Of course, you have to signup with these services first and wait for their approval. You have to have a good quality, unique content and upto date blog posts in order to be accepted in most of these sponsored review marketplaces. They like to have reputable bloggers to start reviewing the products and services the advertisers offer. Joining any of these sponsored review services allows you to write sponsored posts on wide range of topics.

What is squidoo? Squidoo is an easy to design one page article or lens (as is called in squidoo) that let’s you write article on the area of your expertise. It is a network of user generated lenses that can reflect one’s expertise in certain area, review of products or general views on any topic.

What squidoo does for you? Being a lensmaster, you can write on the topic of your expertise. Squidoo also shares the revenue generated between its content creators, some may also go to charity depending on the settings of the users.

This is how squidoo may help you in your online or offline business.

• Get more traffic to your online business – If you own a website, or online store, you can write lenses about the niche of your online store, and direct visitors to your website. Writing unique and good contents on your lens will reflect you as an expert in that particular area, and your visitors will be tempted to click on your hyperlink provided in your lens to find out more about your other online ventures.
• Sell affiliate products – When you create a lens, you are given the option of choosing their built-in affiliate tools, like Amazon, eBay, iTunes, CafePress etc. If someone buys products from these advertisers using your lens or via your recommended product, you get the straight 50% of the revenue. Or if you advertise other affiliate products on your own website, you can direct your lens viewers to your website and make sales by promoting your products.
• Google Ads on your lens – When you create a lens, relevant google ads are displayed on your lens. All the revenue generated from the clicks on google ads go into a pool, half of which is distributed among the lensmasters depending on the certain criteria setup by the corporation. Your previous and current earnings are displayed on your dashboard so that you can keep track of your royalties.
• Referring a friend – If you think you know someone who is best suited for creating lens, writing about stuff or own a website, you can refer them to squidoo using this referal link. When they become lensmaster using your referal, and make their first $15, you get an extra $5.

You should definitely be a lensmaster if you own a website, a blog, an online store, are an entrepreneur, are passionate about writing, belong to a charity and above all, wish to start earning online.

You can also visit SquidU from time to time where you can learn to make better lenses, tips on how to promote your lenses to the public. You can also get answers to your questions from the seasoned lensmasters here.

Have you used Squidoo? How was your experience?

Looking and hearing about the current economic situation today, seems like it’s going down south, and pretty rapidly. We are just waiting for the federal government to declare recession officially. Hearing about the government plan, situation looks like loose loose for a regular household in America.

In such a situation, there are some changes that you can make in your day to day life to make it easy on you, financially.

• Stop using the credit cards. Keep cash with you. If you are used to credit cards, this sounds daunting, and impossible to do, but try it a few days in the beginning. You will feel pretty comfortable using the cash, and find yourself saving some green in the long run.
•  Try using “pay-as-you-go” plan on your cell phone. This will keep you from making lots of long distance calling, and keep you on your toes.
•  Avoid driving. Take the public transportation services, or walk or bicycle. This will help you physically and financially.
• Do not wear brand name clothes, shoes or any other accessories. Quality does not mean buying expensive clothes. Even if you wish to buy brand names, look out for sales and discounts regularly. Check out local brochures and fliers. 
•  When going grocery shopping, make a list. Buy everything all at once, instead of making multiple rounds to the grocery stores, in case you forget to buy something.
• If you do not watch lot of TV, but have cable, get it disconnected. If you like watching movies once in a while, you can visit blockbuster videos or Netflix to get the movies delivered.
• Shop online, buy used stuff if you just have to beautify your place, or something that you won’t be using for long time. Check out your local classifieds, like craigslist.com or khrido.com

These are some of the very few things that you can do to save in the long term. If you make these habits, you will find yourself at a good place, physically, mentally and financially.  

Well, few weeks ago I cleaned out my apartment and gathered so much stuff from the last few years that was just cluttering the storage space. I wanted to sell it or give it away, but to whom? where? How to start? After doing some research, I came across a few local classifieds. I put up some heavily used stuff for free, and hardly used stuff for few bucks. Not long after that, people started calling  or emailing to ask the condition and how much price.

After posting three items on Toronto Classifieds, I was able to get rid of all of them within the same week. I have not purchased anything yet, but there is lot of stuff to choose from. Their search feature makes it easy to look up specific items. Managing Ads is pretty easy. If the items are not sold, you can always repost your ads with just one click. Your ads expires in 60 days otherwise.

I was able to sell a DVD Player, an old bike and used CRT monitor. I deleted my ads as soon as I sold them. I will be putting more stuff on it, and will post the links here. I am also going to experiment with more local classifieds and see if I can make more sales. You can trade stuff as well. I am going to give that a try.

There are some regulars on Khrido Classifieds from different locations whose stuff I check regularly.

Sandy Stuff ‘n’ Such

Used Stuff in Ottawa

Used Stuff in Toronto

Some of the Google must-haves are listed below that can help you track your website visitors, their origin, earning and stats:

• Google Analytics: This free service generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. It can track visitors from all referers, including search engines, impressions, pay per click campaigns, landing pages, entry and exit pages, how long the visitors stayed etc. It is a powerful tool to help you assess where the traffic is originating from and where you can improve more.
• Google Webmaster Tools: Google Webmaster Tools provides a free and easy resource to make a site more google friendly, how google bots crawl your site, top search queries, position your website showed up for certain keywords. It also gives detailed information on broken links, duplicate titles and description and any other issues with a website. It gives tons of information on how to make a website a successful venture.
• Google Adsense: If you own a website, you must have heard about Google Adsense. It is probably one of the most popular revenue generating tools available online. You have to have an account in order to display google ads on your website. It is pretty smart to figure out the niche of your website and to display appropriate ads.
• Google Webmaster Guidelines: Make sure to keep your website in compliant with Google terms and policies in order to keep using any of their services. Not all the websites are approved to run their revenue generating programs. Read them from time to time as the rules may vary with time. There are many adsense optimization tools that you can use to make google ads on your site more effective.

Remember, advertisers like to advertise their services and products on quality websites. Your earning potential goes up as the advertisements find that you are sending them high quality leads. Of course, this will take time, patience and lot of effort on your part, but if you keep doing it religiously, it will pay off.

What are Hubpages? Hubpages is a collection of articles or hubs, as they call them, and help you earn revenue as well. After registering and becoming a member you can write your own hub and promote them as you want. If you mention your main website in your hub or profile, you would want to promote your hub which will indireclty promote your website. Marketing your website using hubpages is a natural optimization of your website in search engines. Make sure not to spam your hubs or others. Spam is taken very seriously, and you may end up having your account banned.

How to use Hubpages? You can become a member of huboages by registering and conforming your email. Once you become a member, you are all set to start hubbing. It would be convenient for other hubber to know more about you if you summarize the contents of your hub in your summary. It will give them the idea about what your niche is and why they should keep coming back to read your hubs. Hubpages can be browsed by hub ratings such as “What is Hot”,”What is New”,”What is best rated”. There is a topics tab that can b used to browse through popular categories and subcategories. If your hub appears in What’s Hot category, you will end up driving lots of traffic. 

What can you find at hubpages? Hubpages has lot of traffic and people form varied interests and hobbies. You can find discussions on politics, Legitimate Online Jobs, Dating for Married Women, How to write hubs etc.

Why use Hubpages? Hubpages can be very motivating. It helps to:

• Promote your website – Hubpages are an excellent way to get relevant traffic to your website. You can place direct link to your website. It also helps your website in making it search engine optimized, because of hubpages’ own great web presence. You can promote your hubs using social bookmarking and media marketing websites like delicious, digg and stumbleupon. The best of all, you can track your daily visitors by plugging in your Google Analytics code.
• Make Money – Yup, that’s true. Hubpages lets you add your Adsense code. If any ads are clicked in your hub, you will paid commission for that click amount. You can also use affiliate accounts like eBayand Amazon. If you wish to use eBay and Amazon ID, you are required to have commission Junction account. You need to apply and activate for these accounts before you start using them.

You may or may not like Hubpages but you definitely would not want to ignore  this social networking platform if you are planning on making money. Click here to check out hubpages!

Technorati Tags – hubpages eBay amazon marketing promotion website money

Photrade is pretty new online photo application. Well, their very first launch happened in late 2006. The first version of the  Photrade Alpha site was launched in November 2007. Then in January 2008, the company received the funding and started on the building the first beta version of the site, and by the end of this year, they are planning to go public.  

What Photrade Offers – Photrade lets you create a profile, browse pictures, create and manage galleries, sell stock images and earn revenue from photo clicks. Uploading pictures is done using their uploader as of now, but they are planning on integrating with Flickr so that you can transfer them directly. They have different photo galleries where you can move the pictures by dragging and dropping between them. You can also tag your pictures. Your photos can be easily shared, protected and licensed. They can be watermarked and copyrighted from security point of view. You can sell the copyrights of the pictures. Their tracking system is pretty neat. You get the basic stats to keep tab on general activities for each photo like how many times your pictures were viewed, and how many sold and the earnings etc.  

I had submitted a few pictures. Here is what this looks like in Photrade:

Sell photos on photrade | By sandnsun

Making Money – Photrade offers to make cash if you are uploading your pictures. You can set a price for each picture that you upload. You can setup the prices with different sizes and formats for all your pictures. 

In the recently reported experiences, members have been having great success with their events photography. It is extremely convenient for people to upload the pictures from certain events, set the price, and receive the orders directly from the site. Compare this with sending out a message to each of their friends, receiving a price quote, getting the stuff printed and delivered and then handling the cash and check payments etc. Photrade seems to be making the whole experience a pleasant one.   

Photrade is a new addition to already existing and well established photosharing giants like iStockphoto and stock.xchng. Let’s see where they stand in the coming months.  

Have you tried photrade? How was your experience?  

Technorati Tags – stock photography money monetize photography

To start using adsense, you can create a blog using blogger. That is, if you do not own a website already. Create quality contents on that blog so that your visitors find them interesting enough to come back and read more.  Also make sure all your links are working and not broken. It will not leave good impression on your visitors or google.

Goto www.google.com/adsense and fill out the application form. You will be sent a confirmation email from google. So, make sure to give your correct email address.  They will review your site, and send you confirmation email if you are accepted or rejected.

I am assuming you will be accepted, so that we can move over to the next step.  Once you are accepted, you can login to your google adsense account. You will see various tabs on the top, click on “Adsense SetUp”. You can select any of the available links.

If you choose “Adsense for Contents”, next page you will see to set up the ad suitable for your page. You can select Leaderboard, Skyscraper, half banner or full banner. You can preview your ads on the same page by clicking on the link provided. If you are not on the google account, you can also preview your ads by using this Free Adsense Preview Tool.

Placement of ads on your website plays the most important part in monetizing your website. So, make sure they are at the spots where they are most visible to your visitors. Ads on the top of the webpage perform very well. If you place the ads on the bottom, it may not attract many visitors to click on your ads. Ads on the left hand side have been said to perform very well too.

I used to visit popular forums like sitepoint and digitalpoint, just for reading stuff. I did not have any blogs of my own then. I stumbled into affiliate forums, and after reading many posts there, I realized that people were making tons of money by putting affiliate links in their interestingly addictive blogs.

You can also try some of the popular affiliate networks. Some of the most popular ones are clickbooth, neverblue ads and clickbank. There are many more that you can try.