ScratchBack: Because the PayPal Donation Button is Ugly

Making money for your blogging/website endeavors isn’t new, it’s actually a big reason why so many people are starting their own websites. Once Darren Rowse published on his website that he makes a six-figure income purely from blogging and has even went as far as to publish a book about blogging for cash, everyone has been jumping on the blog bandwagon.

There are many ways that you can make money blogging including putting a PayPal donation button on your site. Most of your readers are not advertisers and so while you can make money from direct advertising on your website, there are still a great deal of people visiting your site and if you write about a great deal of information that appeals to many people and they appreciate the work you have put in to your website in order to bring them the content they crave, some people may love to have the option of donating a little money to you to thank you for your contribution and let you know that they appreciate your hard work.

If anyone has actually seen the PayPal donation button you may have noticed that it is seriously one of the ugliest buttons to ever grace a website. I don’t know what layout the PayPal donation button would look good on, but it honestly looks horrendous on most websites and while it lets your readers donate to you, they don’t get much out of it.

ScratchBack took all of what I’ve already covered into consideration when thinking of a program that would let a website’s readers give back a little. ScratchBack is a program that gives you a fancy shmancy tip jar for your blog. It lets your readers scratch your back and like the saying goes, it also lets you scratch their back in return by providing a link back to their site when they purchase a link using the ScratchBack widget, which you can see in action on my sidebar to the right.

ScratchBack is a great program with an easy to manage control panel, making the entire program fool proof to set up for your website. It is also quite flexible with many color options for you to choose that will match your website’s layout the best and it also lets you pick your own widget rate, giving you complete control over the price of your top spots. By pricing your top spots low you may get more people who purchase a link on your site and scratch your back, but by pricing them a little higher, your links will be more in demand, especially if you choose to only display a certain number of top spots at a time. For instance, on Woman Tribune, our top spots are priced at $25 for an entire month. Looking at that purely from an advertising perspective, you are able to tell me that you appreciate the hard work put into this website and in return, get a link back to your website or blog for about 83 cents a day–A complete steal when you inquire about advertising prices on a website. Even if you don’t have a website of your own and you still want to scratch my back, you can link to your favorite website, a friend’s website or a website that you feel readers of Woman Tribune would be interested in.

To sign up with ScratchBack you can go to their website and you can also check out their blog for exciting industry news. They have also implemented a link directory which is huge, so go on over to their blog directory and submit your link.

Hint hint: Link directories are important because it provides a back link to your website which helps raise your Google PageRank.

We give ScratchBack…
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Blogging Basics: Do You Have What it Takes?

This past year has easily been marked the year of the blog. Not only does virtually everyone keep a blog, whether it be on their own domain, their MySpace page or LiveJournal, but it is also the time where more and more people are realizing the amount of money that can be made by blogging. But here’s a tip for anyone looking to create their household income by blogging: It isn’t as easy as it looks.

There are many bloggers out there that are pulling in annual six-figure incomes. Some aren’t making as much, but quite a few are able to live a decent lifestyle by what they make through their websites. Darren Rowse of ProBlogger is one of the top people in the blogging world right now; just look at the domain name! His website is dedicated to blogging for profit and teaching others how to benefit from blogging. Amanda Harris of Pajama Mommy is another person who not only makes a significant amount of money from her website, but her business posts go into more detail on how to do so. Another one of my personal favorites is Courtney Tuttle, who is the blogging bible as far as internet marketing goes. So how are they doing it?

Each and every successful website has a webmaster behind the scenes who has spent hours upon hours (I cannot stress the amount of time enough) marketing their websites. When thinking of your new website, think of it as practically raising something. Your website needs a lot of love and attention and if you let it go for even a few days, you have potentially lost a great deal of readers.

It takes months to build up an audience for a website and when you succeed in doing that, you cannot stop. One of the drawbacks of the internet and the society we live in today is that we 1: want instant gratification and 2: have the attention span of a gnat. Your website must bring a lot to the table that appeals to a wide variety or a large group of people and always keep in mind that there are trillions of websites on the internet today–Why do these people want to read your website? What do they get from reading your work?

If you’re thinking about blogging for profit ask yourself these few questions:

• How much time can you wholeheartedly dedicate to your website?
• Does your website appeal to a large group or wide variety of people?
• What makes your website different than the trillions already on the internet?
• If this wasn’t your website and you happened to stumble upon it, would you visit again?

This is just the very tip of the iceberg but I plan to dissect blogging for profit in several steps so check back frequently!