Personal Finance Stories

Learning To Blog Class Sessions

One of the fun things about going to BlogWorld Expo 2008 was listening to expert bloggers reveal their personal blogging tips and tell us how they make money with blogging.  Jim Krukal
lead a question answer session with four very successful bloggers, Brian Clark, Zac Johnson , Darren Rowse  and for a brief time Jeremy Shoemaker.

Each guest was asked questions about what made their blog successful and what they recommended to others who are starting out a new blog.  They discussed issues such as which programs were making them the most money, whether Google Adsense was really Webmaster Welfare, and what topics are the best to blog about. They talked about how long it takes to establish a good blog and what to expect from your blog at the beginning.  All of them agreed that you need to have a passion for the topic you are going to be blogging about to avoid the dreaded "abandoned blog."

Superior Blogging Class Videos

Before I continue, I need to say that I have found a much better video of this Blog World Expo Blogging Tips session than the one I took.  It covers the entire 45 minute session and you can even see me sitting in the audience. I'm the blonde on the right, below Jim Krukal.

I found this today after discovering that Twitter has a search feature that you can search for keywords. Just click on that link and replace the word "keyword" with whatever you want to search for. It's a great way to hear the latest on the topics you are interested in.

Guest Blog Speaker  - John Chow of JohnChow.com

John Chow gave some good advice to people starting a blog. He recommended several things. One of his favorites is making money with the Wordpress Themes through the Thesis Showcase Gallery

• Blog about something you feel passionate about
• Lay everything out on your website blog and be honest about all your offerings
• Use residual affiliate programs
• Offer direct advertising to people
• Offer great content

He mentioned that if he were to shut off his website blog, he would still be able to make a five figure income because the affiliate programs he offers people are all producing residual income. He also got to the point where he used his Google adsense advertising areas to offer direct advertising and immediately made more money.

Guest Blog Speaker Brian Clarke of CopyBlogger.com

 Brian Clarke gave these blogging tips

• Repitition is the key - Talk about things over and over again
• The worst thing on a site is banners - the best things are product reviews where you convey to people that you are a real person, you used a real thing and you should too - teaching sells
• Don't be a cat blogger where all you talk about is your cat.
• You may want to check this out with him, but he says that he's able to make a lot of money from recommending WordPress Themes through the 
• Build an audience and find out what they want to buy.
• Build an email list
• For handling newsletters and email lists, use AWeber
• Write for people, not search engines
• Word of mouth traffic is golden
• Use Chitika for advertising

Guest Blog Speaker Zac Johnson of ZacJohsnon.com

Zac Johnson's blogging tips

• Zac started on the internet 12 years ago and he's only 26
• He makes 5 figures a month
• He likes direct ads and blog ads
• Meet with and talk to affiliate managers on a regular basis
• Zac tells people on his blog how he made $860,538.38 in 4 months

Guest Blog Speaker Darren Rowse of ProBloggers.net

Darren Rowse recommended these blogging tips

• Put ads inside of the content of your posts
• Affiliate products that you personally recommend sell well

Thank you to Jim Krukal who inspired me to invest in a Flip Video camera! He shared with the audience that these five star bloggers, pardon the language..."Bust their ass with blogging."

Salt Lake City, Utah was the host to a large Gem and Jewelry show where hundreds of entrepreneurs gathered to sell their jewelry and gems to eager crowds.

I interviewed one entrepreneur profit maker, Pradeep Pradhan and asked him what he liked about selling his jewelry at the Salt Lake Gem and Jewelry show. In the amatuerish video (I will get better at this), Pradeep tells us about his best money maker.

During the interview I discovered that Pradeep has several businesses. He owns a restaurant in San Diego, California and he is currently working on another business and is in business negotiations with people in Nepal. He is truely an entrepreneur profit maker at heart.

Being an entrepreneur affects all areas of your life and with Pradeep Pradhan, you can tell he has taken advantage of several different types of businesses. He certainly is improving his financial condition and has added a nice story to the website.  Thank you Pradeep and good luck with your business plans!

Blog World Expo 2008

BlogWorld Expo 2008 was held last weekend, Sept. 19-21, 2008, in Las Vegas, U.S.A. More than 200 expert presenters in the field of blogging and internet businesses spoke at the 2nd annual Blogging Convention.

With so many great presentations, the hardest thing about attending the conference was being able to decide which speakers to listen to.

The conference started off with Richard Jalichandra of Technorati presenting the State of the Blogosphere.  Technorati.com allows users to submit their blogs and provides people with a system of tracking their blog popularity. Technorati has a list of the top 100 blogs according to user voting and community interaction. You can read the best blogs on a variety of topics.

Richard Jalichandra presents the State Of The Blogosphere 2008

In the state of the blogosphere report that Richard Jalichandra presented, we learned that there were 1.5 million posts in the last week on any given day and that Technorati has indexed 133 million blogs since 2002. Between 50 to 100,000 blogs where considered influencial.

The advice Mr. Jalichandra gave bloggers was to be transparent and authentic. He said that the new influencer in the blogging world, is...you guessed it...YOU!  Blogs are all about information and influence.

Technorati has a system of assigning blogs an authority ranking.  This ranking is based on a number of factors, one of them being the interaction or number of comments people are making on the blog and the number of times your blog is mentioned in other blogs.  They have said that there are between 50 to 100,000 blogs that are considered to be "influencial." This authority ranking can be tracked by going to Technorati and registering your blog. 

There seems to be a critical point at which a blog turns the corner of being one in millions to becoming influencial.  Mr. Jalichandra stated that blogs with rankings in authority of 50 or higher have reached that critical mass point.  So bloggers, aim for that 50 authority.  Apparently there are only only 76,000 blogs that have reached that point.

The people at Technorati.com have conducted surveys to determine the answer to the question - How old are bloggers?

The results showed that 37% where between 25 and 34, 27% where between 35 and 44, 15 percent where between 44 and 54 and 8% were over 55 years old.

Only 14% of the bloggers surveyed were using their blogs to enhance their business. One out of 4 people spend 10 hours a week blogging. Out of the high money earners, (the top 10%) made 81 posts per month. $19,000 a year was the media income from blogging.

Blogging is here to stay and in my humble opinion will only become more influencial as time goes on. With the free software provided by WordPress and the inexpensive costs of buying a domain name and securing a hosting company to host your website, there aren't any big hurdles to high to jump to get your blog started today.

* You can read the State of the Blogoshpere 2008.

Why did the housing market FAIL?  GREED, CORRUPTION and IGNORANCE! 

In 2003, I was taking some Mortgage Banking courses to obtain my Mortgage Banking Certification.  One of the courses was introducing, what they termed “New” instruments for financing mortgages.  The new instruments were not available in the state of Texas at that time due to the state Homestead Laws.  However, later that year they would become effective because the laws would be relaxed allowing homeowners to decide if they wanted the protection of the current laws or wanted to take advantage of one of the new financial mortgage instruments to get more house than current laws allowed them to have with their present income.

I was not new to the mortgage industry.  I had been in the mortgage business for 20 years.  I also recognized that these instruments were not new either.  They were just redesigns of the products used by Savings and Loans during the 1980s for the most part. 

I voiced an unpopular opinion at that time.  I said to all who would listen, “This is NOT good!  There are to many greedy and uninformed people for this to work.  We will see the S&L crisis happen all over again, only worse this time because of the increased practice of securitizing pools of mortgages and marketing them to investors as MBS (Mortgage Backed Securities) investment pools. 

I watched as the parent company of the company I worked for went from buying and selling pools of loans in the $100,000 to $1,000,000 range to $1,000,000 to $1,000,000,000 range in a matter of 6 months to a year. 

New residential construction sprang up on every vacant lot.  Older homes were bought out, torn down and huge new houses took their place.  Everyone who could identify a hammer from a nail was now a “home builder’. 

Older residences were selling on the market for 3, 4, 5 times the actual replacement cost, let alone the actual value.  Everyone was trading up from the home the owned before to one 3 or 4 times bigger, newer and of course better.  Greedy lenders convinced greedy and gullible buyers that by the time the ARM (Adjustable Rate Mortgage) they were purchasing to buy the house actually went up, their salary would have increased to equal the adjustment.  Anyone and everyone could own a home now.  It didn’t matter that the end payment was many times more that their income warranted they would be able to sell or refinance when the time came to pay more. 

Why should we pay to bail out the housing market?  WHY BAIL OUT GREED, CORRUPTION and IGNORANCE?  I don’t know, no one has convinced me yet.

“But, I don’t want to see the Economy collapse”.

I personally do NOT believe in bailing out companies or homeowners because they made a bad judgment call, and certainly not greedy or uninformed people.  I saw too much to even pretend that I imagine that the majority of those involved don’t deserve exactly what has happened, including the investors. 

However, (and this need a lot more research, as to bail out terms and conditions) we are dealing with a different age and economic mix than prevailed in the 1980s.  Many of our investors are foreign entities.  The soundness of our dollar on the worldwide marketplace and our economic standing in the world depend on our ability to stabilize the market and regain the trust of the entire world.  We have no choice but to underwrite the investments that are held by so many foreign investors. 

This being acknowledged, a very strict oversight committee must oversee this bail out.  Not by backbiting, corrupt politicians, but an honest, trustworthy, independent committee.  Our main problem here, of course, is finding honest, trustworthy, independent and (let me add) incorruptible people that are experts in the mortgage industry. 

 This article was written by Virginia Ritchie.

Doing keyword research sometimes brings to light some interesting statistics.  While using internet keyword research statistics to determine what the hot topics of conversation are I discovered that
the number of searches for the words Sarah Palin (37,625) has beaten the number of searches for sex videos (21,036).

Anyone care to comment on this?