Effectively, your making less money now than last year, despite which of these raise brackets your in. 10% raises, and maybe you’d be ok.

What are you doing to get by? How are you going supplement your income to beat the increases in cost of living?

What is CBProAds.com? How did I know you were going to ask that?, haha! Basically it is an advertising system similar to Google’s. It doesn’t read your pages and display relevant ads, instead you set-up the advertising code that you want from their website and choose the categories of ads you want shown within those blocks.

Now, I know their little promotionals say that you can make $10,000 per month by just displaying ads. I find that a little hard to believe. However… the theory that I like about these ads is that they are clickbank ads. Clickbank products routinely pay you a 50% comission! So, a $40 e-book that shows up in an advertisement on the side of your webpage could bring you in $20 on a purchase. Perhaps even more. Instead of a $.05 for a click. Your call. But it sounds like a good idea to me!

I’ve put a few on my site here, but as you can see I haven’t refined them much yet. They look kind of off a little and “me too”-ish given the others around. Kind of busy, don’t you think?

Anyway … its free to join, so click on this link and go register yourself. The ads are easy to put up and you’ll have them on your page in no time!

Questions? Ideas, suggestions?

All you have to do is sign up, and start your campaign. Easy. But, if you don’t know what you are doing, you can loose money trying to advertise. Enter the help! I realize that I don’t know what I’m doing, but I do know that there are plenty of people out there who do, and I’m willing to listen to someone what someone else has learned the hard way to find out! Don’t want to make the same mistakes if they can be avoided.

So I came across this website. It’s AdWords Profits 2 by Jacobo Benitez. He’s 21 years old, he lives in Mexico (born there) and he claims to routinely make $16,000 or so per month!

Wow. Makes you stop doesn’t it? I mean, how many people — smart educated people — make only a little more than $16,000 per YEAR! And they earn their money in their native language. Jacobo working in Mexico, I’d assume that English is a second language to him. So these results truly are astounding that someone could “figure” this all out to make that kind of income when he has to do this in a language that isn’t his native tongue, or culture.

So I bought. I figured it was definitely worth reading into what he does because if it is easy to him with these starting obstacles he has then I should be able to learn it too! And if not, there is a 56 day return policy on the product.

Here’s the link to the plug-in.

Down below the post that tells about the plug-in there is a “download” link. Or, if your like me and just want the file — hit the little “Jump to comments” button near the post title and then scroll up above the social networking buttons and you’ll find the download button.

• Download the file
• Upload it to your WordPress plugins folder
• Go to your “plugin” page from the WordPress dashboard and “activate” the plug-in.

Now, all that is left is to run it. And at times it asks you to download files for back up. I did. I simply let the thing run, it did it all. Downloaded the new version of WordPress. Turned off my blog, asked me to upgrade my database, everything — it did it all! I was so hands off. I felt like a dummy almost just hitting next!

So, moral of the story, if there is one, is that it is important to keep WordPress updated! And if you feel lazy and just want someone else to do it, this plug-in is for you! Highly recommended!

So, how to start? Easy! Just go to the WordPress website. This is the place where you can download the software you’ll need to run the blog. It is free software, maintained by people sort of like me and you, expect they like to program software. God bless them!

Anyway, if you don’t want to bother reading everything on there (it can be information overload, for sure), then click here to go straight to the download page. (or here to download the software directly).

What now? Well, unzip the program to a place on your computer where you’ll know where it is. Desktop, or some folder in your My Documents file. Now, you don’t run this software from your computer, it is software that you’ll install on your website’s webserver. Simple enough so far? Well, sadly it gets just a wee bit more complicated now. (If you prefer the official guide to installation, feel free to go ahead and click here to read it. My feelings won’t be hurt … at least not very badly.)

The next step is to get the software onto your webserver. The most direct method to do this is to upload the software using FTP. FTP - to get fancy on you, stands for File Transfer Protocol. Don’t let that scare you, because all it is is a way to transfer files between computers. And you’ll be putting them in a place that not everyone has access to. It requires a password. But, as you have a website, the password is generally the “admin” login and password. If you’ve just signed up for webhosting, usually all the FTP information is in the welcome email.

Start with the FTP program. This program (I recommend iFTP) is a little program that you will install and run from your computer. When you run this program it asks you what FTP site you want to connect to. Tell it your FTP login and password. And once you do, it connects and you are seeing the backend of your website.

Now you have a decision to make. One one side of the FTP program screen you’ll see the files that are one your webserver, and on the other you’ll see the files that are on your personal computer. Decide where you want your blog installed. If you want to keep a regular website and have a blog on the side, then you’ll set it up in a subfolder from your main webpage. If you want your enter website to be a blog, then you’ll just transfer the WordPress files to your main public html section. Otherwise, you’d probably want a “blog” subfolder.

• If you want your domain to be the blog (for instance Yahoo.com) then put the files from WordPress directly in the public HTML folder you’ll see on your webserver. If you want a Yahoo.com/blog version - which lets you keep your regular website AND run a blog, then create a folder called “blog” in your public HTML folder and upload or transfer the WordPress files there. You could use any name you’d like, “weblog”, “journal”, or even “news”.

Now that all the files are there, create a MySQL database and a main user. This step you’ll need to talk to your webhost about more than likely. They can point you to specifics for your situation or maybe even do it for you. These “details” about your MySQL database you’ll edit into one of the WordPress programs called wp-config.php. This file, you’ll then upload to the appropriate place on your webserver (and by appropriate place, just log into the FTP program, connect to your webserver and find the place you put the WordPress files. Once you see this file in the webserver side, just upload and overwrite this one. Easy enough….!

Now run the install… Just type this URL in your browser window. http://mydomain.com/wp-admin/install.php. (If you’d used “blog” or something else, then add that after your domain name and before the /wp-admin/ part.)

Ok, I know that sounds complicated, but really it isn’t. The neatest thing about all of this is, that no matter how complicated it may sound, it isn’t hard - and even though you don’t have to admit it to your friends, you can get this all done for you! Wow!

Fantastico!

If you log into your webhost for your account, and you are at the control panel, (specifically cPanel) you may find a section called: Fantastico. If you do, then chances are good that you can click on this link and click on the install wordpress option. And presto — its installed for you. If you don’t see that, don’t despair. You can go to WordPress’s “Install 4 Free” option. Click here. This is a group that will install your blog for you for free! Read the little terms and conditions here and fill out the form and your on your way! Basically a real live person will go and install your blog for you and make sure it works. How sweet is that?

Do you really have an excuse for not having a blog yet? Hey, if you don’t mind, if this helps you or if you set-up a blog, I’d love to hear about it. Drop me a comment.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Well it is! All you have to do is remember an email address. Any email you send to that address is published.

Now some will publish anything coming into one email box, some will require the subject to begin with a certain “keyphrase” so that someone doesn’t randomly spam you and it get posted! (how embarassing!) And some require that the email be sent from a specific account or two.

Now you can be on the road somewhere and send an email and presto! Its on your blog. You do give up some of the control of the look, but being able to update from anywhere is really cool!

At times I wonder tho, as if you are able to email, you are at a computer with Internet, and that means that you can get to your blog’s admin page and just do a regular post. But whatever.

Ok - what is a blog? If you are wanting to have one, then you probably already know, but just in case: A blog is a website that is essentially a journal, a log of your daily/weekly/monthly(or how ever often you prefer) postings about anything. Rather open-ended. It is a web-log, shortened ever further to the common “blog”, and people use it for lots of things, some for like a diary, others just to periodically tell about family events, some to talk about their business or specific software, games, etc. You can do anything you want on your blog - there are no rules.

So… How do you go about doing one? The easiest way is to head over to blogspot (Google’s blogging platform) and set-up a blog there. It’s really easy, and I’ll put in a specific how-to shortly.

Another popular way, and the one I use is to set-up your own website and use WordPress software to run your blog.

A third popular choice is to use Live Journal. They have software you can download and use on your own site and they also have hosted webservices too.

Now, if you use one of these hosted services, you run into the potential problem that if something happens to your posts within their service — then all your work is gone. On the flip side, that is a rare occurrence, and if you host it yourself you could forget to backup and have the same thing happen!

ok — you’ve set-up a blog. You have it running. What now? Essentially use it. Fill it. Put things on. It is by far the easiest way to put things on the web. And what I recommend is that you put yourself on a schedule. Times that you’ll sit down and put your thoughts on your website weblog. I like to take a little time in the evenings to do my updates. But weekends are also great. Like right now, it is a nice calm weekend day, and I’m taking a little time to get this blog going a little further along. I’m rather disappointed in myself that I have had this one online for so long and have done so very little with it. Sad, I know. But hey, check back, I promise that the next update will be a lot sooner than this one!

Sure, there are “jobs” out there that pay you to write a blog, say for instance you might be working for a company that keeps an active blog, your job could be just updating that. But you could also write a blog in your spare time.

Some people, such as this guy, Zach Brooks, actually make quite a bit of money by writing a blog in his spare time. I’m sure the press he’s gotten from this news story for his blog, midtown lunch, hasn’t hurt him lately either.

So! If you are interested in doing this, or doing it better, then stay tuned!