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This article is not intended to give you the newbies course about hosting, installing a blog on your domain and etc. It will give you some serious advice on your blog business. Bad blogging habits are easy to get into, and one of the worst is to leave your ‘About’ page unchanged. You know the page: it is provided by Wordpress as standard and a whole host of bloggers leave it unchanged. Why they do this is known only to them, because this is the first page that a large number of first-time visitors to a blog check out, and the reason why many of them leave without looking further. Read more »

I am a little late in posting this report, I am afraid. However the figures are still of interest as November was the first full month when the effects of Google’s penalties for paid links in blog posts really took effect. More than half the blogs where I have been writing sponsored posts have seen their page ranks fall to 0. Initially the October Page Rank update (using the Google algorithm) took them all to Page Rank 3 or 4, but within 48 hours those Page Ranks had fallen back after a manual trawl through any site linked with the ubiquitous PayPerPost. Their required Javascript code and required disclosure statement are easily targeted by anyone wanting to pick out sites that have been paid to blog by Payperpost. And once my Page Ranks fell the opportunities from PayperPost dried up as well.

My paid blog earnings for October were already reduced as the new Page Rank affected earnings for the last six days of the month. November earnings overall were down by 35 per cent against the figures for September. The sums for Payperpost were only 30 per cent of the amount I earned form that site in September. Fortunately some sites continue to offer paid blogging opportunities in spite of the page rank changes and I have listed the top paying sites here.

If you want to find out more information about the way that paid to blog sites work in general, you can read my review of how to start getting Paid to Blog here.

1 PayU2Blog
In November this was far and away the highest paying paid to post site, generating more than double the amount that any of the other companies paid for blog posts. The opportunities at PayU2Blog offer $5 mostly, for a short blog post of just sixty words. The posts are approved automatically, and around ten per cent of the opps are for longer posts, paying up to $15. The good thing at this site is that they pay out twice a month - often earlier than advertised. As I have mentioned before, the opportunities are loaded into your control panel showing the dates when they are due. This means bloggers can plan their workload accordingly.

2. Smorty
Smorty was the next best highest paying site in November. They send email alerts when a new paying blog campaign is available and these pay various sums from $6 to $22 per post. Approval takes a few days and you can only accept one opportunity at a time so if there are more paid opps available you need to write the first one up speedily in order to accept another.

3. Blogitive
Blogitive came good again in November after a couple of quiet months. To get paid posting assignments you need to log in to your control panel and available opportunities will be shown. Once you accept them the time limit is 48 hours, and each post of 100 words pays $5. As long as the link is included there is usually no problem with approval and payment is made monthly.

4. Blogsvertise
Earnings at Blogsvertise were a little lower for me this month, but the individual opportunities are paying slightly higher amounts.

5. Izea
I think I have said it all in the introduction. The available paid opps for my sites with Page Rank 0 never pay more than $5. The admin require a non sponsored post before and after their opportunity, so in fact the blogger needs to write three blog posts to earn $5. I am also concerned about being linked with the site on my higher ranked sites as I do not want their page rank to be damaged. So I am choosing very few opps from Izea now.

There is increasing interest in having nose procedure carried out as thousands of men and women realise that the process is simple and affordable. Nobody has to go through life with a mis-shapen nose any more!

I reported on the Roger Hamilton seminar that I attended last week, and at the end I was in two minds over whether life membership of the XL Results Foundation is a scam or a legitimate business network. Hundreds of readers have visited the article that i wrote but I am still looking for clear evidence for either side of the argument. One are I was concerned about was how easily life membership of XL foundation can be transferred if a member decides it is not offering good value for money. The paperwork issued by Roger Hamilton states that membership can only be transferred after one year, however I have found a website that deals in reselling the life memberships in XL Results It appears to be authorised by the proprietors of XL Results Foundation. The good news, for anyone considering joining, is that the resale prices are much lower than the figure of $12,000 that was being charged at last week’s seminar. The agent is called eXchange at a website called lmex.net, a business operated by Qualvin Advisory Pte Ltd (Qualvin). The website is called Life member Exchange and there are currently four life memberships for sale, at prices ranging from $5400 to $6000. If I can get some solid evidence as to the value of a life membership in XL Results, I intend to buy my membership from the resale market. I will save up to $6000- that is half the quoted price!

UPDATE 5 June 2008:

After a lot of recent comments on my other posts regarding Roger Hamilton’s much-criticised Results Foundation I checked out the resale market for Life Memberships again this week.  The same offers that I saw in January are still available at the Lmex website - none appear to have been sold.  Nothing that I have discovered since attending the XL Business Breakfast has shown any value in signing up for a Life Membership.  I feel sympathy for anyone who was swept up with enthusiasm following the powerful presentation and is now trying to sell a worthless life membership …..

I have attended a couple of interesting entrepreneur seminars in London recently, this week I was invited to a complimentary breakfast event in London with Roger Hamilton. The seminar promised to focus on ways to connect with people, ideas and opportunities all over the world through an organisation called XL. Roger would discuss how to improve the quality of your connections and your business network to make money. The talk would also cover “four critical factors that all great entrepreneurs focus on harnessing grow and manage their businesses - four things that could bring more wealth, certainty and ability to make a difference than virtually anything else you could learn on business elsewhere.”

I booked my place and turned up on time, and listened to the hour long presentation with my fellow guests who all seemed fairly bright and positive. The speech was interesting and described a lot of the business ideas that members of XL foundation had been able to use to help them make money ethically using connections through the foundation.

So far, so good. There was plenty of positive stuff about getting the right mindset to create and seize business opportunities, plus an insight into the eight categories of entrepreneur identified through his Wealth Dynamics test. At the end of the formal presentation it became clear why we were here: stakeholding is, according to Roger Hamilton, one of the four factors mentioned above. He offered us the chance to stay behind and hear how we could have a stakeholding in the XL Results Foundation and get the benefits that go with life membership of the group.

I stayed behind to find out more, along with around thirty others. We all received a life subscription form, showing a cost of US$15000 for life membership. Roger then proceeded to sell the idea well: there is a limit on the number of memberships released this year, we would get free entry to other seminars and training, access to network with all the foundation members. Sounds impressive, but would any business coach advise you to sign up so much money without doing proper due diligence? I gave my excuses and left.

When I got home, I did some thinking and some research. First let me say I think the Foundation has some good things to offer, but a financial commitment of life membership to a private company that has only existed for five years does not appear to be a sound investment. There was no cooling-off period, and I found conflicting evidence on the possibilities of transferring your membership if the scheme was not right for you.

If the presentation comes to London again I will take another look, but for the moment I will stay with my existing business networks - Linkedin and ecademy. They are both free and have worked well for me so far.

If you have any experience of XL Results Foundation, please leave a comment.