The cost of entry is to write a blog post that links back to the site running the contest. I think that’s a very cool way of getting some incoming back links and Gobala, who runs the site, offers a link back to anyone who’s making a post, so everyone wins in reality.

So, if you fancy a fun contest, have a look here.

There’s a great website at blog reviews which allows you to get paid for your posting. I can certainly see that would encourage some people to post to their blog more frequently.

The biggest problem, that I’ve seen anyway, in the blogosphere is when a good site starts up and then dies some time into it. I suppose there must be dozens of reasons why that could happen, such as illness, lack of time, lack of interest. But surely lack of motivation must be one of the biggest causes?

Payperpost is a website that I joined recently. It’s a given that they pay you for making a post and the amount can vary from a couple of dollars to $15 or $20. I don’t think anyone will ever retire on that kind of money, but for many people it might just make the difference between making a post and not bothering.

The site itself is clean, colourful and easy to use. Very Web 2.0, in fact.

I’ve suggested to my brother that he signs up and starts making a blog. He has a computer. He has the internet. He has time.

He has no motivation.

Getting paid for blogging might actually change that.

I’ve even got signup links to the site on the bottom of all my posts now. There are so many people out there blogging for free. I think it would be pretty good if more joined in this cultural change.

The reputation of service centres that do that kind of work in the UK is not very high, quite honestly. Everyone has heard tales of going along with a pretty new car and coming out with a huge bill.

Now, leaving aside the fact that some people are truly blind to the faults of their own vehicle, it seems there are enough complaints about the problem to make you believe that it happens often enough to be a problem.

After all, if the ’specialist’ in the field tells you that you need some work doing, how are you going to argue with him unless you have specialist knowledge yourself? For most of us, it’s not really an option.

So what do you do when you take your car somewhere new for the MOT and find that the specialist corrected a fault you knew about, for nothing, because it was only a 1 minute fix?

I’ll tell you: you start telling everyone you know. And that kind of advertising is probably worth a lot more than they could earn by ripping people off by adding little jobs on.

Another garage might have made a quick £30, but this one has just made more referrals from that one act than he could have got with a £1,000 advertising campaign.

The car drives a lot better than it did, too.

Well, over the years I’ve been very fortunate to have done jobs that I would have done for virtually nothing. Indeed, as far as my wife is concerned sometimes I did! Working evenings and weekends just because you like doing something is hard for some people to understand. They don’t always get that a vocation is not the same as a job.

I’ve always earned more money, much more, when I’ve followed my passion. The only times I’ve been badly paid have been in the jobs I hated anyway.

So I’m quite pleased with the results of what I’m doing now. I’m now an internet marketer, selling various stuff online and also doing technical work for a bunch of people. Things like script installations and Wordpress installations. A lot of the stuff is easy to do, but here’s the thing.

I am losing count of how many people know it’s easy to set up a script, but just don’t want to.  They’d rather spend their time doing the things they do enjoy.

To me, the idea of paying someone to install a script for me would just never enter my head. First, because I can do it myself, but perhaps more importantly, because I enjoy doing it.

Luckily, I’ve made some good online friends doing this and they all have different characters. One of the chaps I’ve met is a journalist and a fiction writer so it’s natural that we’ve discussed writing.

We think we have a simple way for fiction writers to put their work out there, via the internet, and perhaps make a little money. For so many writers the recognition of being read is what the work is really about and any money is secondary. Welcome, but secondary. And I’ve read the advice so many times that you should follow your passion and that’s where the money is, that I’m beginning to believe it.

Another thing I’ve noticed for myself is that I always work harder for a client than I do for myself. Not that I’m lazy, I’m far from that. But somehow, giving value to a client always seems more important to me than finding a better way to make some extra money for myself. So one of the best ways for me to learn something is when somebody needs a job done. I’ll move heaven and earth to find out how to do it and give the client a good service.

To my way of thinking that’s win-win. I get to learn and the client gets a great service at a cheap price.

When we open the online bookstore I’ll have to learn fast how to make it work well. And when it works well amateur authors should be able to make a little money from it.

So pretty soon I hope to be enabling amateur authors to sell their work online in an easy way. And you can bet my stuff will be in there too! Even if I have to sit down finally and start doing the writing I’ve been promising myself for so long!

There’s a growing need for people who can write, to create articles for people who can’t. There’s some money in it, although I don’t think anyone here will grow rich quickly, or otherwise. But there is a living to be had by writing for people who won’t – or can’t.

Does anyone already do this? It seems like an ideal situation not least because of the payment, which is relatively minor, but also because your work does actually go out there. I’ve started writing articles, for myself, and they’re getting me some results in the search engines now.

What’s most interesting for me is that any skills I have as a writer are put to good use in making the articles worth reading. In my case they’ve been related very much to the health arena. If I can put some information across in a simple way then that’s a good thing of itself. Should it matter if underlying that some advertiser somewhere would like to make a sale too?

Particularly in internet marketing circles there seems to be a desperate need for fresh talent. A lot of those now filling that need are more marketing types than writing types and I would think that quality writing, of the kind I find in the blogs I visit, would do very well.

In the UK Salman Rushdie started out as an advertising copywriter. Went on to sell a few books and make some money. Of course he also went on to cause a massive ruckus, but cutting his teeth on making his words pay – someone else – was how he got to be a famous and published author.

Guess I’ve talked myself into doing some more article writing. Anyone want to set up a collective?

But getting the right word is also important to people selling on the web. I read an article by a web expert and he gave some statistics about the difference a single word made to his client’s campaigns. Now, what made this so interesting to me was that the expert was entirely truthful and said he didn’t really know why a single word change could make a big difference to his client’s sales. I’ve got permission to reprint the article here and I’ve posted it as it appeared originally on his website.

While the article is written from the perspective of a marketer, I think we can learn quite a bit from it too. We’re all probably used to getting hold of a thesaurus and finding a different word to replace one that sounds a little tired. But how many of us actually test the end result? What our readers think a word means may be very different from the dictionary definition. After all, I once had a friend who always used the word ‘altruistic’ in sales meetings and people thought he was being facetious. He used it because he thought it meant mercenary! You can imagine that people were a little taken aback! Funny thing is when I confronted him about it he wouldn’t correct his error. It cost him sales. I wonder how many readers the wrong word is costing us?

Here’s the article. For anyone thinking, or hoping, to sell their writing, there may be an idea or two in here for us.

How One Word Or Even One Letter Can Boost Conversion Rates By Over 400%!
By Eric Graham

Recently I was reviewing the keyword specific conversion rate data of a consulting client of mine. I have been working with this client for a few months now, helping her improve the sales conversion rate of her website and we have had very good results, taking average conversion rates at her site from below 1% to just over 4.3%.

(Your sales conversion rate is simply the number of unique visitors your site receives vs. the number of sales you make. If you have 3 sales for every 100 visits your conversion rate is 3%.)

Now, one of the keys to improving conversion rates is to continually test and measure every detail of your website, marketing and traffic. While reviewing the data from one of her Google Adwords campaigns I stumbled across a few hard to explain results that perfectly illustrate the very large effect small differences can have on conversion rates.

The keyword “piano lessons” had a conversion rate over the last 30 days of 5.09%. The keyword “piano lesson” had a conversion rate of only 1.64%. Both of these keywords had the exact same Adwords title and description, the same average position in the search results and the exact same landing page on my clients website. The only variable is one letter in the keyword… an “s”. Lesson vs. Lessons. That’s it! Yet the plural version of the keyword (piano lessons) out sold the singular version (piano lesson) by over 300%!

Another key phrase that had an even larger variation was “how to play the piano” vs. “how to play a piano”. Common sense would say that these two phrases would convert almost identically… Wrong.

Again, with identical titles, descriptions and landing pages, “How to play the piano” converted at 5.92%, while “How to play a piano” only converted at 1.42%. That is a whopping 417% difference between “a” and “the”!

Short-term variations and fluctuations in the conversion rates of individual keywords or landing pages are common. However, the data on both of these keyword pairs was measured over a full 30 days and several thousand clicks for each keyword. I don’t have any easy answers why adding an “s” to a key phrase or changing an “a” to “the” caused such a difference in conversion rates.

Sure, you can guess at it and draw a few conclusions such as “plural keywords convert better than singular keywords” or “using ‘the’ in a key phrase is more specific and targeted than using ‘a’”. However, these conclusions are just guesses. The only real conclusion you can draw from this case study is that you have to test EVERYTHING!

If one word or one letter can have that big of an impact in an Adwords campaign, then a similar change in your main headline or guarantee can have an equally significant impact.

The lesson here is to test, test, test. What should you test?

• Test headlines.
• Test guarantees.
• Test bonuses.
• Test colors.
• Test sub-headlines.
• Test your copy.
• Test different prices.
• Test layouts.
• Test autoresponder messages.
• Test your USP (Unique Selling Proposition.)
• Test ads.
• Test keywords.
• Test policies.
• Test images and graphic design.
• Test deadlines.
• Test navigation.
• Test your checkout process.
• Test font sizes.
• Test payment options.
• Test EVERYTHING!

Now, when you are testing a change, only test one item at a time. This part is critical. Testing only one change will help keep your results as accurate as possible. If you change 4 items at once and see a 1% boost in conversion rate, it is possible 3 items are helping and 1 is hurting, so your conversion rate boost would have been greater with just the 3 changes.

The bottom line is this…
If you really want to take your website’s sales conversion rate to the next level, you must absolutely commit to a focused and long-term campaign of testing and optimizing every aspect of your site. You never know when a small change is going to give you huge results!

About the Author
Want to improve your conversion rates? Eric Graham is the CEO of several successful online companies. A top authority on eCommerce & Internet Marketing, he’s an in-demand speaker & consultant. Visit www.web-site-evaluations.com today for an in-depth evaluation to boost YOUR websites conversion rate!