How To Make Money Until You Strike It Rich

You’ve heard the adage, “You have to spend money to make money.” Reminds me of my parents who, when I asked them how to spell a word, told me to look it up in the dictionary. Well, if I had known how to spell it in order to look it up, I wouldn’t have asked how to spell it in the first place!

There is some truth to that adage though. It requires patience, creativity, and dedication among other attributes to earn your first buck. You can use it to purchase products you need to make you more productive, buy advertising to increase your exposure, pay for hosting, pay for writers, etc.

So until you build your list of thousands that you can promote products to or have a blog with great traffic to justify selling advertising on, what can you do to earn money in the meantime?

Writing reviews is one method of earning that first buck. Now, I know some of you out there will say that paid reviews are a no-no, and you would be right under some circumstances. For those of you new to the blogosphere, the no-no I’m referring to is that Google tends to slap bloggers (a.k.a. lower or remove their all important page rank) who do paid reviews because they feel the information would be biased.

Personally, I have been Google slapped before on several of my blogs, so I’m speaking from experience. I’m happy to report I’ve recovered my PR for those blogs including MeAndMyDrum after making some modifications.

So, if reviews are “dangerous” why would I suggest them?

Reviews have been around since the cave man grunted, “This nice place. You stay here.” And I think it’s safe to say they’ll be around with us for some time (reviews, that is, not cave men).

But services like PayPerPost require you to insert a bit of code in your footer. And depending on the review you write for one of their opportunities, you may also have to insert another bit of tracking code in the post itself. These are what I believe Google picks up on. I’m not saying it’s the only thing, but clearly, this can be seen as a flare. It’s for these reasons and others that I am no longer doing PayPerPost reviews. (Maybe I’ll get into that in another post.)

For me, writing reviews is one of the ways I earn money, and I invest that into my business. Collectively, I’ve made over a thousand dollars doing reviews, but I didn’t like having to post them on MeAndMyDrum because they weren’t always a good fit. That’s why I created another blog that’s specifically for reviews of all kinds that make me money.

Advertising and affiliate sales, of course, are another way to make money, but it’s hard to do that when you’re just starting out with a new blog. Why? Because it takes time to build your reputation and bring traffic to your site. Heck, even doing paid reviews is not something you can do just starting out with your own blog. You have to have an established blog or be a part of some service that allows you to write for them and get paid to do so.

Here are some services you can write for that can earn you money while you work to build your blog on the side:

• Digital Journal: I was invited to join this citizen journalist site last year. I was excited to find I had earned my first dollar in little under an hour of my first article.
• Triond: You submit your content to them and they publish it on appropriate websites.
• Today.com: Another service where you create your own space and write for a topic you’re interested in.

The money you make from these services is dependent on how much effort you put into it and the level of traffic your articles generate. This is not something to get rich quick on, but over time you can build upon your writing skills and your reputation while earning residual income.

Any other services you can think of that you can write for and get paid?

I have another paid-to-review site that’s REAL easy to write for that I’m only giving to my newsletter subscribers. Are you one of them? If so, then keep an eye out this week for my subscriber-only tip. If you’re not one, then head on over here to become one and get a free ebook in the process.