Blogs are rated based on Google PR, Technorati blog rank, Alexa traffic rating and some other benchmarks.

In the addition to the Top 100 Money Making blogs 45n5.com have a list of “Upcoming” resources where you can submit your own blog if it fits the online money making niche.

I have submitted Web Income Stream to be included in the database few weeks back and now proudly found it in the position #354 (4th from the bottom…) One thing that seem not to work properly is a page rank - pages with PR0 and without any PR will display PR: “N/A”. Also I know some sites have changed page ranks during last Google update but those changes were not reflected in 45n5 statistics…

I understand - there is nothing to brag about being on the bottom of the list but this is just an interesting challenge for myself climbing up that list and see where you are standing compared with well known internet marketers. Just recently I finally found time to get this blog of the ground and let’s see where it will take mew few month down the road…

Another positive thing I realized about 45n5 Top 100 Make Money Online Blogs - it DOES sent some traffic to my site even though my Web Income Stream is all the way near the bottom. According to the Live FeedJit Traffic Statistics I get at least one visitor a day from 45n5.com.

If your website or blog is discussing affiliate marketing or online money making opportunities you should definitely submit it to 45n5 list - inclusion is free and you may get some additional traffic from it. Also you can have fun watching your standings compared to industry leaders…

What is so different about this contest? As many probably know, John Chow is one of the top well know internet marketers and his money making blog gets thousands of visitors daily. According to his own words monthly revenues he generates from the blog are ranging from 25 to 40+ thousands dollars. And here is an example why…

Checking out his blog today I came across the announcement about John Chow Market Leverage Affiliate Challenge. The rules are simple - you have to sign up as a new affiliate with Market Leverage through the link provided and make as much money as you can from this program in the month of August. Top earner will get sparkling new iPod Touch and a $200 ML American Express Reward Card. In addition first 10 new affiliates who generates $10 in commissions will get a bonus - 2GB USB flash pen.

Lets analyze for a second what is so interesting about this contest and why John Chow is a very smart marketer and his blog is making so much money…

First of all to participate in the contest you have to be NEW affiliate of Market Leverage and sign up through provided link. John explains that as necessary step to track standings of contest participants… In reality - Market Leverage is a two-tier affiliate network and for every referral John will get paid life-time 5% commission of those new publishers earnings.

Now John is awarding his prise to the affiliate who actually makes most money for HIM. With his popularity I have no doubts there will be at least few hundreds new sign ups with Market Leverage network. Yes, he may have to spend little bit money on the prise (that I seriously doubt) but in the long run even if small part of those new affiliates will continue earn money - they will be earning for him…

John also didn’t forget to capitalize on the existing affiliates. This time is not for share of earnings but for advertising and traffic… Who is not qualified to participate in the main challenge have a chance to win Flip camera ruffle. For single entry - just comment on the affiliate challenge post and get 5 bonus entries if write an article about his contest (of course with a back link to JohnChow.com and Market Leverage). Do you think few hundreds (if not thousands) related content links and returning visitors commenting on the blog worth the price of Flip Mino? And I am not even talking about all those new RSS subscribers who will want to follow the progress of both challenges just in case they win…

I am 99% sure for running this huge promotional campaign which for sure will bring huge amount of new affiliates, Market Leverage will reward John in some way in addition to the potential life-time share of earnings from subaffiliates.

What conclusion can we make from the John Chow Market Leverage Affiliate Challenge?

The biggest money are made NOT by promoting individual products, but by recruiting an army of other affiliate marketers to do promotion and than share theirs profits with you. The hardest part is motivating people to earn more money (for you)…

If you Google for Online Surveys - you’ll get over ten million results and most of them will promise great payments ($25 to $150 per hour), free product to try and a lot of other interesting things. In reality most of those sites will just provide a referral links to other referral sites etc…

There are actual legitimate research sites that will pay for taking online surveys, but most of them pay from $1 to $20 (nowhere close to $150…) in cash per completed survey and other part will offer cash equivalent you can redeem in selected products or keep trial samples.

From my own experience with survey panels most of surveys pay $3 to $10 and take about 15 minutes to complete. Much more opportunities are available to US residents than rest of the world and also may defer from state to state, age, marriage status, kids, ethnic group…

One of the best places to start when looking for online survey companies is Survey Police.

They provide large list of legitimate research companies with numerous feedbacks from actual panel members. In some instances Survey Police even help panelists to resolve problems with survey companies.

After you have chosen and joined some survey panels here are a few tips to keep in mind:

1. Use contact email that you check most often and try to complete surveys as soon as you receive invitations. Many surveys are limited to certain number of users and as soon as this amount responses is received - opportunity is closed.
2. Fill out all profile fields - this may help you to qualify for more opportunities.
3. Be very careful when you are answering pre-screening questions. For example if survey is about movies - don’t say you haven’t been in the theater for over a year…
4. Don’t rush, read every question in full or you may get disqualified half a way into completing survey.
5. Many survey panels may NOT work in browsers other than Internet Explorer so to avoid loosing opportunities always open surveys in IE.

I’ve heard from many webmasters participating in online surveys that average earnings per month could be around $150 -$200 if you are lucky. Some month you get more offers, some - nothing at all. So… The conclusion is - you can make some extra pocket money from online surveys but I would not count on it as a steady full time income.

If you are good on what you doing, your website has quality unique content and you are generating good amount of traffic - most likely you will not have problems finding advertiser to pay you directly for ad space.
For majority of new websites it’s not the case and the most common website monetization tactic is inserting Pay-Per-Click advertisement feeds (like Adsense, YPN, Kontera) or banners from affiliate networks. Now your earnings will be determined by how many people click on your ads.

Can you make money with PayPerClick ads? Lets take a deeper look…

It will depend a lot on the theme (or niche) of your website. For popular competitive niche there will be a lot of advertisers bidding for the keywords and paying higher price per click to be in the top spot. In this case every click may earn you few dollars. For less popular subjects competition will be much lower and earnings per click could be just a few cents.

Second determining factor for making money from PayPerClick ads would be placement those ads in high visible spots but in the same time not affecting visitors browsing experience. If it’s a text links - ALWAYS adjust colors to match main theme of the website.
I am not going to go into details about proper ad placements - there are tons of tips and recommendations on each and every ad network.

Let’s get back to the main subject - how theme of the website affects amount of money you may potentially earn… For you to get paid people have to click on your ads. Who is most likely to click on those ads or content links? People who doesn’t know that it is an ad or not aware (or don’t care) that you are getting paid for those clicks. The worst possible category of visitors in the view of bringing you any kind of commissions are WEBMASTERS! No matter how perfect you place ads on the website and blend it in with the rest of the content - they will see them and will go extra mile not to click on it (even if they are very interested in this advertisement).
In other words less tech savvy is the visitor - more likely he will click on the banner or text link.

Next time you get an idea for a new website keep in mind these little tips:

- make sure there is a large potential market in this niche. Do some Google search for related keywords and see how many results there are.

- check few search results pages deep and pay attention how many different advertisers you see in the sponsored boxes: more often you see the same ads - less advertisers are bidding for these search terms and less money you will get paid per click…

- try to target less tech savvy people (kids, women…) and STAY AWAY from anything webmaster related!

The main advantage of having directory within your blog or site - it provides additional relevant content and gives your visitors more reasons to stay on the website longer. Properly structured and well maintained directory may also bring extra traffic that otherwise you probably would not get… Another plus of having directory - it can generate additional and very significant revenues.

About a year ago whole business with directories was taken to the extreme when people were starting low quality obvious link farms by thousands. To prevent manipulation of search results Google has changed theirs approach to indexing and evaluating pages. Large part of those made-on-the-fly directories was removed from Google index and left to die…

For directory to succeed - it has to provide QUALITY content to it’s visitors. And by “visitors” I mean people who came to your site looking for resources, not webmasters who want to submit websites to your directory. For example I was checking traffic sources for my World Web Directory and saw that many search terms which brought visitors were related to individual pages that I have optimized for every listing. I described in more details how to improve quality of directory on my Directory Resources blog.

How do you make money with directory? If you can maintain high quality, free of junk directory, especially if it’s highly targeted narrow niche - people will gladly to pay for inclusion. Higher the traffic and more competitive niche - higher the price you may charge for submissions.

The biggest mistake many directory owners make - they concentrate on the webmasters who submit their sites and accept many low quality resources as long as people are ready to pay. I repeat one more time - your goal is to provide high quality content to your visitors, even if you have to refuse some money. In the long run it will pay of handsomely…

As I mentioned before, there are many pre-made scripts available to power up directory but from my own experiense I would highly recommend eSyndicat Directory Software. It’s a powerful, highly customizable script which can be used as a stand-alone directory or you can build whole portal with it. There is a free version with less features available to try it out but you should definitely go for the Pro version (only $75 with unlimited life time upgrades).

So… here it is - another potential revenue stream for you - Web Directory.

Let’s say you are an expert or at least very competent in some kind of field like writing, programming, design or something else web related. You should be able to find a client for your skill very easy on one of the active webmasters forums like Digital Point or UK Webmasters World.

There are thousands of people constantly visiting those forums to find some answers or outsource some work that they are don’t have time or knowledge to do themselves.

It is essential to be a member of active high traffic forums to market your services and also to promote websites. Creating and maintaining good name in webmasters community is much more important for online business than off line one since information on the net is spreading with the speed of light…

Sometimes it worth to do some work for free in exchange for feedback or review of your services. This will benefit you in the long run and potentially bring in more business. People are less likely to use someone who just joined the forum, have zero i-Trader points and have none or very little useful posts on the subject… If you’ve been around for a while and participated in the discussions related to the field you tryind to sell services for - there is a very good chance someone may hire you.

You should create some kind of website, even free one with the Blogger just for the sole purpose of collecting feedbacks from your happy customers, having a list of your services with estimated prices and may be portfolio of completed projects or sample articles (if you offer design or writing services).

Finding quick customers through forums is mostly for the quick cheap projects, because usually there is a high competition for those customers. You may be forced to offer much lower price that usual just to get that quick cash. But if you have time or (like I said in the beginning of my post) simply need money fast - this is a way to go…

You never know - one of those quick customers may turn out to be a good paying long term one in the future if he is happy with your service now…

Few years back over 90% of web surfers were using Microsoft Internet Explorer but nowadays other browsers fast gaining share of the market. Most popular are Mozilla FairFox and Opera.

Even Internet Explorer has released new version (IE7) which works much different from the preceding version (IE6).

Layout and styles configured to work fine in IE may appear all broken or not readable in other browsers. I can guarantee - no one will open another browser just to see your site, so you will loose potential customer.

Multiple browsers can be easily installed on your computer without any interference with exception of IE versions - you can have only one version running.

This is even more important if your site has anything to do with web design services. I know a pretty good graphic designer whose site is all messed up when viewed in FairFox and he refuses to fix it. Than he is wondering why there is no new business and no one wants to advertise on his site…

So… Take your time to make website multi browser compatible or hire someone to do it for you - you will appreciate it later

I will call it Blog Income Stream.

Probably easiest and fastest option to get started with new blog is to use free Blogger account from Google.

Why Blogger? The answer is simple - it’s easy, it’s fast, and most important - it’s free! Wouldn’t you like someone offering you fully equipped store to use rent free? That’s exactly what Blogger gives you - fully featured online store.
You still want to personalize the blog to make it unique and attractive to the visitors. Building online business image and brand recognition probably even more important that for a regular off line business.

There are many other portals that offer free blogs as subdomains on their servers, but if you decided to go with “free” blog option I would suggest to stick with Blogger or WordPress hosted blogs.

Sure there are more professional options like using your own domain name, hosting servers, more advanced publishing software (like Subrion CMS for example), but you can get back to these options after you get initial presence on the web and become more comfortable with working on your blog.

Now most important questions:

- Can you make money with blog? - The answer is Yes!
- Will you make money with your blog? - It’s entirely up to you…

There are tons of advertisements who promise to make you an Internet Millionaire working few hours a week - forget about it!
As any new business your new online business (and that is exactly what your blog will be - online business) requires hard work and dedication.

Lets use the same example I was giving before - the store. In the beginning your blog is like a little newsstand on the middle of nowhere with no customers and empty shelfs.
Your goal is to turn it into a Designers store on the Park Avenue in New York City…

The competition is very high and new blogs are started every second. Only few of them will survive and prosper. Will yours be one of them?