The following is a guest post from John Schroeder who regularly writes for his blog PassiveFamilyIncome.com.

Are you looking for ways to make your life simpler? If you are like most people, then getting your personal finances under control would go a long way to improving your life. Paying for monthly expenses, managing your career, and saving for retirement are just a few of the financial issues that ordinary people face every single day.

So what are some ways that you can fix your personal finances to make life easier? Get a second job? Cut your expenses? Downsize your home? These are all ways to help out with your finances, but are only short term solutions that require personal sacrifice.

There is another option however that does not require as many personal sacrifices and is often referred to as passive income. While the term passive income means many different things to different people, there is one common theme that is agreed upon. Once a passive income stream is created and begins earning money, there is little to no ongoing effort on your part.

If you are interested in learning how creating passive income can help you simplify your life, please take a look at some reasons listed below.

1. Automate your Personal Finances Using Passive Income

Building recurring income streams can help you automate your personal finances. Since a passive income stream does not require a lot of your time once created, it is a natural way to start automating your finances. If you have a passive income source that brings in money each month, think about ways you can use that income to automatically pay one of your expenses. This is a perfect opportunity to pay off monthly expenses like car payments, cable and phone bills, just to name a few.

Think about how much time savings and satisfaction you will get if you can automate just a few of your monthly expenses? This will make your life so much simpler!

2. Healthy Living

One of the best ways to simplify your life is to live a healthy lifestyle. Getting the appropriate amount of sleep, reducing stress, eating healthy, and frequent exercise are all activities that will make you healthier. As a result of living healthier, you can lower medical costs and avoid unnecessary doctor’s office visits which have a positive impact on your life. In addition, the healthier your are the more productive and efficient you will be.

The direct results of building passive income is one way that you can live a healthier life. The time savings (once an income stream is setup) benefit of focusing on recurring income streams make them well worth the effort. Having additional time in your day will allow you to exercise more often, eat healthier (as you have more time to cook), reduce stress (from the daily grind), and much more!

All of these health benefits as a result of creating passive income will make your life simpler.

3. Pay off Debt

Do you carry a lot of debt? Maybe you have that lingering car payment that you would like to get rid of but just can’t come up with the extra money to pay it off? Creating passive income streams is one way to pay off those recurring expenses every month without any worries. The first step is to identify monthly bills that you would like to automatically eliminate from your budget.

Once you have identified a monthly expense you would like to pay off, go out and build a passive income stream that brings in a monthly amount that can cover your expense. Don’t think this is possible? I can tell you first hand that this is how my family pays for our monthly car payment. A portion of our recurring monthly passive income covers our vehicle expenses every month!

4. Build Your Savings

Having adequate savings is important for any family. Establishing multiple income streams provides an opportunity to build your family nest egg. In the event of a family emergency, job loss, or other unexpected expense – a solid savings can really ease the pain of your hardship.

So how can you build your family savings? You guessed it – by creating passive income streams! Think of how much easier your everyday life would be if you had an automated process to consistently build your savings over time without worrying about it.

5. Start Donating Money

Many times in life I have found that giving can be much more rewarding than receiving. Are there local charities that you want to donate to but just can’t scrounge the extra money? Using passive income to donate money is a great way to give back to others who may be less fortunate or down on their luck.

Donating to others is a very rewarding activity. When you see others struggling to eat or find shelter everyday, it can really put a new perspective on your life. If you are looking to step back from the daily hustle and bustle, then donating to others can help you to simplify your life!

It takes time and work

Creating passive income is no get rich quick scheme. While it can really help you simplify your life by helping your personal finances, it still takes time and work to establish solid income streams.  If managed properly, the income generated from these types of sources are well worth the effort.

Note from Bob: The hardest thing about building a passive income stream is getting started. For me I have found that writing for Hubpages and other similar sites is one of the easiest ways to get the ball rolling. Lots of people like to rent out real estate (for a positive cashflow) or receive royalty payments from writing books, songs, or selling photography.

What have you done to start creating passive income?

A few months ago I wrote an article about what you should do with your old cell phone. It talked about a service that Amazon offered where they would buy your old cell phone off of you. I gave it a go and pulled out a 3 year old cell-phone that was collecting dust in my closet and they sent a check for $20.

I found a few more places online that will not only buy your old cell phones, but a lot of other electronic junk you may have laying around the house. And yes, some of them buy your broken electronic toys as well. I haven’t checked but my hunch is that selling these items yourself on Ebay would yield a higher return. But if you just want to quickly and easily unload a few old electronic items in exchange for cash, one of these sites are probably the way to go.

BuyMyTronics.com

They offer free shipping and purchase old Game consoles, Cell Phones, PDA’s, iPods, and iPhones.

Gazelle.com

Gazelle seems to have the process down pretty well. It is a very easy-to-use site that also offers free shipping for your items. They buy Cell Phones, Digital Cameras, Laptops, MP3 Players, PDAs, Video Games, Gaming Consoles, GPS Devices, Camcorders, Satellite Radios, Desktop Computers, LCD Monitors, External Drives, Movies, Calculators, Camera Lenses, Projectors, Blu-Ray Players, and Home Audio equipment.

MyBoneyard.com

This is a very simple site and they buy Desktop computers,Cell Phones, Smart Phones, Laptops, Flat-Panel monitors, Digital music players, Camcorders, Game systems, GPS, and Cameras.

Do you know of any other places to sell your old electronics?

Bob enjoys dark chocolate, paying off debt, giving, Foosball, loose-leaf tea, helping people succeed, learning, anything God created, playing guitar, doing things the "long" way, Philippians, excellence, Chick-Fil-A, and making his wife smile. He started ChristianPF in 2007 and has been having a blast ever since. Find him on Facebook & Twitter.

I have now been using Ebates for a while and with it being completely FREE and incredibly simple, I am still surprised how few of people are taking advantage of it.

In an attempt to show how simple it is, I created a short little video to explain the process…

Basically, merchants pay Ebates to refer customers to them. Ebates then pays a chunk of that back to the shoppers themselves. Win, win, win.

That’s it. It is completely free, only takes a minute or so to sign up and then you can start earning money. I have now received 3 checks from Ebates and while I wish they paid monthly, they do indeed pay out every 3 months like they promised. To sign up just head over to Ebates.com.

Here is how Ebates describes the process:

A few things worth mentioning about Ebates

• The payout percentages vary from 1% to about 25%
• They have a ton of merchants – many well known stores: Best Buy, Walmart, Staples, and really about anything you can imagine
• Some merchants offer cash bonuses for signing up
• Ebates also offers referral bonuses for friends that sign up
• Payment options include Paypal or a paper check
• They also have a toolbar that will tell you if you are on a site that offers a cashback bonus

I signed up for Ebates last year and have added them to my online shopping arsenal along with Amazon Prime and Bing’s Cashback Program. Do you use Ebates? Has your experience been as good as mine?

Bob enjoys dark chocolate, paying off debt, giving, Foosball, loose-leaf tea, helping people succeed, learning, anything God created, playing guitar, doing things the "long" way, Philippians, excellence, Chick-Fil-A, and making his wife smile. He started ChristianPF in 2007 and has been having a blast ever since. Find him on Facebook & Twitter.

Money Magazine created another article that I am always interested in reading. It was a list of the top 10 best paying jobs in the U.S.. It’s funny, every time I see one of these lists there are always lots of comments disputing what is listed. In a previous list I put up about 25 good paying jobs you could get without a degree, there were lots of comments arguing against the average salaries listed. So, take it with a grain of salt – even if it isn’t 100% accurate, it still is interesting to see what professions we as a nation highly esteem (hence the high rate of pay).

Money’s Top 10 best paying jobs

So here is the list from Money Magazine…

1. Anesthesiologist

Median salary: $292,000

2. Physician/Obstetrician/Gynecologist

Median salary: $222,000

3. Psychiatrist

Median salary: $177,000

4. Nurse Anesthetist

Median salary: $157,000

5. Sales Director

Median salary: $140,000

6. Actuary

Median salary: $129,000

7. Finance Director

Median salary: $121,000

8. Software Architect

Median salary: $117,000

9. Attorney/Lawyer

Median salary: $115,000

10. Insurance Broker

Median salary: $114,000

Thoughts about the top-paying careers

As you would bet you don’t see teachers, police officers, or social workers on the list. But it is nice to see that health professionals are topping the list. Many of them go to school for a decade, work crazy hours, and in crazy conditions and devote their lives to improving the health of their patients.

I would love to see Pastors get paid more (and dare I say appear on this list?). While Pastoring a church is a full-time job in itself, many of them have to do it in addition to their day-job. It would be great if all the pastors could devote all their time to pastoring, rather than working another job to pay the bills.

The U.S. has been a blessed nation because traditionally we have put God first. Without Pastors shepherding the flock, this country would be in a much worse spot than it is.

What about you? What jobs do you think should be on the best-paying list?

Bob enjoys dark chocolate, paying off debt, giving, Foosball, loose-leaf tea, helping people succeed, learning, anything God created, playing guitar, doing things the "long" way, Philippians, excellence, Chick-Fil-A, and making his wife smile. He started ChristianPF in 2007 and has been having a blast ever since. Find him on Facebook & Twitter.

Over the last month or so I have been running a little bit of an experiment. Basically, after hearing from some others that there is money to be made with Hubpages, I decided to give it a go.

What is Hubpages?

Before I start getting into detail, I should explain the basics. Hubpages is a website that basically allows you to publish an article on their site. I use the term “article” loosely because it can be as short as an article or more like a single page website. It is completely up to the user. A hub (their lingo for article) can be about any topic you could possibly want to write about. You could create a hub explaining 10 things you wished people knew about you, how to play guitar with your toes, or facts about albino grizzly bears.

You do not need to be a great writer and honestly, I have seen some people who are terrible writers do quite well. All you need is the ability to say a little bit about something.

So how do you make money with Hubpages?

There are actually a variety of ways, but the simplest and most effective way I have found so far has been by using Adsense. After you finish your first hub you can install your Adsense ID and you will begin sharing the revenue with Hubpages for your hubs.

If you pick good keywords (which I will get to in a minute) you will likely begin getting traffic from the search engines within 24 hours of publishing it. If these visitors click on the ads you will get a cut of that revenue (I think it is 60%).

My results during July

I spent most of July trying to create a hub every day or so and I am now up to 23 hubs. I didn’t do the best job with keyword research and did very little if any work after creating the hubs and yet I still made $47.14 in July.

This breaks down to $2.05 per hub/month. Two dollars doesn’t sound too exciting, but if you consider that is probably completely passive income it is pretty exciting. In theory, that $2 per hub should continue paying that each month – and to be honest most pages do better in the search engines after they have been around a few months or more. So it very well could increase over time as well.

I am going to continue to create some more hubs during the month of August and see what the results are. I will try to keep this post updated with the new results each month.

Steps to get started

If you are interested in giving this a shot, these are the steps to get started.

1. Sign up at Hubpages
2. Create your first hub. Once you get to the design page, it is pretty self-explanatory.
3. Sign up for an Adsense account (if you don’t have one). This might take a couple days to get approval.
4. Add your Adsense ID to Hubpages. When you are logged into Hubpages, you click the “My Account” button, and then the “Affiliate Settings” link. This is where you will install your Adsense ID.
5. That’s it. Once it is installed, you will begin making money when someone clicks on the ads. Warning: do not click the ads yourself or tell others to click them. Google will catch you and will ban you from the program.

Keys to succeeding

Keyword research

This is probably the most important part. The title of your hub needs to be based on your keyword research. A good place to look is Google’s Keyword Research tool – drop in some keywords that your article might be about and see what comes back at you. I believe this is more of an art than a science, so just find a keyword phrase that is being searched for and give it a shot.

But I do suggest looking for longer phrases, i.e. Don’t title your page “ipods” but something like “how to put music on your ipod” would likely work a lot better. But either way, you just have to test to see what works. Sometimes your research will work just like planned and other times it won’t. But the good news is that even if you don’t do any research, you still have a chance of picking up some visitors on Hubpages. But, the more you plan out your keywords the better you will do.

Get Links

Like I mentioned above, I didn’t really get many links to my hubs, but if you can link to it from your blogs and get other links it will definitely be helpful. Submitting it to social bookmarking sites might be helpful as well. Linking your hubs to each other is a good idea too.

Content

Generally speaking the more content you put on your hub the better. I would say 400 words should be a minimum. Shooting for 600-1000 would probably be best. And add as many of the widgets as you can. You can add a news widget, a poll to ask your readers a question, etc. You don’t necessarily NEED to add a bunch of widgets, but it will probably help.

Learn and adapt

Not all hubs will work. In fact, for me of the 23 I have created thus far 5 of them are generating about 90% of the traffic.

Referral Program

Per a reader’s request to discuss the referral program, I will touch on that. The links to hubpages in this article are referral links. I haven’t referred any users in the past and honestly don’t really know how or how much can be made from the referrals – but if anyone signs up via the links, I will add that to the update next month.

Looking to find out more?

These are a few articles that go into a whole lot more detail than I did here on how to make money with Hubpages.

• How to make money writing hubs
• How to improve your hubs’ earnings
• Maximizing Adsense revenue with hubpages
• Create a search-engine friendly hubpage

Bob enjoys dark chocolate, paying off debt, giving, Foosball, loose-leaf tea, helping people succeed, learning, anything God created, playing guitar, doing things the "long" way, Philippians, excellence, Chick-Fil-A, and making his wife smile. He started ChristianPF in 2007 and has been having a blast ever since. Find him on Facebook & Twitter.

If you haven’t noticed, just about every pawn and jewelery shop is advertising to buy gold. Gold prices are still very high and everyone is trying to cash in.

Selling your old gold jewelery may or may not be a good idea. If it is just taking up space and has no sentimental value it may be worth thinking about. But the challenge for most people selling their gold is that they have no idea whether they are getting ripped off or not.

The sad truth is that every gold buyer pays a tremendously different amount for your gold. In the video below you find out that the sellers were given the following amounts for the same gold chain…

• $50 from the local pawn shop
• $37 from TurnGold2Cash.com
• $11 from Cash4Gold.com
• $5 from GoldKit.com

It is pretty frustrating to think that you could get $5 or $50 depending on where you sold your gold. So, lesson to be learned – if you are going to sell your gold, do your homework to get the best price and stay away from GoldKit.com!

Be careful selling gold via mail!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56KcAABIn0Y

Have you sold any gold lately? If so, where and how did you do?

Bob enjoys dark chocolate, paying off debt, giving, Foosball, loose-leaf tea, helping people succeed, learning, anything God created, playing guitar, doing things the "long" way, Philippians, excellence, Chick-Fil-A, and making his wife smile. He started ChristianPF in 2007 and has been having a blast ever since. Find him on Facebook & Twitter.

I just recently did some spring cleaning and decided to unload a bunch of old books. Whenever I am getting rid of books I take a couple steps…

See how much the book is selling for

I look the book up on Amazon.com using the ISBN number to see how much used copies are going for…

As you can tell, the cheapest used copies are selling for $4.07. As I will explain below, you probably shouldn’t sell anything for less than a few bucks. You will find that some people sell books for as cheap as a penny. I am not sure why, but it definitely happens.

If the lowest used price is worth my time, I then go to my Amazon seller account homepage (you can open an account here). Once logged in, you will get to your dashboard – see the image below…

Listing your first book on Amazon

Looking at the Dashboard above, if you just click the “List single items” link, it will take you to this screen…

Here, you can select the item type, but I mostly use the ISBN number – it is quicker and more accurate. Once you pull up your specific item, Amazon will take you through a few more steps asking questions about your item. They will want to know…

• What condition the product is in. Is it new, like new, used, torn to shreds, etc…
• Comments about the condition of your product. This is where you will want to write specifics about the product. Is the dust cover missing? Is the entire book underlined in hot pink?
• The price and quantity of your product. I always recommend setting your product at the lowest price. If you don’t you will have a very slim chance of selling it. Most buyers just look for the cheapest item and buy that.
• Select your shipping method. Here you can choose to expedite shipments or ship internationally if you choose.

That is about it! I just repeat that process until I have all of my books (items) listed.

A few things worth mentioning

Amazon gives you a $3.99 shipping credit for each book. I always use Media Mail from the USPS and it normally costs about $2.50 or so to ship each one. Even including packing materials and other incurred expenses, it should be fairly easy to ship books for under $3.99.

Amazon charges lots of fees (only on items that sell). This is why you probably don’t want to sell an item for less than $2-$3. Unless you sign up for a pro account, you will be paying Amazon a fee of $2.35 + 15% of the item sale price. So, selling anything for less than $3.00 will not yield much profit.

To speed up the book-selling process

This step is optional, but will definitely increase the chances that your books will sell and will help you sell them quicker. Normally every day or so I log into my account and adjust the prices of my items to make sure they are the lowest priced.

On the Seller Account Dashboard, click the link called “View your current inventory” and it will take you to a page like this…

Here you will see all of your listed books. It will show you your current selling price and whether or not you have the lowest listed price. If you see a green ball under the low price column, you are in good shape. If you see a lower price, then you will want to click the edit link and lower your price a penny lower than the current lowest price.

If you want, you can waste your life away doing this all day long, but I prefer to do it in early evening – when many of the businesses selling these books are closed. That way I can normally have the low price until morning when they come back in.

Do you have any other tips for selling stuff on Amazon?

Bob enjoys dark chocolate, paying off debt, giving, Foosball, loose-leaf tea, helping people succeed, learning, anything God created, playing guitar, doing things the "long" way, Philippians, excellence, Chick-Fil-A, and making his wife smile. He started ChristianPF in 2007 and has been having a blast ever since. Find him on Facebook & Twitter.

I can remember my teenage days well. I didn’t want to work, but I needed to make money to support my social life. So I umpired, cut grass, and bagged groceries. I didn’t particularly love any of the jobs, but in order to offset my spending, I needed to work.

The good news for teens today is there are a wide range of ways to make money – that weren’t around when I was a teenager. Most of them require a good work ethic, but there are a lot of new opportunities available.

Luckily for many teens, they may already be very skilled in certain areas that could easily translate into a nice side income for them. For example, I remember hearing about a teenage girl who designed Myspace backgrounds and was making more money than her parents. So potentially, a teenager who is willing to work hard could make considerably more than working traditional “jobs” like at McDonalds, cutting grass, bussing tables, etc.

What type of teen are we talking about?

The seven year period defined as the “teenage years” sees a wide range of maturity levels. I remember moments where I showed high levels of maturity and moments that are better left unspoken. Interestingly, the frequency my immaturity didn’t necessarily decrease as I grew closer to 20 years old. My point in saying all this is that some of these jobs are going to require a teenager who is “on the ball”in terms of maturity. But if you have (or are) one, these could be much better alternatives to “would you like to supersize that?”

Jobs requiring moderate maturity level

1. Social Marketing Consultant

Many companies are looking for qualified candidates who know the ins and outs of Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter to help them with their social marketing efforts. Head over to a job site and search for “social media”.

2. Sell stuff on eBay for Mom and Dad

I am sure mom and dad wouldn’t mind sharing some of the profits, if you sell some of their clutter for them.

3. Have a Garage Sale

If it is something too large or that won’t sell on eBay for some reason, you can always have an old-fashioned garage sale!

4. Write product reviews

There are places like Ciao, Epinions.com, ReviewStream.com that pay for product reviews – if you have an opinion and can type quickly this might be a good option.

5. Become a Census Taker

The 2010 census is underway and there may still be census taker positions available in your area. You may need to be 18 to apply.

6. Find odd-jobs on Craigslist

Some of these might be landscaping work, or similar odd-jobs, but it might be great summer time work for teens!

7. Bank Account Opening Bonuses

Not sustainable, but it’s a quick way to make money. ING Direct offers $25 for opening a new account and Virtual Bank offers $20. If you do some digging you will probably find many other companies offering cash bonuses for opening accounts.

8. Take online surveys

I am not particularly fond of the whole online survey thing since I had a bad experience using CashCrate. But there are lots of online survey sites and people who do it successfully.

9. Sell Digital Photos

Making money as a photographer has become easier over the last decade. There are now lots of sites looking to buy digital photos: Shutterstock.com, 123RF.com, Dreamstime.com, CreStock.com, Fotolia.com. As with most things, the better you are the more money you will make, but it can be nice passive income if you work at it.

10. Sell Plasma

Not sure how old you have to be, nor how painful it is, but if you are into that sort of thing, it can be a way to make some quick money.

11. Take part in medical studies

I have a couple friends who have almost done this exclusively as a job. They were basically human guinea pigs, but they made some decent cash at it. Sometimes they would have be at the medical facility for up to 48 hours, so your schedule may need to be flexible. Just google “medical studies” + your city to find some options.

12. Tutor or give lessons

Are you great at math, science, or kicking a field goal? Why not advertise your skills to those a few years younger than you? Many parents are willing to pay a teenager to tutor their child in an area that needs development.

13. Create Myspace backgrounds

or Twitter backgrounds for that matter. Just set up a simple site to sell your work, get a paypal “buy it now link” and you are off and running.

Jobs requiring a uniquely mature teenager

14. Create Websites

I can’t tell you how many people have asked me to build them a website since I started this one a couple years ago. I am not seeking the work and people are requesting it, so if you do a little legwork and pursue small business owners, there is a lot of work available. Teens might be great for this, because they would be able to work for less than some higher end website developers, which would put them in the price range that it seems many small businesses are looking to spend.

15. Blogging

Two years ago I wasn’t sure if there was money to be made blogging, but I have since found it to work out nicely. It isn’t something that will provide much income quickly, but if you stick at it, it can. I wrote extensively about how to make money from a blog a few months ago.

16. Design Web Logos

If you have a flair for design, it may be worth trying to make some money designing logos for small business or blogs.

17. Freebie Trading

I first heard about freebie trading from Leslie who made $28K last year doing it part time. It seems like it requires a certain kind of person, but clearly there is potential as a decent money maker.

18. Freelance Write

As they say on the web “content is king” and everyone wants it. Elance.com is a great place to go to get paid for your writing skills.

19. Sell articles

Following in that same vein, you can sell articles you write at places like Constant-Content.com, ArticleSale.com, Helium.com.

20. Start an eBay business

Last year I experimented with starting an eBay business to see if there was money to be made. While profit margins can be thin selling on eBay, there are over a million eBay businesses, so it is a viable option.

21. Sell widgets on Etsy.com

If you create any kind of arts or crafts or widgets of any sort, you should check out Etsy.com.

22. Join a Focus Group

There are likely to be focus groups in your area that may be willing to hire teens. Google “focus group” and your city to get started.

23. Be a Mystery Shopper

This is the dream job isn’t it? You get to shop and get paid! The added bonus is that you secretly have recourse when you are treated poorly in the store.

More ways for teens to make money

If you are looking for additional reading, check out these articles…

• 12 ways to make extra money
• Making money and earning extra income
• 52 ways to make extra money
• 15 ways for teens to make money this summer
• 26 ways to make extra money
• 15 quick ways to make money

Bob enjoys dark chocolate, paying off debt, giving, Foosball, loose-leaf tea, helping people succeed, learning, anything God created, playing guitar, doing things the "long" way, Philippians, excellence, Chick-Fil-A, and making his wife smile. He started ChristianPF in 2007 and has been having a blast ever since. Find him on Facebook & Twitter.

How about trading it in for an Amazon gift card?

As I was browsing on Amazon the other day, I notice that they work with a program called Flipswap which allows you to trade in your old cell phone or iPod for an Amazon gift card. So, I decided to check it out.

Here’s how it works…

I went back to my closet and found one of our old cell phones and started entering in the information to see what they would give me for it. At first when I searched by Manufacturer I couldn’t find my phone, but when I typed the model number in the search field it came right up. Just like they say, it only takes a couple minutes to plug the information in about the phone. They ask…

• About the cell phone’s condition
• If it has original packaging
• If it has a battery
• If you have a charger
• For the phone’s ESN#

I assume that each one of these questions affects the price they will pay for your old phone. After I plugged all the info in, I was actually surprised to see that they were going to give me $20.25 for my phone. It is in good condition, but it is probably 3 years old and was one of the cheaper phones when I purchased it. So, getting $20 for it is a win for me! I mean what else am I going to do with an old cell phone?

How about Recycling it?

As you probably know just throwing your old cell phones in the trash is a big no-no. According to studies, “Cell phones are potentially hazardous waste because they contain lead, mercury, cadmium and arsenic. If thrown in the trash and sent to incinerators or landfills, environmental contamination can occur from combustion and leaching into soil and groundwater.”

Which makes me wonder – if they are that bad for the environment, what kind of impact are they having on their users? But we will leave that discussion for another day.

Where to recycle old cell phones, pagers, iPods, PDA’s, etc

RecycleMyCellPhone.Org has a similar program to the Flipswap program mentioned above that allows you to mail your device to them for free.

What do you do with your old iPods and cell phones?

Bob enjoys dark chocolate, paying off debt, giving, Foosball, loose-leaf tea, helping people succeed, learning, anything God created, playing guitar, doing things the "long" way, Philippians, excellence, Chick-Fil-A, and making his wife smile. He started ChristianPF in 2007 and has been having a blast ever since. Find him on Facebook & Twitter.

How I replaced my day-job with earnings from this blog

In less than 2 years I went from not knowing what a blog was to making more with one than my corporate desk job.

The purpose of this article is to show you how to make money with a blog. I suspect most people won’t stick with it long enough to make a full-time income, but even making an extra few hundred dollars a month isn’t bad either. This article is extremely long (more like 10 articles), but I wanted it to be a thorough and helpful resource for those wanting to start a blog or make some more money from the one they already have.

For the sake of convenience, I added links to different sections of this article, so you can easily skip ahead to the section you want…

• How it all started for me
• Blogging basics
• How to get a self-hosted blog
• The importance of a customizable theme
• How I make money with this blog
• How long does it take to make money from a blog
• How to get traffic to your blog
• SEO tips for blogs
• How I increased Adsense income by $1500 in under 3 months
• 11 Tools that have helped me succeed
• Warnings for those just starting out

I should also mention that I really haven’t written about blogging or making money from blogs on ChristianPF yet, because I wanted to make sure that it was a viable option for making some cash. Now that I have found that it is, I decided to pour out everything I learned the last two years about it…

How it all started for me

About 2 years ago I was talking to a friend of mine about the idea of building websites full of free information to help people. After brainstorming a bit, I got a couple ideas of topics that I was passionate about: Proverbs and Personal Finance. My first idea was to post a Proverb each day and comment on it. As I explained my idea further to him, he informed me that I would basically have a blog. I didn’t know what a blog was, but I thought, “oh, ok, sure.”

So, over the next few weeks I read as much as I could find about blogging and ultimately decided on creating a blog about Personal Finance from a Christian perspective. I had been very interested in helping people with their money, so blogging seemed like a great way to reach people all over the world. Over the next couple months, I started writing articles and officially launched ChristianPF in June of 2007.

At this point I had thought about making money from the site, but had no idea how and honestly didn’t really think it was possible to make a living at it. I threw up an Adsense ad just to see what would happen and I still remember how excited I was when I saw that I had made my first 7 cents! From there, I set a goal to make $100 by the end of 2007 which was pretty easy to accomplish – even without knowing anything. I should also mention that from June 2007 to June 2008 I spent about 4-6 hours each weekend writing articles and averaged about 4 new articles each week. And I spent a few more hours each week on site maintenance, emails, social media, etc. So in total I probably was spending about 10 hours each week working on the site.

Getting laid off

In July 2008 things got interesting. The large brokerage firm that I had worked 5 years for was bought out by a larger firm. I was told that my department would no longer be needed, so they handed me a severance check and I was on my way. By this point I was making some money from the blog, but not enough to even pay the rent each month.

After much prayer I decided against looking for another “day job” and decided to work full time on building the blog. Thankfully we had paid off most of our debt, and had my wife’s income as a support to buy us some time. I figured I would give it a shot for a few months and if it didn’t work out I would find another 9-5.

From that point, the income generated from this website has increased each month and in February 2009 it exceeded my monthly income from my old day job. I am still a little bit in awe and can’t believe that I am actually paying the bills from this website!. But, I thank God everyday that I get to do this – I really did not like working in Corporate America and am so thankful! It is hard work, but it doesn’t really seem like it when you are doing something that you are passionate about and love doing it.

Blogging basics

I am going to try to boil this down to the essentials. There are whole books written on this subject, so I am not going to try to cover everything here. If you are looking for a good book about blogging for beginners, I suggest reading Darren Rowse’s Problogger. But for a quick, bottom-line version keep reading…

What is a blog?

A blog is short for “weblog”. Basically, it is just a website that has entries listed in reverse chronological order. The original idea behind it was to be a online journal or diary that was updated daily (or as frequently as the writer chose). Over the last decade many software programs and blogging platforms have been created to make the process VERY EASY.

As the blog writer, depending on which platform you use, you can just type your entry, press submit and it shows up on your blog for the world to see. Most bloggers don’t know any programming languages and are not “techies.” Starting a blog is one of the easiest ways out there to start a website. If you haven’t started one yet, why not try it? It can be very quick to set up and can be completely free.

Is it easy to start a blog?

It is very easy. Even if there are steps along the way that are confusing, there are plenty of resources to get the help you need. There are over 20 million blogs in existence, so it can’t be that difficult.

How much does it cost to blog?

There are many services that allow you to start a blog for free (see below). I suggest using one of the free services to get a basic feel for blogging and “get your feet wet.” Once you decide you want to stick with it and that you want to make money with your blog, I suggest moving up to a self-hosted blog (see below). Anyone who is really trying to make money with a blog will probably be more successful with a self-hosted blog. Getting a self-hosted blog may not be free, but still can be VERY inexpensive. You will need to pay for nothing more than a domain name ($10) and web-hosting (as cheap as a few bucks a month).

Getting a blogging platform

All 4 of the options listed are free. The first 3 options are the easiest, but the are also limited on features. If you are just trying to make an extra few hundred dollars from your blog, these options could work. But if you are really serious about trying to make good money from your blog, I recommend self-hosting your blog (which we talk about in the next section…).

Tumblr.com – This is probably the simplest blogging platform to use, but it also is the probably the least customizeable. So, it might be something good to start with, but it would be more difficult to build an income-generating website with it.

Blogger.com – Blogger is also very good, easy to set up, owned by Google, you can customize the theme, and the domain name includes “.blogspot.com” (in some people’s opinion a little less professional). Blogger continues to become more customizeable and currently has a lot more options than they did a few years ago.

Wordpress.com – I like wordpress.com they are completely free, easy to set up, you can customize the theme, but other customizations are limited, domain name includes “.wordpress.com”.

Wordpress.org – Wait, what is the difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org? To put it simply Wordpress.com is where you will go to set up a basic, easy blog with limited features. Wordpress.org is where you will go to get a self-hosted blog. If you get to the point where you are serious about blogging and really want to make some money with it, you need to self-host your blog.

How to setup a self-hosted blog

If you are going to be using one of the first three options above, you can skip this section.

If you are serious about blogging and are looking for the best way to customize your blog’s look and other features, then getting a self-hosted blog from Wordpress.org is probably the best way to go. It is currently the top choice for most bloggers. It does require more work up front and does have small costs associated with it: buying a domain name ($10/year) and hosting your blog ($10/month).

One of the big advantages is that you can use your own domain name (i.e. yourblog.com). While this might not seem like a big deal, it is a lot easier for people to remember yourblog.com rather than yourblog.blogspot.com which is what you will be given if you use Blogger.

I will warn you, being a non-techie myself, this took me some time figuring out how to get my self-hosted site set up. Wordpress.org has a great step-by-step guide for getting you set up. While it is more work on the front end, I am really glad I got good advice and did this at the beginning, than having to do it now.

Pick a Domain Name

1. You should start by purchasing a domain name. Psychicwhois.com is a great tool to see what names are still available. I would suggest going to for a .com rather than a .info or .us or anything else for that matter. It is just too easy for people to get confused. A .com is always going to hold more value than any other extension.

2. Once you get it picked out, you need to find somewhere to purchase it. I bought my first few domains at GoDaddy.com and have bought the remaining ones from Dreamhost. While GoDaddy is about one of the biggest names out there, I can’t say that I recommend them because of some of their advertising campaigns that they run. But the good news is that there are thousands of options of places where you can purchase a domain name.

Pick a host for your blog

The webhost is the company that you pay to store all of your files for your blog. There are also a million web hosting companies out there. I don’t suggest just looking for the cheapest one, because a lot of these companies are not very reliable and your site might be down quite a bit.

I like to go with the bigger companies who have a longer track record and are more established. They may cost a dollar or two more a month when you are starting out and it is well worth it.

I have hosted my websites with Dreamhost from the beginning, mostly because I knew a lot of people using them and I got a hosting package for about $7.00 a month. I did find hosting cheaper, but with hosting you often get what you pay for – so keep that in mind.

COUPON: Also if you do use Dreamhost – I have a 25% off coupon you can use, just enter “Christianblog” as the promo code.

I still host most of my websites at Dreamhost, but have moved ChristianPF.com to MediaTemple. The main reason was that since my livelihood now depended on the website I wanted a higher level of service from my hosting company. MediaTemple has been great in that regard, but as always it comes with a price. I am currently paying $50 a month for hosting with them.

While I have never used BlueHost, I have heard decent things about them from others. They may be worth checking out if you are pricing web hosts.

Get a customizable theme

After I took the step the self-host this site, the next step that greatly helped me increase earnings was choosing a highly-customizable theme. I don’t necessarily recommend doing this at the beginning, since it does cost money to get a good theme, but once you are committed to blogging and are willing to invest a few bucks, putting that money towards a good theme is a good investment. For this site, I purchased Semiologic, which is a fantastic theme that gives you a lot of control. It costs $300 for the full version, but I quickly made that money back because the theme allowed me optimize my ad placement in ways that no other themes did.

If you are a programmer, you really don’t need to buy a theme because you can make the all the customizations yourself to any basic theme. Since starting to blog a couple years ago, I have learned some HTML codes, but I am still about the furthest thing from a programmer! So for people like me, a customizable theme allows me to control things and areas of the site that I would never be able to change with out the help of a programmer.

My Themes

At the time of this writing, I am still using Semiologic for the theme on this site, but since I had been hearing so much buzz about the Thesis Theme, I decided to buy it and try it out on another one of my sites. I have to admit, I never thought it would be able to compete with Semiologic, but I am finding out how wrong I was. After testing it out, I really am very impressed with it. Right out of the box, it provides you with a very pretty looking site that is very easy to customize. It is SEO optimized very well, has a ton of support for it, and once you figure out how to use the hooks you can customize it to oblivion if you want. The kicker is that you can buy it and get lifetime updates for $87.

I still really like Semiologic and think it is a great theme, but for the price, if I were shopping right now, I would go with Thesis. I am going to get to know and learn Thesis on my other site for a while and make sure that it really is everything that I think it is and eventually I will convert this site to Thesis.

Update: I have now switched this site over to Thesis and I couldn’t be more happy with it. If you do get it, I recommend the Thesis OpenHook Plugin, and you will be able to easily do just about any customization that you can imagine.

How I make money with this blog

When I go to family functions or social events I often get a blank stare when I explain what I do for a living. I think people understand the part that I write articles and put them on a website, but when it comes to making money from it, they don’t get it. In this section I will lay it out and hopefully it will help bring some clarity…

CPC Ad Networks

There are a few different ad networks that I use on CPF. The most successful one has been Google’s Adsense program. Basically what they do is read the article that I write and find ads that are relevant to it and display them next to the article. The great thing about it is that by having extremely relevant ads, it actually can be quite beneficial to the readers as well. For example, if I write an article explaining what an IRA was, but didn’t mention where you could open one, Adsense would likely be displaying ads of places to open an IRA. So as a reader, if I read that article and decided that I did want to open an IRA, the ads would be providing options that the article did not.

I am currently doing a few tests with another CPC network called Chitika. Apparently, you can use it in conjunction with Adsense. The jury is still out, but I am interested to see how it compares to Adsense. All things considered, I have found that if optimized correctly, Adsense really can work well. I will explain more about how to optimize it in sections below.

CPM Ad Networks

While Adsense pays on a click basis (CPC), I use other ad networks that pay by the total # of impressions (CPM). At the beginning, these networks didn’t produce much income, but as the traffic grows CPM networks seem to work well in conjunction with Adsense. I use (or have used) Adsdaq, Casale Media, Adbrite, Adify, Veremedia, and BuzzLogic. Each has their own strengths and weaknesses and may be suitable for one kind of a site and not another.

Affiliate Product Sales

Basically an example of an affiliate sale would be if you sold lawn mowers and I referred a customer to you, if they purchased you would pay me back a % of the sale for referring them. There are a million options for this on the internet now. The main programs I use are Amazon’s Affiliate program, LinkConnector, Commission Junction, Shareasale, E-Junkie, and LinkShare. There are many others, but these are a few of the more popular ones available.

I have a very strong policy about honest recommendations. I give my honest opinions about products that I find regardless of how it will affect affiliate sales. This is probably why I don’t really make too much with affiliate products. For example, I wrote about Cash Crate and updated the article to show what I didn’t like about them. Because Cash Crate has such a generous referral program, I know some people making lots of money from it, but I just don’t feel comfortable recommending it since I had a bad experience using it.

On the other hand there are products like ING Direct, Ebates, Amazon Prime, Ebay, Sharebuilder, and Quicken Online that I recommend and also have some sort of affiliate or referral program as well. These are what I love because I can help readers by pointing them to good resources and tools that have helped me and get paid in the process. I know some people don’t have a problem promoting anything that will pay them, but I just can’t, in good conscience, recommend something to someone that I don’t genuinely believe will help them.

Direct Ad Sales

I also sell ad space directly to advertisers. This hasn’t provided much income for me yet and may or may not even be worth my time. I know that in certain niche markets direct ad sales can work out very well, but thus far it hasn’t been a big money maker on CPF.

How long does it take to make money from a blog

The second question that people normally ask after, “how do I make money with a blog?” is, “how long is it going to take?”. Well just like most things in life, there is no legitimate quick and easy way. It takes time and hard work.

As you can see from the chart below it took me a long time before the trend started moving upward. But, for more than a year I was working at it about 10 hours a week. And don’t forget I didn’t know anything about blogging, advertising, getting traffic, etc when I started. So, if you know that ChristianPF is a blog, then you have a head start on me.

Also, you have the wonderful privilege of reading this article where I am going explain most of the things that I did to help create that upward trend seen below – that I didn’t know the first year.

Blog earnings visualized

From other people I know who make a decent amount from their blogs, this curve seems to be typical. While the first year didn’t yield much income, it was crucial for the second year to be able to. While I wish I could tell you that you could jump right ahead to where the income starts increasing quicker, but I just don’t think it is likely. There are some tips in this article that I wish I would have known at the beginning and I think they will make things go a lot quicker, but there is no getting around the fact that it is going to take time to get there.

But just like anything, the more you put in, the more you get out. The two keys are consistency and a willingness to learn. Without them, I would say that it will be very difficult to make money with your blog.

How to get traffic to your blog

So now are getting to the point of this article where I start sharing everything I have learned over the last couple years about blogging. So, if you are like most, you want to create a blog so that others can read what you have to say. Sadly, people will not find your blog (in the beginning anyway) unless you do a little legwork. These are some of the things I did to get traffic and some that I still do.

The first thing I suggest doing is writing a few great articles about your topic and feature them in your sidebar. Then I would start working on generating traffic, because you not only want traffic, but you want returning traffic as well.

Guest Posting!!

I think this is one of the best ways to start getting some quick traffic. Almost every blog I know allows guest posts (even this one) – and almost every one of those does not discriminate. What I mean is that most bloggers (that I know anyway) will accept or reject a guest post based on it’s quality, not on whether they know the person or not. This provides a great opportunity for a newbie to write an article that could be seen by 20,000 readers. I don’t know of any other method that could bring traffic as quick.

I must admit, I could still do more guest posting myself. I have been pleased with the results in the past. The key is to write a great article – don’t hold back your best stuff. I have seen people grow their blogs very quickly by giving some of their best articles away as guest posts. Also, only submit unpublished content as a guest post. If it has already been published, then the blog that is allowing you to guest post won’t get any search engine traffic for that article. But there are places to republish your articles you have already published – we will get to that in a minute…

Sign up for blog community sites

Just a few off the top of my head are mybloglog.com, technorati.com, and blogcatalog.com. Look for other blogs in your niche and join their networks and ask to become their friends. Networking with some of your fellow bloggers here will send a few visitors your way and is a good way to get started.

Submit to Blogcarnivals

One of the best things beginning bloggers can do is to sign up for blogcarnivals. At this site you can submit articles that you wrote on your blog to be included in a list of articles by the hosting blog. It is kind of like “open mic night.” If you have a good article with a good title, you can get some good traffic from blogcarnivals, not to mention incoming links from other related sites.

Join Directories

If I were starting a blog today, one of the first things I would do is Google “whatever topic I want to blog about” + “directory” This should return a list of web directories about your topic. Getting added to these directories will only help. You may not get a lot of traffic from them, but ultimately they will help you get more traffic from the search engines. A few to get you started…

• Blogs.com
• Blogged.com
• Blogflux.com
• BOTW.org
• DMOZ.org
• Yahoo Directory

Blog Commenting

One of the absolute best ways for new blogs to get traffic is just to comment on other blogs. Commenting with a thoughtful and provocative response will often send a few visitors your way. The blogging community is generally a very social community and those who are active in the community often reap the rewards of it.

Forum Commenting

Becoming involved in forums related to your topic and having a link to your blog in the signature line can send a few visitors. Google “your topic” and “forums” and you are sure to find a few. Just don’t be annoying and go in just to promote yourself. People can see that from a mile away. The new age of the internet (aka Web 2.0) is very much a “give and you shall receive” environment. If you seek to give and be a benefit before seeking your own rewards, you will be much better off. Why not get started at the Christian PF Forums?

Linking to other blogs

I don’t know what it is, but everyone wants to know when someone is talking about them. So it is with blogs. When people link to my site, I get a notification and often go check out who linked to me and what the context was. I have had some good relationships form just from this.

Create Squidoo pages

Squidoo.com, Hubpages.com and a handful of others are sites that allow you to build a simple page about a topic. You can do it very quick and the pages often rank well in the search engines. If you build a page that gets a little bit of traffic and have links coming back to your site, you will catch some of those visitors.

Article submissions

Submit articles to article submission sites. These sites collect articles and most allow a bio-section that can include a link back to your blog. Here are a few that are worth looking into…

• ezinearticles.com
• goarticles.com
• articledashboard.com
• buzzle.com
• articlecity.com

SEO tips for blogs

It will take a while to get a decent amount of traffic from the search engines. The search engines do not like NEW websites. They like more established sites that have a lot of people linking to them, hence proving that they are reputable. This is why getting links from other bloggers, directories, other web sites that have a good reputation in the search engines’ eyes is very important.

As your blog begins to grow by having more pages and more links the search engines will begin to send you more and more traffic. This is a good thing!! But, as I mentioned earlier, they are very wary of new websites – so time will be your ally when it comes to the search engines.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an science/art (depending on who you ask) that focuses on getting your website or blog to the top of the search engine listings. Being at the top of Google’s results for any decent keywords can be a great source of traffic and the greatest part about it is that it is FREE TRAFFIC!!!

I am not going to get deep into SEO much here, there are far more thorough books about it (i.e. SEOBook) but as your blog grows you should try to learn more about it, as it will only help you by knowing more. Just like most of the things you will learn while blogging, you don’t need to be an expert at it – just having a working knowledge will provide great results.

The thing to remember about the search engines (especially Google) is that they are trying to create a perfect system where any searcher can find exactly what they want. Google wants to display the most relevant websites to their searchers. They will never have a perfect system, but they probably won’t stop trying.

If you can keep this in mind, it will be very helpful when you are trying to optimize your blog. Don’t waste your time trying to trick them, they will figure it out and will punish you for it. Just focus on making it very clear to them what your site is all about and writing great content for your reader and the rest will take care of itself.

So, let’s get to some SEO. These are some of the most important (in my opinion) pieces of SEO that every beginner should know. If you do these right, you will be much better off than most people who don’t know anything about SEO.

1. Title Tags

This may be the single most important part of on-page SEO. The title tag of your website is what shows up in the top of your browser window. It is also one of the most important determining factors that the search engines use to determine what your site is about.

In the above picture you can see that the title tag is “Christian Personal Finance – Financial help, debt help…” You WILL want to make sure that your title tags contain the keywords that you want to rank for in the search engines. If your site is about rock climbing, you will not want to have “welcome to Bill’s blog” in the title tags. Something better would be “Rock climbing 101 | the best rock climbing techniques”

2. Anchor Text

Anchor text – the text that people use when linking. For instance, if I created a link for a great search engine you can see that the link will go to Google. “great search engine” is the anchor text. The anchor text is a big deal, because it tells the search engines what other sites say your site is about. Google really places a lot of importance on what words are in the anchor text.

Obviously, you will not be able to control how other people link to your site all of the time. But, for those times that you can, you should use your keywords when possible. Linking to other pages and posts on your website, directory submissions, blog carnivals, and your signature line in forums all may be good places to make sure you get your keywords in your anchor text.

3. Keyword Research

If you are trying to get traffic from search engines, it is always a good idea to know what people are searching for before you start writing. I often use Aaron Wall’s keyword tool and run some keyword ideas through it to get estimates of how many people are searching for them.

4. Get links

We already lightly discussed the importance of links coming into your blog. Other that the great benefit they play in improving your search rankings, they also send visitors to your site. It is an obvious benefit, but often overlooked by people focusing on SEO. If you get a link from a blog that gets a lot of visitors, you could see a huge traffic spike from it. If you get links from lots of blogs, you could and will see visitors coming from most of them. Maybe not a bunch, but as you get more and more links, you will see more visitors coming.

The bottom line about link-building is that you have to create something great that people want to link to. If you can consistently do that, many other things will fall into place.

How I increased Adsense earnings $1500 in less than 3 months

This section is going to be a little bit beyond the basics and I will provide details of how I dramatically improved earnings from Adsense. Just to clarify, at the time of this increase I was already making some money with Adsense, but I had no idea how much difference a few tweaks could make. In my case I increased earnings over $1500 in a short amount of time.

The thing you have to understand about Adsense is that no two sites are alike. Every blog has a different audience and different articles and most likely a different layout, all these things affect Adsense earnings. Knowing that, testing and trying new things is critical to find the winners!

1. Added a Privacy Policy

This is such a simple thing to do. I never realized that is a “requirement” for Adsense publishers, but when I added a link in my footer to my Privacy Policy there was a noticeable increase in earnings. I assume that Google rewards those who have a privacy policy and punishes those that don’t by trimming their earnings. In a perfect world you would want your lawyer to draft your privacy policy, but here is a sample template of a privacy policy to make your life a bit easier.

2. Put ads where people’s eyeballs went…

For me there is an eternal struggle between usability and profitability with ads. While I want need to make money to pay my bills, I still want to make this site as user friendly as possible. So, I have made some sacrifices with this site in order to maintain certain levels of usability, but one of the main keys to making money with Adsense is ad placement.

Like I mentioned before, this needs to be experimented with. But for the first year or more of this site I just kinda threw the ads where ever I had extra room. Once I changed the location of my ads, my earnings tripled overnight. It really freaked me out. I had no idea that just moving an ad a couple inches would have such a dramatic effect.

The diagram to the right (from Google) provides some good starting point for what locations work and don’t.

3. Section Targeting

This was another tweak I made that made a noticeable difference in earnings. Basically “section targeting” is telling Google what text on your site to look at when deciding what ads to show. Google is pretty good at figuring this out if you don’t do this, but if you have a lot of stuff going on in your sidebars and footer sections, it is probably worth experimenting with.

It is very easy to implement. You only need to use this tag…

<!– google_ad_section_start –>

to tell Google to start, and this tag…

<!– google_ad_section_end –>

…to tell them to stop. I just added a text widget at the top of my post for the start tag and after the content for the end tag.

4. Who Sees Ads Plugin

This is a great plugin that allows you (as the name suggests) choose which visitors see which ads. There are lots of criteria that you can select, so you can specify that Search Engine users see a particular Adsense unit when regular readers see something else. I have found that search engine visitors click Adsense ads a lot more than regular readers. I still show some Adsense to regular readers, but I focus my energy on the visitors from search engines – this plugin makes this very easy.

5. Changed the colors

When Adsense first came out, people said to make the colors as loud and ugly as possible to draw attention to them. Next I heard that the best thing to do was to blend them into the site. Of the two methods I think that blending works a little better, and definitely looks a lot better! But, I have a slight variation of that has worked even better for me. Currently I have have most of my links set to a lighter blue color. I used to have many of my Adsense ads match that, but I saw a nice increase when I changed the Ad titles to the old standard Link Blue. I feel that visually it is a complement rather than a match. It stands out a little bit more, but doesn’t look bad either – IMO…

6. Wrote articles people are searching for

This might seem unrelated, but it is very important. If you are like most bloggers, you have a regular readership and you have readers from the search engines. For some reason, a lot of bloggers just don’t give much respect to search engine readers and don’t really try to reach out to them other than trying to “convert” them to a regular reader. I approach things a little bit differently, rather than getting frustrated at the fact that so many search engine visitors don’t come back, I started to embrace it. I realized that my main goal of this site was to help people, so why should I care if they only visit once or on a daily basis if they are getting helped? So while I very much appreciate and value my regular readers, I also understand that I can help those who find the site via a search engine.

I started doing keyword research to see what people were looking for in the search engines. If there are people searching to find out how to sell stuff on Ebay, I want to help them find out! What happened for me as I started to become more conscious of what people were searching for was that I started getting more search engine traffic – which of course leads to higher earnings from Adsense.

7. Added a Google search bar

This is a no-brainer. Google is the master of search, so you can bet that their search capability on your site is going to be better than the default Wordpress search tool. By installing this, you will help your visitors find the information that they are looking for on your site and make some extra cash in the process. When the search results (from the websites you choose) are displayed they have the standard Google ads present, just like normal Google search results.

8. Hooked Google Analytics up with Adsense

TA few months ago, Analytics started allowing the option to integrate your Adsense data. This has been so helpful for me. It provides webmasters with a wealth of information about earnings. It is simple to see which articles are making the most money, which keywords are yielding the most, what sites send the most valuable traffic, and a whole lot more. If you use Adsense, don’t pass this one up.

9. Tested, re-tested, and tested again…

When running Adsense tests, I typically let them run for a month in order to make sure they are very thorough. I have a calendar that I use to mark down when I make changes and what changes I make. Then when the test is complete I compare CPM and eCPM rates to see what performed better. A/B split testing is a better method when possible, but for certain tests is just isn’t possible or practical. But either way, if you want to make more money with Adsense, experimenting and testing is a must!

10 tools that have helped make it all possible…

Not all of these tools directly contribute to the bottom line, but each one of them have been very helpful over the last couple years.

1. Google Analytics – which is a wonderful (and free) statistics tool that will help you keep track of your visitors and analyze a lot of data about them. As I mentioned before it now integrates with Adsense to give even more valuable data.
2. Semiologic WP Theme – This is the theme I use for most of my Wordpress sites. It costs about $300 for the full version, but I started with the free version, which I think is far more customizable than the vast majority of WP themes out there already. So if you are just starting out your probably don’t need the full version yet, but eventually it is probably worth considering. For what it has allowed me to do I know that it has paid for itself many times over.
3. Google webmaster tools – This will help you see how Google views your blog. They will also let you know if there are any problems with it that you may not be aware of. For me I had some issues that were really hurting my search rankings, but I found out about them and fixed them and voila! All better.
4. Google’s Keyword Tool – This is a great tool to get ideas about popular keywords as well.
5. SEObook Keyword Tool – I use this to get a ballpark estimate of how many people are searching for particular key phrases.
6. SocialPoster – This tool allows you to submit articles to multiple social sites. I use it to submit to about the top 5-10 social sites.
7. Hittail.com – This one provides ideas for articles based on what you have previously written about and could probably rank for. I just noticed that the free version is gone. If you have a blog that is established it might be worth paying $10 a month for it – I suggest doing the free-trial and see how much it helps you.
8. Stock.xchng – The best free stock photography site I have found.
9. iStockPhoto – The best cheap stock photography site I have found. They have lots of images that you can get for just a few bucks.
10. Feedburner – If you have a blog, you will want to burn a feed. Feedburner makes this fun, organized, and easy…

Warnings for those starting out…

Don’t quit your day-job

Even if you know a lot about making money with a blog (which just be reading this article, you have a tremendous advantage over me when I started) it is going to take a while. This is not a get-rich-quick scheme, it is more of a work-for-free-for-a-long-time-and-then-reap-your-reward type plan. The beautiful thing is that I can now say that it does work if you are diligent and open to learning from your mistakes. But either way, convention wisdom says, build your blog part-time and when you start making more from it than your day-job consider making it a full-time deal. My situation is a unique one and I don’t recommend doing what I did unless it really is God calling you to do so. In my case I am now thankful that I got laid off – if I hadn’t I would probably still be doing a job I didn’t like!

Learn everything you can

One of the advantages I have is that I love to learn and don’t stop when I make a mistake. I work really hard to learn from my mistakes and figure out what the better course of action would be for the next time. You are going to do things wrong, but you just have to keep going and keep learning. Learning how to use Google search is very important. If you do, you will be able to find an answer to just about every problem you encounter on the web.

Avoid time-wasters

Checking your stats every hour, reading 500 blogs in your RSS, playing on Facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon, or Youtube all day will kill your productivity. Focus on what yields results and stay disciplined to stick with that. Social media is an important part of building traffic, but you have to keep it in check.

Have fun

While I wrote this article as a guide to help those who want to make money with a blog, I understand that many people don’t really care about that. Either way, life is too short not to be enjoying it. So whether you want to be a full-time blogger or just communicate with friends – have fun!!

Bob enjoys dark chocolate, paying off debt, giving, Foosball, loose-leaf tea, helping people succeed, learning, anything God created, playing guitar, doing things the "long" way, Philippians, excellence, Chick-Fil-A, and making his wife smile. He started ChristianPF in 2007 and has been having a blast ever since. Find him on Facebook & Twitter.