I’m sorry to say but due to personal reasons I will not be blogging this weekend. I am very sick and do not have time to blog. I will continue posting regularly on Monday, July 23. Thank you for your patience, and once again I am sorry.

I have been seeing a lot of people doing reviews through ReviewMe, PayPerPost Direct, Sponsored Reviews, and even completely direct reviews from the blogger themselves. I am publishing this post as more of a question and to hopefully get some kind of discussion going.

The questions I have are as follows:

1) Do you have any personal experiences with any or all of the above listed methods? If yes, how have those experiences been? Positive, negative, neutral?

2) Whether you have had experiences or not, what do you believe is the best method to increase people’s interest in getting reviewed by your blog?

3) What would you recommend as a good starting price for a complete review of a blog or website?

Let me hear your ideas.

Although some people refuse to remove the nofollow code from their blog comments, I have decided to do so. I believe that if you are willing to spend time reading my material and participating within my blog community, you should be rewarded as much as possible. I figured the best way to do this would be to remove the nofollow code.

For those of you interested in how it can be done to help your commentators out as well, I downloaded it from SeoPedia.org.

What exactly does this plugin do?

This plugin will remove the nofollow attribute from the comment author URL, but will leave the nofollow to any links withing the comment’s body.

There it is. Easy upload, and all it will remove is the tag from the author’s URL. This way if anybody spams referral links within their comment, these are not subject to the nofollow attribute. Enjoy!

Setting goals can be one of the most important ways to work towards something you strive to achieve. Whether it is a personal goal or a team goal, setting goals is very important.

1. Written Goals

To begin, the most successful people have written their goal(s) down. If you can visualize your goal every day, you are more apt to strive to reach your goals. With a goal in mind, you also know where you must concentrate your time and effort in order to achieve what you want. I read an article once about a man who had always wanted a brand new Corvette. Every morning when he woke up, and every night before he went to bed he would look at this picture of his dream car. He was never very good at saving money, which is why he could never afford it. Each and every day he would think about that car, and instead of spending money on smaller items, he decided to save. Eventually, this man was able to buy his Corvette. The point of that story was that with proper self control and confidence, any goals are within reach.

2. Setting Realistic Goals

A main reason as to why many people fall short of their goals, is because they set goals that are just flat out unrealistic. For instance, if you were to create your blog today, and you wrote down that you wanted to be making $100 a week in AdSense revenues within one month, that is a very unrealistic goal. Instead of setting goals that are extremes, try to set a goal that you feel you can reach while having to work hard towards your goal. A more realistic goal would be for you to make $10 in AdSense revenues in your first month and a half. With proper content, and a lot of SEO work, you can easily reach that goal. Success is contagious. Once you reach one goal, it becomes addicting, and you feel as though nothing can stop you from accomplishing your dreams.

3. Do Not Fear Failure

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes - Oscar Wilde

If you set a goal and fail to reach it, first check to see if your goal was realistic. If it was, then strive to achieve it in the next week, month, or year. If you set a goal but do not reach it, you are still ahead of the people who are just mindlessly out there without any direction. Remember, champions are those who stand up even when they cannot. Especially if you set goals that are possible, but require work, you are bound to fall short now and then. All that means is that you need to work a little harder next time to reach your goal.

The Art of Success

People who write their goals down will achieve them 70% more often than those who do not. By writing down reachable goals, and eliminating your fears of failure, you have a one way ticket to the land of success. Success breeds success, so once you get started, the sky is the limit.

As I have mentioned time and time again, the most important thing about blogging is to individualize yourself. One of the worst possible things you can do is directly copy somebody else’s material. Understandably, you will take ideas, but to 100% copy someone else’s tactics will not have a positive outcome for you.

Do Not Directly Copy Ideas

This principle reflects back to high school when teachers would lecture about plagiarism and the dangers associated with duplication of other’s ideas. It stands true in the professional world as well. The basis of this post comes from the craze for the keyword “make money online.” Ever since John Chow implemented the website review system with the anchor text of make money online, I have seen a number of duplicates of his brilliant idea. Granted this idea seems genius, but the amount of publicity they will get compared to what he has already gotten from his plan will fall extremely short in the long run. Maybe the teachers know a few things?

I Googled “cheating” for an interesting picture to add to this post, and found this one. I think it fits pretty well within this post. After all, the point of blogging is to provide others with your ideas, and if you wish to become a successful blogger, people are interested in reading what you personally have done and can do to get where you are. If you are mindlessly publishing duplicate information, what is the point of reading your blog? As I have explained, if I notice a site with the exact template that I have seen elsewhere, I refuse to visit that site again due to their lack of creativity and/or confidence in their work.

Why Successful Bloggers Are Successful

One of the main things I have noticed with multiple successful bloggers, is the fact that they have created or published information that is interesting, and somebody can learn something from their posts. If people are spending their time researching how to make money online, they are looking for valuable information, and they want to take something away from their experience. If they read your blog and notice that they have previously learned everything you are providing them, why would they ever visit your site again? Much of this seems like common sense, but with the amount of duplication I have seen, some people would think otherwise. If blogging about making money online is too difficult for you, then I would suggest that you broaden your niche to reach a wider target of people. This is the primary reason why many bloggers have more than one blog. There is only so much information you can provide on a website targeted to making money online before you need to target a different niche group.

Other Tricks To Successful Blogging

Content can be difficult to provide sometime. I have even had a few times where I have struggled to think of something that I truly believed readers would be interested in. You can re-read your older posts and either summarize them, or build a post in addition to what you wrote previously. You can also create a series of posts based on a previous post if you can properly implement additional content. Even on a blog as young as Online Cash Flow, there has been a day or two where I just could not think of anything to write about. Granted I am still learning all about SEO, increasing traffic, ways to better target your niche. The list goes on and on, but I was able to scrape together information and inter-link posts of mine to provide readers with something else to read. If you want to be successful at anything, you will need to work at it. Researching about additional topics to broaden your knowledge will definitely increase the amount of content you can write about.

This is part 3 of the series. You can find the previous posts here: Part 1: Balance, Part 2: Hard Work, Part 3: Stand Out From The Crowd.

As you previously read, I am writing this series to try to explain to bloggers how to be successful. Through my experiences and a lot of research I have been able to narrow successful blogging down into three main parts. The third part deals with making yourself and individual, and not just another robot blogger. What I mean by this is you need to make sure you are providing something different that other bloggers are not.

First and foremost readers will be drawn to your site layout or design. Whether poorly designed or well designed, readers will notice. This is why you should spend a decent amount of time creating a blog that is put together professionally, and do not just copy the template of another blogger. I have seen this time and time again, and I refuse to return to those blogs, simply due to the fact that they cannot individualize themselves.

Another key point that I have realized is the implementation of imagery. Make sure these images pertain to your topic and are placed properly throughout your articles. When doing that, you will notice that many people are drawn to these articles and will tend to read them. Would you rather read a complete page of text, or a page of text that is broken down by some neat looking images?

As you all knew already, one of the more important things to differentiate yourselves would be your content. Not only are duplicate pages frowned upon by viewers, but the search engine and page rank calculators are not friendly with duplicate pages either. As well as seeing the exact same template on various websites, I have seen articles that have been copied and pasted, with very few changes. Personally, I will also not visit those blogs again, as if you cannot even produce your own content, why are you even blogging?

The last thing I have noticed a couple successful bloggers doing would be free prize giveaways. Whether these prizes are for the most comments in a week, randomly drawn from the pool of commentators, or you create some other system, prizes are definitely a way to keep readers interested. After all, who doesn’t like free stuff?

That last point brings up a pretty neat idea. Once traffic grows a little here, I might have to create some type of free prize giveaway myself. Does anybody have any ideas? I would be happy to hear suggestions of how to hold the prize giveaway, and also what people would like to get.

This is the second of three parts in this series. Part 1: Balance, Part 2: Hard Work, Part 3: Stand Out From The Crowd.

I’m happy to announce and publish the first series here. Included here you will find the second key to success when blogging. That key is hard work.

Many people claim all of these get rich quick schemes, or easy money online. In all of my experiences, to make any decent money, some amount of work must be put in. The most success I had with the least amount of up front work was my experiences with eDataJob. I will not try to sell you on that, as I already provided a post, but there was very little up front work to make the amount of money that I did from that opportunity. However, work was still needed, and that is the key of this post.

After reading multiple articles about successful blogging and working hard, the general assumption is that where there is hard work, success is not far away. However, this hard work must be consistent in order to be successful. By that I mean that you cannot work hard for a week or two and then instantly think you will be one of the more successful bloggers. A friend told me a quote about working out:

When I run, I go for 21 minutes. If I can go for 20 minutes, why not do 21?

I countered with the response of “why not do 30, 60, 90″ but that’s another story. The point is that if you are working on your blog anyways, make it worth your while. When you are doing something, go at it 100%. Do not half-ass your work. With a substantial effort, your time and work will be rewarded.

I have been working on this blog for just over 2 weeks, and I have worked hard at creating an encouraging learning environment to help teach people about making money online. With my work, I have recognized my Technorati rankings on the rise (which isn’t saying much because of how “young” this blog is, but still). Traffic has also increased substantially, in fact increases have been upwards of 300% unique visitors per day.

Enough of my short earned success though. The underlying point is that you are reading this because you wish to be successful. Therefore I can assume that you want to put forth some effort to reach your goals. Remember that when you are working, make sure you work 100% so you are not wasting your time. Your efforts will be rewarded.

There are a number of instances when lower numbers are good, but the most important one I have come across in the past 2 weeks has been my Technorati Rank. Upon creation of Online Cash Flow, this blog was ranked close to 1,000,000. Sounds pretty decent, but within the Technorati system, the best blog is ranked number 1.

Therefore, I have been pleased as my rank has been steadily falling as more content is added to this blog. Just two days ago my rank was up around 187,000 and today it is under 165,000.

Obviously the curve will begin to level out, as I will be in competition with blogs that are put together more precisely, but at this rate the future looks very promising. I can only hope to have similar rank increase in future.

As with anything, the key to success is balance. Maintenance of this balance is probably the most important key to success. According to the USDA Dietary Guidelines:

Consume a variety of nutrient-dense foods and drinks among the basic food groups. Choose foods that restrict your intake of saturated and trans fats, cholesterol, added sugars, salt, and alcohol.

I would be willing to bet that many of you are wondering what this has to do with blogging. The whole issue dealing with variety is an umbrella statement that you must remain in balance with whatever you plan to do, or you will fall. Time and time again, being unbalanced will result in failure. Whether you are eating an unhealthy diet and not exercising enough, or working too much and not resting enough both have detrimental effects.

Although blogging requires a lot of work, you must balance your time between writing, reading, editing, and taking breaks from your blog. The common misconception is that more is better. With blogging, however, balance is the key. As I have said previously, make sure your frequency of posts is consistent. I have seen blogs fail time and time again due to inconsistency. Bloggers begin publishing 1 post per day, and gradually increase their posts until they reach 8-10 posts per day. However, publishing 8-10 content-rich posts is extremely hard to maintain, and then it becomes too much of a hassle for the bloggers so they stop completely. This is where balance remains important. I would recommend a post count of anywhere from 1-5 per day, depending on your backlog, and the material you are writing about. This way, your readers know how many posts to expect from you, and are not sitting there wondering what happened if your post numbers have very little variation.

This is part 1 of a 3 part series. Still to come - Part 2: Hard work, Part 3: Stand Out From the Crowd

For those who have been consistently reading my blog, (obviously not many people) you would remember my post about my first subscriber via Feedburner. Since then, however, I have seen some fluctuation in my number of subscribers from 0-2. I was wondering if anybody else has experienced similar problems with their statistics?

Also, I realize that building up a reader base takes time, and lots of it. Along with time, there needs to be something there that your readers are attracted to. Whether it be the content, the community, or the commercial items in which people are interested it, there must be something.

With consistent updating, it is very simple to build your community, as long as the content you provide is up to date, and relevant to what your readers want. In fact, I’ve read from fellow bloggers that it has taken some of them anywhere from 1-2 years to generate any significant traffic to their blogs. Likewise, many people try to monetize their site too much too fast. For instance, some people start a blog with the intentions of getting rich quick. They load their site with advertisements, but do not provide the content that is needed. It is these sites that are very quick to fail.

On the other hand, some people have blogged for upwards of 2 years before even monetizing their site, or implementing any type of traffic analysis. When the traffic is consistent, the monetization becomes the easy part.

Another good thing about blogging, is that you have the power to change whatever you want, whenever you want. If you are not making any money from the income sources you have chosen, it is very easy to move things around.

More to come about income sources, monetization, and traffic in the future.