Helping you to make enough money online to quit the day job

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Writing Partners Forum

Mar29
2011 Leave a Comment Written by admin

I have set up a forum for anyone who is looking for a writing partner. If you are looking to set up a site with more than one writer contributing then this is the place to tell other writers about the opportunity.

If you need to find writers to outsource your content to or you want to earn cash by writing as a freelance writer, this is the place to find contacts.

The forum is set up at another site I own and has the awful URL…

http://www.allirelandblogathon.com/forum/

I will buy a domain in the next few days and point it at this forum,. but meanwhile just visit the site and bookmark it. You need to register to read the forum content and I need to approve your account, which is pretty much automatic.

I am hoping that this will become a kind of online writers’ coffee shop.

Keyword Research

Feb04
2011 Leave a Comment Written by admin

I found out the hard way exactly how important keyword research is. I wrote a hundred articles using only free keyword research tools. The income I earn from them is minimal. Most have never earned me a penny.

I bought Market Samurai and that made a difference. 70% of the articles I wrote after researching keywords using this program earn me two euro a month. Market Samurai has one big problem, well two actually:

  1. You have to come up with keywords and test them out one at a time
  2. It uses all my bandwidth, so much so that I lose my Internet connection for a week after a couple of hours using the program

The second disadvantage is unlikely to affect you, but the first one makes the tool very slow. I wish I had not spent $95 on it, I really do.

I had heard about a monthly paid program called the Keyword Academy a while ago. Someone I know and trust had joined and was swearing by the program, declaring that it was membership to it that was responsible for his earnings increasing to $800 a month in six months,

I signed up for a month’s free trial just before Christmas. I was stunned at the power of the Keyword Academy keyword research program, Niche Refinery.

Niche Refinery analyses the 800 words you input from a free Google Adwords search. It then ranks them from 0-800 in terms of difficulty to achieve top position in Google.

YouTube is 797, butterfly eggs is 0 (probably). Since starting my membership of the program the articles I have written are already earning me the $33 a month that the program costs. I have reached break even point in one month and expect my articles’ earnings to increase logarithmically over the next year.

Niche Refinery is only one of the tools you get from the Keyword Academy. The others are just as powerful. As a member, even in your first, free, month you get access to PostRunner and Streamline. Postrunner is a guest posting system which makes guest posting and the links you get from it a doddle. Streamline is a system that keeps track of the links you build using Postrunner and suggests alternative text you should be using as well as your main keywords.

I strongly advise you to check out the Keyword Academy. Take the one month free trial and check the power of these programs for yourself.

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Big Week this Week – I Decided to Take My Pension

Feb02
2011 Leave a Comment Written by admin

I have been putting this off as long as I could to reduce the actuarial reduction to the minimum. I checked out on the teachers’ pensions agency website and when I eventually found the calculator worked out what I would get.

To be honest there I have no option. The last of my redundancy money will be gone by the end of this month and I need money to pay my mortgage.

The weekly pension is not much more than my dole payment, but at least I won’t have to go through the humiliation of the dole office interviews.

My online earnings are growing, but slowly.

At Christmas I became involved in a new website launch, www.5Currencies.com.

This site is co-owned by the group of nine people who work on it. I am one of two writers and if you want to find out about different ways to earn a few bob online you should check it out.

I had better get back to the writing grindstone though if I am going to pay the mortgage.

Why Don’t Teachers Wear Trouser Braces?

Nov23
2010 Leave a Comment Written by admin

You see people on television wearing braces and they are definitely the Christmas present to give this year, yet I have never seen any teacher in braces.

It might be a combination of factors, or it might just be that teachers don’t wear braces.

If teachers do wear braces why don’t we ever see them?

I have not worn braces since I was at primary school. In those days braces were a like bra straps. You kept them hidden. Perhaps teachers do wear trouser braces, but they cannot adapt to the new fashion of showing off fashionable suspenders. Perhaps every teacher who never takes his pullover off is wearing braces underneath and is shy about revealing his ‘underwear’ in front of a class.

If teachers do not wear braces, why don’t they?

Overt displays of bright red fashion trouser braces seems inappropriate in the classroom, to me at least. Other teachers might feel the same.

There is also the cost of men’s suspenders, too. These are not the essential trouser holder uppers of my youth.  A fashionable set of trouser braces will set you back £50 to £90. They come supplied in a wooden box for that price mind you. There is no way that most teachers would wear a non-essential fashion item costing a whole day’s pay in a classroom, science laboratory or workshop. Teachers are usually very sensible about their classroom ‘uniform’, hence the stereotypical teacher in a pullover, rather than a suit.

Teachers may just think that displaying trouser braces in a school environment is just ostentacious and inappropriate.

Then there are the practical teachers who wear a trouser belt because it works. If it works, why bother replacing it. Men with no waist need to wear trouser suspenders because belts do not keep their trousers up with no waist.

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Emergency Resuscitation Techniques for Dead Blogs

Nov18
2010 Leave a Comment Written by admin

I have too many websites to update as reegularly as I would like.

I have one sir that is about four years old. Icurrently have it set uo as a Make Money Online blog, http://PerfectHexagrams.com/ but it does not even pay for itself. You might have a simlar domain you have half forgotten about…

I asked around for ideas what I should do with it because it is slowly becoming more sick every day, negleced and unloved.

Most people thought I would be a fool to let it die. So it is in ER.

For now I am using it to link to my Infobarrel articles. I don’t know why I never thought of that myself.

Whenever you write articles online you must link to those articles from as wide a variety of websites as you can. I have a lot of InfoBarrel articles written connected with WordPress, writing articles and making money online, so I can sensiby link to them from my Perfect Hexagrams website. I have also opened up the site to other InfoBarrel writers and invited them to post there with links to their own articles.

If you have a similar, almost forgotten website, install WordPress on it, change the theme and invite people to use it to make backlinking posts from. It will fill your website with fresh content and boost your Alexa rank if nothing else. For $10 a year it is worth it to keep your site going and grow it back to health again, ready to sell maybe…

FORUM-Live Today

Nov10
2010 Leave a Comment Written by admin

I have set up the forum I was talking about a few days ago.

Please register and let me know of any glitches. This is the first time I have used phpBB3, so I am still learning.

Escape Teaching FORUM

All posts are moderated (for now anyway) and there are no links whatsoever. I have disabled Private Messaging.

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Escape Teaching Forum

Nov07
2010 1 Comment Written by admin

I will be putting a forum onto this Escape Teaching website at some point in the next few days.

My thinking is that this will allow site users to ask me and each other questions more easily, though I am not online 24/7. I am in Ireland, so same time zone as UK, but I anly have 15oMB per day bandwidth (not half enough), so I am not online non-stop.

You will need to be registered on Escape Teaching to make posts in the forum. There will be no signature links. The idea is to help each other, to learn and to help each other to learn how to make a second income online, rather  than to blast your links all over the shop.

Watch this space…

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Site Re-Design Coming

Sep28
2010 Leave a Comment Written by admin

Over the next few days Escape Teaching will be totally redesigned. All current content will still be available on the new site. ( I learned from the previous rebuild – two visitors still access the previous incarnation of this site most days).

Escape Teaching is powered by WordPress. The theme is one I designed in 20 minutes using Artisteer, a software program that allows anyone to design their own unique themes for WordPress, Drupal, Blogger and more.

I have a theme ready to go, based on one I have designed for another site, WritingPayingArticles.com. You will notice that this site is NOT immediately identifiable as a WordPress site. I have removed WordPress links from the footer, removed categories, blogroll and login panel, so it looks like a static site. New posts go to the News page.

Artisteer allows me to design a program, perfect it in terms of width, text size, font and font spacing, then to change the colours and header graphics and reuse it for another site.

Do you have any feelings re the site redesign? Please comment on this post. Thanks

Posted in Building a blog

Free Lunch? NO WAY

Sep18
2010 Leave a Comment Written by admin

We all see thos emails offering this and that for free. How does that work?

There are no free lunches. online as elsewhere. At the very least, you will have to give an email address and allow the “guru” to send you more emails. The emails you will receive are carefully crafted by psychologists to elicit a response in at least 30% of their recipients. That response will the punter money and earn the “guru” a few dollars. They keep blasting everyone on their email lists for ever and a day, and, eventually, a significant number of subscribers buy something.

If you download a free ebook it will have links in it to affiliate products that will earn the author money.

Free websites are supported by advertising. If there are no ads, then you should be suspicious, unless the site is a new one, which is building up its user numbers before putting ads up.

Websites cost money, so a website owner must at least recover his or her costs in one way or another.

One approach that canny website owners adopt is to build a loyal readership and to earn their trust by giving LOTS of free information and passing on their knowledge. Once those readers have developed trust in the website they are more likely to follow the owner’s recommendations, to follow referral links, which will earn money for the owner.

What Does Marking Science Coursework Involve?

Sep17
2010 Leave a Comment Written by admin

I marked science coursework for MEG and AQA from 1986-2003, so I have sufficient experience in this field to give you a good understanding of what is involved.

Meetings etc

Coursework moderation involves lots of paperwork and a mountain of coursework packets from your assigned schools. You will need a large desk and plenty of storage space.

There is a compulsory meeting to explain the mechanics of moderation and to standardise every moderator’s expectations. The meeting is run along similar lines to an examiners’ meeting, with moderators being broken up into teams that work under team leaders.

You will “moderate” a few samples at the meeting and then go home.

At Home

You will usually send the first school’s work you moderate to your team leader for checking, so you need to get underway with this immediately while everything is still fresh in your mind.

As a moderator you will see many examples of work where teachers have given more help than they should have, but this is rarely penalised, and certainly not bu a junior moderator. You report serious cases of cheating to your team leader, who will do nothing with most of them. One or two cases might be referred, eventually to the examining board, who will issue a warning.

Assistant moderators can only make minor adjustments to a school’s coursework marks. Anything more than a few per cent adjustment means that the entire sample must be sent to your team leader, who can make slightly bigger adjustments.

Why Do It?

The whole coursework component of GCSE loses all credibility once you become a moderator and see the process for what it is, a paper exercise where only tiny adjustments are made.

Being a moderator will help you understand the moderation process and learn how far you can go in terms of “positive marking” before being penalised.

The pay works out to about £40 a school, but it is hard work. Timing of the moderation is good, because it will arrive before the exam marking season in late June, and should be mostly out of the way by the time you have marking deadlines to keep to.

You can moderate for more than one exam board at the same time, but, despite what they say, the different boards DO have different standards and it is very easy to become confused about what each board is looking for.

A typicla moderator will earn £800 before tax for the work, so in terms of a replacement income for teaching it is extremely valuable.

Posted in Teaching-Related - Tagged
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