after subscribing to the buytemplates.net newsletter ($290 value)
  

How to enter

Here are the things you need to do to participate in this contest:

1. Subscribe to the buytemplates.net newsletter.
2. Subscribe to the OMNINOGGIN RSS feed.
3. Open the OMNINOGGIN RSS feed it in your feed reader, scroll down to the footer section of this post, and write down the special code for this contest (it should be highlighted in burgundy)
4. Comment on this post saying that you have subscribed to the buytemplates.net newsletter, subscribed to the OMNINOGGIN RSS feed, and make sure to include the special code for this contest.

This will earn you 1 entry into this contest!

Increase your chance of winning

After performing the above required steps to enter, you can increase your chance of winning by doing any of the following.

• Stumble this post (+1 entry): Make sure you include your StumbleUpon user name along with the entry comment above.
• Digg this post (+1 entry): Make sure you include your Digg user name along with the entry comment.
• Vote this post up on Reddit (+1 entry): Make sure you include your Reddit user name along with entry comment.
• Twitter about the contest (+2 entries): Make sure you include @madeinthayaland into your tweet and include your Twitter user name with the entry comment.
• Blog about the contest (+3 entries): Make sure include the URL of your blog post in the entry comment.

When does the contest end?

Sponsor

This contest is sponsored by Website Templates from buytemplates.net. Buytemplates.net is a one stop shop for all your website requirements. They offer the following products and services:

• Professional pre-designed website templates
• Template customization
• Custom template creation (custom web design)
• SEO/SEM services
• Website Maintenance Services

You can download hundreds of templates with a small membership fee. Their membership fee starts as low as $49 for budget, $69 for standard, and $99 for premium plans. You don’t have to hire a web designer or external web design studio and pay enormously to design a single web template.