06Jan The seven deadly sins in make money blogging
I have a very hectic week because my children all return to school, kindie and college. As a mom with four boys whose age range from 18 years old to 6 years old, I have to deal with tiny sandals to three piece suits (for the chef-wannabe) to Government aided books to crayons and a million other things. I took a week off from my voluntary work at the cancer hospital because I was worried about separation anxieties. It turns out that my little boy was so excited about school, he cannot stop talking about ‘School is so fun, I want to go back tomorrow’. Phew…
So, I have no time to do any serious blogging or do any researches. Therefore, let’s look at what are the seven deadly sins. Actually, seven deadly sins is part of our Christian faith, a reminder that we can go to hell if we are ruled by these. Of course, don’t take it so seriously because not every one of us go to the extreme until we deserve hell. Hehehe, once, someone told me that we humans are built not to do wrong and hence, it is harder to sin than to do good things. Comforting, eh?
But it is fun to see how this seven deadly sins apply in our make money blogging venture.
LUST - Do not waste too much time watching porn till you have no interests in making money.
GLUTTONY - Do not eat too much if you are a food blogger, eating on the pretext of blogging materials. You will end up fat and broke.
GREED - Do not buy more domains than you can manage.
SLOTH - Do not take too much time writing a post or updating a blog or Google spiders will never visit you or index your blog.
WRATH - Do not lose your temper too often on a business-like blog like make money blog because people who read serious blogs have no sense of humour.
ENVY - Do not envy your competitors pagerank, alexa ranking, technorati ranking, traffic or awards. Spending time comparing those stats only give you ulcers.
PRIDE - Do not get too puff up to reply your comments. And you may lose that PR 6/10 the next time Google pagerank updates again.
So there you go, the sage hath speakth. Hehehe.
06Jan How many days to get money from Paypal to our local Malaysian banks like Alrajhi or Public Bank?
Over on Paypal site, they mentioned that it takes about five to seven working days to transfer money from our PayPal account to our Malaysian banks like Alrajhi or Public Bank.
If you want to know how to transfer the money, you can read my post on how to transfer money from PayPal
. I have some screen shots on the steps to take.
Meanwhile, below is the screenshot that shows that money is transferred from PayPal to Alrajhi within three days only.
As you can see, we can only transfer USD495 per 24 hour. (it is USD500 minus USD5 charged by PayPal for admin fee). I have to make the withdrawal every 24 hours as I do not like to keep money in my PayPal for fear of hacking or phising scam.
Anyway, I am such a good girl, I never use PayPal to buy anything. All just go into the bank, for my children’s education. :)
The foreign exchange for USD to MYR has weakened again. Last few weeks, I get RM 1,767.00 for USD495. Now, the amount has dropped to RM1,681.88. Well, can’t complain. It is still money and I must thank God for the blessings. Like how we said it in Bahasa Malaysia, Rezeki tu Tuhan yang beri. Syukurlah.
BTW, menj asked if that is a daily income. LOL, if that is, I will be too busy spending money to bother about blogging. It is a twice a month income. Normally, I get payments on the 1st of the month and around 10th of the month (amount is pittance only compared to the beginning of the month). It is hard work, ok? But we can still make money from blogging if we work hard.
04Jan Make money online 2009
When we talk about make money online, it may not involve blogging at all. One can open some crummy online store selling products that give men a hard on HAHAHAHA or lubricant to menopausal women to get wet. Then, you can start a craze on fortune telling by selling things for good fortune for the year of the ox or peddle things to evade Nostradamus prediction that the world will end on December 21, 2012.
Fear, sex, love, money, beauty and all these are in very good demand. People want to look young, have lots of sex, get lots of hot chicks and hunks and they want to control their life destiny.
But these aren’t just my type of method to make money online. Of course, Google or any of those affiliate sales will insert some of these products into my blogs. Those are beyond my control. But I certainly won’t go full force to promote things like these eventhough I can make money selling things like that.
I just cannot imagine explaining to my sons when they ask me how I earn my money. “Oh…mommy just sold some cream to give an old man a hard on so that he can cheats on his wife and have sex all night long with his young girlfriend from Cambodia.” You get what I mean?
This is my Christian side talking and though some may not like it, I think the only way to make money online in 2009 is to continue what I am doing right now. Write some paid posts, sell some banner ads, place some Google Adsense and smuggle some links into the old posts in my blogs.
So, are you willing to sell one of those dodgy products just to make some money?
03Jan How do Malaysians withdraw money from Paypal?
This is a short tutorial on how we get money into our bank. A lot of people are puzzled how I get real money from doing something online. My little boy who is five years old have figured it out after I showed him how money get into my hands.
Once, I took him to AlRajhi Bank to withdraw a sum of money and he went, “Ooooohhhh…that’s how you make money hor?”
Now, he knows when I am working on making money. Then, I showed him money in my PayPal account when I receive it from the companies like PayPerPost, ReviewMe, TextLinkAds etc. At home, on my computer, I showed him how I transfer money from Paypal to my local bank. After that, from the local bank, we can ‘teet teet teet’ the money out of our bank ATM and take the money, put into our pocket and go to the shops to buy things. My older sons know the process too, just in case, I kong kha khiau (kick the bucket hehehe) suddenly.
STEP ONE
You must have a verified Paypal account. You apply for Paypal. Next you give Paypal your credit card or debit card number. Paypal will charge us USD1.95 which is refundable. We need to wait for the four digit number in our credit card PRINTED statement or find it from your bank in the case of debit card. Then, key in the four digit number in your Paypal account to verify it. Once verified, you can start to receive money. If not, you cannot even receive money, what more withdraw.
STEP TWO
Assuming you already have money in your PayPal, you can start withdrawing using your debit card from only Pubic Bank (I hate their service, so they earn this name hehehe) or AlRajhi. Of course, you can withdraw into your credit card but I won’t advise you to because credit card charge a huge commission if you want to withdraw the money.
STEP THREE
Here are the screenshots. You go to
My Account
Withdraw
Withdraw to your card (only US and certain countries citizens can receive the PayPal into their bank direct. But Malaysians are notorious for being scammers and hence, we are the second class citizens in Paypal)
Note that PayPal charge us USD5 for every withdrawal. So, do not withdraw too often or you are paying RM18+ for each withdrawal.
STEP FOUR
Malaysians can only withdraw USD500 per day. After deducting the USD5, each time I get only USD495. Right now, Alrajhi gives me about 3.5+ and the Malaysian ringgit I get for every USD495 is about RM1,700+.
STEP FIVE
Normally, it takes about 3-5 working days (take into account some holidays in US and some holidays in our country) for the transaction to get through. You will see the amount in your local bank after 3-5 days. If not, don’t panic. At times, there are some glitches between Paypal and AlRajhi and the money doesn’t come in. Go to AlRajhi and lodge a complaint form and they will trace the money for you.
So, that’s all the process there is to get money from blogging.
Do you know that the exchange rate for PayPal withdrawal is so much better than Google Adsense to Western Union to our local preferred bank like CIMB, Bank Simpanan Nasional or any Western Union bank affiliate banks? Normally with Google Adsense/WU/CIMB, I get the foreign exchange rate of only 3.44 but with PayPal/AjRajhi, I get about 3.55. Western Union charge for foreign transfer is high but what to do…..it is still better than opting for cheque from Adsense because it takes longer.
Good luck on making money! May you feel the joy of having cold hard cash in your hands from online income.
02Jan Bluehost sucks when it comes to Wordpress 2.7
I am lucky that Bluehost is not my main webhost. Recently, after I upgraded one of my blogs hosted on Bluehost to Wordpress 2.7, it has been crawling at snail speed. I have a hard time waiting for the admin panel to download and getting from Write to Publish is like hell. In one sentence, Bluehost sucks if you are using Wordpress 2.7.
Meanwhile, my main blogs hosted with my webhost at IXIY.com are fantastic because I am using a virtual private server or VPS. My webhost has upgraded my server to :
…there was a server processor upgrade.
It is now running on Dual Quad Core (meaning 2×4 CPUs) as compared to the previous Dual Dual Core (2×2 CPUs). The loading speed is faster now.
On top of that, the webhost has also strengthen security because my previous server was hacked and I had been spammed with Wordpress spam injection whereby the hacker inserted links to porn/drugs/other bad sites without me noticing it because they hid the codes and it is not visible through source codes. Usually, they inserted malicious files disguised as jpeg files on my root server.
I do not earn commission or referral fees, ok? I have to pay quite a big sum of money every month to maintain my VPS hosting but what to do….without investment, there is no gain. My webhosting fee per month is only a fraction of my blogs income but two months hosting fee is enough to pay for two years hosting on Bluehost. So, it is certainly a big sum of money to pay for the security, speed and reliabilty.
By the way, my main webhost is a Penang blogger so service is faster as he lives in the same time zone with me, i.e. same island as me. But of course, my server is in the United States, not in Penang. Hehehe, otherwise, I think I will die with our local broadband speed.
02Jan How to improve Infolinks to make money?
In my previous post, Tom asked if it is worth it is worth implementing Infolinks into niche blogs.
Tom asked :
That would be very handy! I am thinking about implementing InfoLinks into a few of my niche blogs , do you think its worth it?
Well, below is the screenshot of the payment I received from Infolinks on December 30, 2008 :
Infolinks work with Google and we cannot get penalised for selling links. So, it is a safe bet. Moreover, it doesn’t intrude into our regular readers’ view because the tiny bubble pop up doesn’t show unless we mouse over the link. Regular readers will know those double underline words are ads link.
However, organic traffic will immediately click on them because the links look like a useful link.
But I must warn bloggers that it is wise to reduce the links per page or else we will get too many links inserted into our page. You can limit the number of links to appear on each page.
What you need to do is to add a line like the one I bolded below :
var infolink_pid =MY INFOLINK ID;
var infolink_link_color = ‘708090′; (colour that I chose)
var infolink_title_color = ‘708090′;
var infolink_text_color = ‘708090′;
var infolink_ad_link_color = ‘24951E’;
var infolink_ad_effect_type = 0;
var infolink_anow = 5;
It means only 5 links will appear on each page. You can set any number you like. Otherwise, Infolinks will insert insane numbers of links and hence, make people and yourself go crazy with the double underlined links.
So, ready to Infolinks yet? Infolinks can make money if you know how. I only use it on a few blogs which I don’t normally do paid post. However, you can choose to leave infolinks out of your posts by adding in a few codes. You can find all these codes on your Infolinks dashboard under Implementation guide.
31Dec Google December pagerank update - the final one for 2008
Well, well, Google pagerank update happens again.
I notice a drop in pagerank for two of my blogs. Again, my faith blog lost another PR eventhough I didn’t do a thing to it. No paid post, not selling links. Anyway, the traffic to this faith blog is not much and I don’t get many backlinks. So, I cannot complain about it, I guess. Now, it is only PR 1/10. :(
But, on the other hand, my Penang Foods blog has gained another notch to PR 3/10. So, I better don’t gripe about losing pagerank.
It seems that Google pagerank update is more frequent nowadays. But anyway, this is December Google pagerank is definitely the last.