Found Not Lost

I am so bummed. Like I said on the post below about my decrease in page rank,  Google just recently updated Page Ranks. I was so worried about my two Blogger blogs that lost rank that I didn’t even remember to check THIS blog! It wasn’t ranked at all!

Now that got me really confused. I figured even if no one know this site exists yet at least it could have been given a PR of 0 rather than ‘PR unavailable’. I started Googling what could have caused the site to not be indexed and that’s when I realized that if there is something wrong with the coding of your template, it won’t get crawled and you don’t get ranked I am just so bummed.

I realized that even the RSS feeds were coming back invalid because of coding problems. Something about ‘parsing’ and some other stuff that were just way over my head. So I decided to change templates, and voila! This site is valid again.  The RSS feed is now working. The bad part, I probably missed getting ranked because of this and now I have to wait until the next update which probably won’t be for another three months at least.

 So, so bummed about this

Oh, so may you have as scary a Halloween as I’m having. BOO!!!

actually, that’s wrong what I really want to do is SCREAAAAM!!!

I have jumped on the sponsored posts/reviews bandwagon this year and have gotten fair compensation from it. That is one reason I am growing this domain, is so I can continue to earn some revenue from blogging by doing sponsored posts.

One of the requirements to do paid reviews or sponsored posts is to have a well established blog with an audience that will read all the reviews that you will be paid for writing. That means your site has to be indexed and ranked.

I just read this article though that seems to imply that you could be penalized for writing paid reviews. Sure enough, when I started checking my page ranks, I noticed a drop in two of my blogs! And one of those blogs is my most popular one, the food blog. Now a lot of the SEO goobly is way over my head, but I just don’t understand how my ranking suddenly dropped.

I love reading! Do you? Want to show off what’s on your bookshelf? Then join me and thousands who are also passionate about books on Shelfari. It’s like MySpace or Facebook but for book lovers

 I have my Shelfari Shelf displayed on the sidebar of this blog if you want to see what’s on my book shelf. I haven’t had a chance to list all the books on my actual book shelf, but I’ll get around to it. I just added the Stephenie Meyers series which I just finished reading. OMG, I’ll have to write about those books in a separate post.

So if you like Shelfari and plan on signing up, don’t forget to add me to your friends list.

It took me a while to decide to blog for money, but when I did finally get on the wagon, was I hooked! There are several sites online where you can make money, and believe me, there is money out there to be made. Skeptics say that this is just a phase and that all these money making sites will eventually dry out leaving bloggers high and dry. Well, whether it is a phase or not, right now I’m swimming in its cool waters, and so can you.

You can make money online several ways, and I am probably not the best person to tell you how as I am new to this too, but I can tell you how I’ve made my money. If you are a blogger, you can make money three ways (that I know of and use on my sites).

One, you can either sell links from your site. There are what are called contextual links where they find appropriate key words within your posts and make them link to their products or websites. Then there are just plain link ads where you sell them a space on your side bar and they place a link there separate from your content.

Two, you can allow ads on your sidebar or anywhere on your blogs like adsense. You just add the code, the the company will generate the ads. You earn money by how many of your readers click on their ads.

Three, you can do paid or sponsored reviews. There are several places online where you can sign up to review products or website. You write a short commentary or review, include a link, and you get paid for your trouble. Reviews are a more reliable source of income if you are looking to make money. You can control which reviews you’d like to do and how many. You can make as much money as you allow yourself time for. I just joined Smorty not too long ago, and they are one of the better, more reliable places to get jobs reviewing. They pay on time and there isn’t a lot of hassle about getting your posts approved. Provided that you’ve complied with their posted guidelines, of course.

For a non techie like me, I have a huge learning curve to overcome when I started messing with the intricacies of web hosting, websites and everything else that comes with it. As I have probably mentioned before, I am still working on trying to get my husband’s website up and running. It isn’t a matter of installing Wordpress like I did for my blogs, he wants to be able to sell his art online, so I have been looking at several ecommerce solutions. Some of them are free and some of them come with a fee; but always my main priority is their user friendliness. If I can’t understand the jargon or if the platform looks totally foreign to me then I move on to something else.

Ashopcommerce.com has a shopping cart software that is both user friendly and affordable, which they start off by offering a free 10-day trial so you can test drive the program. Also, there in no installation required with this software since it is a web based software. You can be selling from your online store before you know it. With this shopping cart software, you can accept payment from any major credit cards and if you use Paypal, this software includes built in SSL protection which is what gives you checkout security.

More importantly for me, they provide lots of customer support and if you wish, the design of your online story is also fully customizable.