I’ve had to think very hard about what I want to do with my life this month. Although I have always been a staunch opponent of working from home, I was very nearly tempted into doing just that. I’ve made a tidy sum of money over the past six weeks. Some bloggers say that you don’t start making money online until you are earning in excess of $1,000 a month. Well, now I’m at that point and could quite easily envisage keeping this rolling as long as I have the drive.

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?

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Tags: Internet income // 6 Comments »

It’s been a great year for blogging. John Chow has proved to us all that there are small fortunes to be made, Shoemoney continues to inspire, Zac Johnson has made affiliate marketing accessible to everyone and Courtney Tuttle was just a welcome addition to my Google Reader. Those guys have done great things this year, but there are a select few bloggers who have achieved fame for all the wrong reasons and it’s these people that I believe are deserving of their place in the Angel Hall of Jokers Blogging 2007.

The king of con-tests

Darin Carter is the first joker to grace the hall this year. Darin made a name for himself when he failed to come through on a number of contests he held, one of which was one by the Cow about three months ago. Other bloggers who were stung by Darin’s dud contests included Ms Danielle and Egonitron. About a month ago, Darin issued this apology:

I ran some promotions and haven’t followed through on my end 100% not because I don’t have the prizes on hand but because of everything going on with me personally and that is a BIG NO NO in business.

So to all who feel cheated (and you know who you are) I appologize and will contact you with the status on your prizes in the next few days.

A month later and Darin is pushing this one under the rug. I asked Darin in a comment on his blog if he had resolved all the problems with his contests. Being the honest blogger with integrity that he is, Darin didn’t publish my comment, or my subsequent comment thanking him for not publishing it. He did give Egonitron his USB stick at Blog World Expo, albeit one that he likely intended to use himself had the two not bumped into each other. This hand delivery came after Darin told Egonitron this in July:

However I got your email’s and have actually packed the USB drive up to ship it out to you.

Nice on Darin. More photos from Blog World Expo please.

Blogger’s reputation implodes

Next up is Scot Smith, the blogger who came up with the ingenious idea of offering a service to fake the RSS count of any given blog. Initial skepticism turned to bemusement when Scot started lashing out at bloggers, calling them playground names and making himself look foolish. We haven’t heard from Scot for a while, but no doubt he will resurface at some point.

RSSXplosion doesn’t appear to have taken off just yet. Highlights in this debacle came when Scot called the Cow a “tool” and me a “moron”. Quote of the year came in the form of, “Blogs have no credibility. My service gives bloggers credibility with OTHER BLOGGERS.”

A blogging disaster

The third joker in this year’s list is Anthony Feint of Blogging Dosh fame. Anthony first hit the headlines when he borrowed the RSS counter of another blog and started charging his advertising rates based on the inflated count.

The bigger controversy was when Anthony violated a resell agreement on a graphics package and started selling it on his down site for $7, $3 cheaper than it was being offered on Deal Dot Com. Anthony then went on to label Deal Dot Com a scam. The real problem here was that Anthony was stubborn in how he dealt with the situation. Anthony’s blog now sits unattended collecting dust.

It’s not always good to talk

I couldn’t compile this list without mentioning Andrew Talk. This guy paid John Chow $400 to review a blog full of content plagiarized from John’s own blog. After being named and shamed, Andrew apologized and took down all the content, replacing it with a poll asking his new readers if they thought he would be able to bounce back – opinion was divided.

Andrew came up with a few lukewarm posts and some downright awful ones. At one point, he started his own affiliate scheme that paid $0.01 for every visitor affiliates sent to Andrew’s blog. I don’t know how many people took Andrew up on this amazing offer.

In a bizarre twist, Andrew’s blog has apparently been sold, I can only assume to a member of his family.

All mouth and no trousers

The biggest joker of all has to be Ashwin Khanna. This guy scammed the world by offering $2,500 as a prize in a blog contest. Ashwin fixed the contest so that a blog he had set up won. Contest Blogger was all over this one – and rightly so. Ashwin has since issued a feeble apology on his blog:

So it has been 2 months since I last posted something. I guess the first thing to do is to apologise to all the readers who entered the competition. The competition was something I stupidly thought of as a way to get a surge of traffic - which it did - however, I failed to think of the end result.

Common sense failed to prevail in Ashwin’s case. The poor guy now has a dead blog and a name that isn’t worth mud any more.

We could all learn something from these jokers. Just do the exact opposite of everything they have done and you will achieve success. Any more for the list?

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Tags: Blogger light relief // 6 Comments »

This is something I had been trying to wok out how to do for a while. It’s particularly useful for implementing links only on certain pages or for keeping stuff on your home page but off of the rest of your blog, or vice versa.

Conditional tags are a way of having bits of your blog show up only in certain places. The task I had yesterday was to implement some RSS code on only certain pages of a website. I needed to keep the code kept off of the front page and only under a certain category, let’s say “category A”, for example.

It was so easy to implement that I’m actually a little embarrassed that I didn’t learn this basic code earlier. Bear in mind that this code will only work when implemented in your template files and not in actual blog posts.

There are a range of conditional tags that you can use, all of which can be found on the Wordpress website. Here’s the one I needed:

<?php if(is_category(’category A’) ) { ?>

Code went here

<?php } ?>

Let’s say you want something to appear only on your home page. The code would then look like this with conditional tags:

<?php if(is_home() ) { ?>

Code goes here

<?php } ?>

It’s that simple. Conditional tags can come in handy for cleaning up your blog’s template. The possibilities are endless. If you want to use multiple conditional tags, you can do so as follows:

<?php if(is_category(’category A’) || is_single()) { ?>

Code here again

<?php } ?>

This would have the code show up only in category A and on single blog posts. Easy!

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