Adf.ly has a number of options for monetization of either text links you can use on social networks such as Twitter or FaceBook (though in the case of FaceBook, you might want to run them through bit.ly or another link shortener to avoid having them removed), and for the monetization of regular websites. You can shorten links one-by-one, or use their Mass Shrinker Tool to convert up to 20 links at a time. Plus if you have a website, you can use their Full Page Script to convert 100s or even 1000s of onsite links automatically!

For more traditional website monetization, try Adf.ly’s Website Entry Script. It’s the tool I’ve personally been using. You simply copy and paste a small javascript snippet into the head section of your site and choose whether you want to display a single 728×90 banner at the top of your pages, or an interstitial ad which displays automatically after a delay period of your choosing (from 1 second to infinity). I highly recommend the interstitial option as it pays more! The user will see a full page overlay that they must view for 5 seconds, then they can press a big button at the top right of the screen to return to your site. This works particularly well if you have valuable content or offer a free service and is much less intrusive than using a content locker.

The company behind Adf.ly is called x19 Limited, which is based in Central London. They pay regularly and automatically to your PayPal account on the first few days of every month, with a minimum pay out amount of just $5.00. Not bad, huh? I’ve personally received two payments of around $10 each so far.

If you have a product or service you’d like to advertise for surprisingly decent rates, you can also use Adf.ly’s Advertising page to quickly order a burst of traffic to profit from affiliate offers, or product sales. Plus, unlike most advertising companies, you can get started with just $5, which is brilliant when you want to test the waters first. Plus with worldwide traffic starting at just $1 CPM for 24 hour unique visitors, all with JavaScript, Cookies and Flash enabled on their browsers and with their eyeballs guaranteed to be looking at your page for at least 5 seconds, advertising with Adf.ly could be very lucrative indeed! (US targeted and UK targeted traffic is currently priced at $4 CPM).

So…what are YOU waiting for? Give Adf.ly a try today! Sign up is quick and instantaneous, and you’ll be up and running in literally minutes. Copy and paste their javascript snippet into your site, leave it for a day or two and see how it performs vs your current ads. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised!

UPDATE:
Here’s a little tip to maximize your earnings with Adf.ly’s interstitial ads…
When you insert their Website Entry Script, change the int_delay value to “1″…

var adfly_advert = ‘int’;
var frequency_cap = 5;
var frequency_delay = 5;
var init_delay = 1;

I’ve been doing this on my own sites, and it really helps increase ad views as the interstitial loads only 1 second after a visitor moves their mouse on your page. You can experiment with the frequency_cap and frequency_delay numbers also to find a good balance between revenue/not annoying your readers.

Let’s take Thailand as an example. I’ve spent a lot of time in Thailand and I’ve seen the large number of websites and blogs that people make about the place. However, most of these sites aren’t fully utilized for making money online. They’re hobby sites, so to speak, and people spend hours of their time writing content for them without getting any money in return.

What’s to stop you visiting one of Thailand’s major cities, spending a bit of time getting to know the place and then writing useful content to put on a site? Obviously if you choose somewhere such as Bangkok you’re going to come up against stiff competition, but if you go to Chiang Mai, Samui, Pattaya or somewhere equally on the tourist radar but not so much the focal point, you have a better chance of success.

I did this with my Phuket website. I lived on the island and spent time compiling content about the beaches, restaurants, nightlife, hotels and so on. Sure, it takes time, but if you have gained a significant amount of blogging knowledge from running other sites, then it makes sense to put this to good use – and there is nothing better than traveling the world and doing it.

Some people blog so that they will have more opportunities to travel, but there’s nothing to stop a person combining blogging and travel and making a decent living off of it.

Even if you don’t stay in one place for too long, you can do a lot of research on the Internet, look at what your competition is doing and then do it better. A lot of travel websites are dated and tired.

If you really want to take on such a mission, you can also look at the older websites that rank well for your keywords and try and buy the sites out. Many travel websites were started on a whim, but the webmasters ran out of time, money or energy and shelved their projects.

You will likely need a little money behind you to get yourself set up in a new country, but if you’ve been making money blogging for a little while, you should be able to do this without any problems, especially if you choose to live somewhere as cheap as Thailand.

Thoughts? Anyone will to take the plunge?

I was made one offer that could pay up to $1,000 a month working for a website. It’s not particularly difficult work, but I had to question whether I could seriously give up my job and dent my career in journalism to work online. The money is there to be made and I have proved to myself that I can make it, but because I enjoy my career, I’ve chosen to take a route that will earn me far less money.

What has really become apparent to me recently is that I don’t get as much of a kick out of working on the Internet as I do going out and doing something in the “real” world. I’m probably a fool for making this decision, but I think that the option to work online will always be there – it’s just a matter of keeping up with trends.

So what would you do? I calculated that I could earn more than six times my basic salary if I worked from home. Would you do it?

For me, this week was all about making money. I’m well on my way to my first $1,000 month of making money online. It isn’t all through blogging, and most of it is not related to this blog, but it’s a grand that I will be really happy with. So where is the money coming from?

Linking

I’m still making decent money from linking out to other sites. One technique I explored this month involves placing paragraphs of text from a client at the end of old blog posts. The paragraphs contain links and I made $200 from putting five paragraphs at the end of five blog posts. I feel like sticking it to Google really. The blog in questions is my personal blog and I only really value the RSS subscribers, direct traffic and return visitors I know I have. The search-engine traffic isn’t my concern.

Blogging for other people

By sheer luck I’ve come across a guy who has a blog but doesn’t know much about blogging. He’s an SEO expert and his blog has a Page Rank of 5. He saw how I was doing my thing on a few blogs and enlisted my help to start making his blog work. At the moment, the money is good, but it has the potential to get even better. If I didn’t care about my career, I could quite easily blog for a living here in Thailand.

Selling blogs

Now that they have Page Rank, some of my blogs have been easier to sell. The problem has come with selling to buyers who don’t know how to transfer a website. In reality, I didn’t know much about the process until recently, but some of these guys on Digital Point no absolutely nothing. (I will write a post about how to move a blog in the near future.) It would be fine if I had a speedy Internet connection so I could upload and download websites, but I can’t even download an episode of TNA Impact in under a week. Regardless, I still made some money.

Actually, this week I started feeling a bit bored of reading a lot of blogs. I’m also hung over today so haven’t been able to get much work done, which I hate. Beer = lazy. Happy Sunday.

By changing my focus from becoming an online entrepreneur to being primarily a content writer, my earnings this month have been reasonable. In previous months, most of my income has been from link sales, but I’ve moved onto exploiting other sources.

I didn’t just make money blogging this month, I made money from a number of different places on the internet. Here’s a screenshot from my Paypal this month.

As you can see (kind of), for this one-month period, I was paid a little over $650 to my Paypal. Add onto that the Adsense check I lost, which was for a bit over $100, and $200 paid into my bank account, and it’s not been a bad month.

I think what this demonstrates is that focus is essential. I spent too long wasting my time with dead blogs and $5 reviews. I also had a LOT of work offered this month from people expecting me to write for ridiculously small sums of money. I won’t sell myself short and, as I say to these people, if I offer my services for so little in return, I end up wasting my time.

What I’ve learned this month is that we can’t all be Internet entrepreneurs. Some of us are just better and other things, and without that drive to be an online guru, it’s really a waste of time and effort.

I’m already starting to see some profit because there is clearly a market for setting up start-up blogs. People are often too lazy to start their own blogs. Even for low-traffic, low-income blogs, you can still make a profit.

I decided to concentrate all of my efforts on two or three blogs because by wasting my time on other blogs, I was taking time away from writing for guaranteed payments. I was in the ridiculous position of writing content for myself for nothing and putting off writing content for other people for money.

As of this week, I’m not going to waste my time starting multiple blogs. I was fooling myself into believing that the more blogs I started, the more money I was going to make. It doesn’t work like that unless you can 100% commit to blogging, which I can’t.

The lessons here are obvious: don’t take on more than you can handle and get your priorities in order or you will actually lose money.

For several months, I worked for a large, International, online travel company. Without wanting to knock my former employer, the content system had a lot of loose ends that needed tidying up.

My former employer actually contacted me recently to write content for them on a freelance basis. The pay is good and could potentially triple the salary I receive from the newspaper I work for. What it comes down to is this: I asked myself, “What’s the difference between writing content for a website and making money blogging?” Ultimately, the difference is that you get paid without having to do any of the real ground work in building a website up.

While this is perhaps not a long-term plan, for steady, regular income, if you can channel it from a number of sources, you don’t need to go through the headaches of setting up blogs, getting link backs, and going through the whole process of taking your blog from something to nothing.

It can be just a matter of finding a website and inquiring about writing content for it. Forget the $4 tasks you see advertised on forums or various “freelance-writing” services for now. If you’re going to get paid to write, you want to be paid well. You’re time is worth more than the cost of a Happy Meal.

There are lots of ways to make money online, and sometimes it pays (literally) to get out of the mindset that the only way to do it is to set up a blog and put hundreds of hours into getting it up to PR5 or PR6.

I’ve been doing a little research, and have already found one person on Digital Point who has agreed to pay me to write articles for two high-ranking, authoritative blogs. Finding him was just a matter of trawling through the forums. And how did I sell myself? Easy: I sent him links to blogs I author, this one not included, and showed him that I can write. He was impressed and gave me the job right away. (Check out my post on writing tips for bloggers).

Not only do I get paid to write (actually, it’s just rewriting) articles for two blogs, but I get to use these articles and blogs to link out to my own blogs. There are hundreds of people with blogs who don’t have the time or the ability to write their own content. Admittedly, not all of them will pay you very well, but if you find one that can offer you a decent package, you should take it and leave your own quality content for your flagship blogs until they have matured.

This is the perfect solution for people with new blogs that don’t yet have a Page Rank or a large number of visitors.

As long as there are articles to be written, there will always be a demand for writers, no matter where you are.

I put the names of everybody who entered into an Excel file and whizzed my mouse around with my eyes closed to select a winner. The first couple of times the pointer kind of ended up off the screen on the right-hand side. After calming my movements for another try, I finally landed on someone’s name. The winner of my contest is:

Ashwin Khanna

No, that’s a joke as well. The real winner is:

Becky from Pre Blogging

Although she thought the competition actually ended five weeks ago, it ended today and she has won. This means that I have to send her $100 by Paypal now, so Becky, send me your address. It also means that Becky now has a permanent link in my sidebar, and I will write a full review of her blog within the next week.

If you didn’t win the competition and would like a consolation prize, subscribe to my RSS feed for daily Angel.

In other blog news, John Cow has put a big question mark over Tyler Cruz’s head. Tyler is alleged to be trying to scheme people out of money by offering to act as a middle man between a designer and clients.

What I would say is that in situations like this, it always pays to wait for a response from the accused before you choose whose side you’re on. I’m waiting for Tyler’s comeback with interest.