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The weekly winner contest is an ongoing contest that I run here on my blog. Every week, I give away $25 as well as free donated prizes to a different person inside the blog raffle. If you would like to enter for a chance to win $25 as well as a variety of free donated prizes every week, please read the official contest post about the weekly winner contest. The earlier you enter the raffle, the better your chances are at winning your free $25!

It is Sunday again, which means that the next prize winner is chosen! The sixth weekly winner is Collin De Ruyck who blogs over at Your World Gallery. You can read his entry post here. Congratulations on winning your free $25 as well as all the great bonus prizes.

Bonus Prizes

A free license to FruitfulTime task list software ($29.99 on sale value)
FruitfulTime has generously offered you a free license to the FruitfulTime software. FruitfulTime is a complex time-management software that aims to remind you for when you have tasks to be completed. For example, I gave myself a task titled “don’t forget to write your weekly winner post this Sunday!” so that I would remember to write this post on time! If you are interested in testing out the software, a 10 day free trial is available. If you would like more information I recommend you read the page on the to do list software as well as the one that has a general overview on the task list software.

1 Year Subscription to Create the Dream Magazine ($24 value)
Traci, the kind vice president/publisher of Create The Dream, has sponsored a free yearly subscription to their magazine. Create the Dream publishes 6 issues per year, which costs $24. Anyone can download the January issue for free, so you can see the quality they put into their work. You can read more about Create the Dream on their website, or my previous blog post called Create the Dream magazine.

One free hour of time from Vicky
Vicky is sponsoring an entire hour of time for her to do your work, much like a secretary. If I had a free hour, I would have her do link building, but you may get a little bit more creative. Here is what she told me, “I want to donate 1 Hour of my time. I run a virtual office business and I’m sure everyone could use a secretary to help with their office projects.”

*Update: I wrote this post very late Saturday night to be posted on Sunday, and I made the sleep-deprived mistake of having a few “he” instead of “she” typos. They have been corrected now.  In my appology, here are a few free links so that you can read Vicky’s two latest blog posts here and here.

One free review on BlogBadly.com
BlogBadly.com is a humorous blog that parodies “blog-about-blogging” blogs and satirizes topics like blog marketing, SEO, making money online, and all that good stuff. A free review will surely help you gain some additional free promotion and help you increase your traffic.

Previous Weekly Winners

Weekly Winner Number 1
Weekly Winner Number 2
Weekly Winner Number 3
Weekly Winner Number 4
Weekly Winner Number 5

If you would like to donate a prize for an upcoming weekly winner, feel free to contact me. You will get a completely free plug in return for your generosity.

In my previous post where I introduced Adtoll and showed you how you could use it to make money blogging, I had only just touched the tip of the iceberg. Today’s post is dedicated to showing you many tips that I found out while monetizing my blog with Adtoll.

Set your prices LOW
If you believe you should set your weekly advertising price at $20 (Example number), then you will have very little luck getting direct advertisers. The best way to get direct advertisers through Adtoll is to set a ridiculously low price that will negate any risk the buyer thinks he/she may run into. Instead of setting your price at $20, change it to $3-4 and have 4-5 rotating advertisement slots. The reason that selling many cheap slots is better is because your blog will show up highly in the Adtoll directory because the price is so low. This will increase your rating which means you rank higher in the directory. The more people that see your blog the more money you are eligible to earn.

Network Ads Suck
Unlike Adtoll’s competitor Google Adsense, their default ads (network ads) are not targeted and they are sold in bulk. You only earn around 3-8 cents per click when Google Adsense will pay you 3-30. If you want to truly optimize for Adtoll, you will need to directly sell your ads by yourself of through the use of the Adtoll directory. The high paying network advertisers are mostly gaming companies which get a very low amount of clicks (since this blog is about making money blogging) and are not worth a lot. This combination results in a lower income than you have the potential for.

Enable Discounts
By enabling discounts (it should be enabled by default), you have the potential to dramatically increase your earnings. Adtoll discounts allow you to save a lot of money for buying long term advertisements. If an advertisements price is $1, you will save 20% by ordering 3 months of advertising. In an advertisers mind, that is a great deal. This will also keep your advertisements all directly sold meaning it mutually benefits both parties.

Bargain Discounts on Mixed Market Arts
It would be stupid for me to not take my own advice, so I have decided to lower my prices even more! When I first started monetizing my blog, I charged $200 per month for the top banner at the top. When I recently switched to Adtoll, I lowered that price to only $80. Now I swear I am going crazy because I have just cut that price yet again.To celebrate my monetization experiment with Adtoll, you may now advertise in the premium spot at the top of the blog for only $4 per week. I have even enabled coupons on that already low price, meaning if you order a month at that super low price, you will save an extra dollar on top of that.

BEST OFFER: You may secure the premium spot at the top of the month for THREE MONTHS for only $41, which is less than $0.50 per day! If you act fast, you may now advertise on this blog for three months and only pay half of the standard cost for a single month!

If you are interested in the other advertising locations on this blog at a discounted price, please visit the advertise page at the top.

I have been busy updating my version of Wordpress to the newest release (2.3.2), and doing a lot of finishing touches on my new blog theme. Everything is finally ready and published. The new theme allows for much easier reading (white background, black text), gets rid of the dominant orange color scheme, provides additional advertising methods, and features the best information prominently. The new theme also features the updated logo/brand for my blog.When I started my blog last November, I told myself not to start monetizing for at least 30 days. Well today, 73 days later I have officially opened up some bargain advertising deals on my blog.

125 x 125 Square Ads (top right):
These will go for $25/m each. There will be a maximum of 6 sold, and the first three are reserved for a contest I had announced earlier.

Paid Reviews (Bargain Priced):
I will write a 300+ word review of your blog, website, or product. The review will be my completely honest opinion and I will list the good things as well as the bad things. I will link to a minimum of three of your pages (including the homepage). The links will have the ‘nofollow’ tag to follow the Google webmaster standards. The cost of a review will be subject to change, but for the original announcement of them in this post, the price is only $40 and unlike the other advertising solutions, is a one time payment. The blog review post will be featured on the homepage for a minimum of 24 hours and will remain in the archives forever. If you are interested in purchasing a paid review, but are scared to throw away money thinking that I will write a terribly negative post on it, listen up. I am going to be the first blogger who will let you ask me (on a scale of 1 to 10) what I think of your blog, site, or product. If I give you a 9, you will know that I am very fond of your product and will write a great review. If I tell you that I think your blog is a 6 out of 10, you will know there are some flaws that I will post about, but otherwise I like it. If I give you a 3/10, you will know that I am not very fond of the product but you may still choose to pay for a review for the publicity you will get.

Sponsored Widgets:
If you are a developer of a new cool widget, I am willing to allow widget sponsors on my blog. There are millions of different variations of widgets, so I cannot give a set price. Please contact me with all of the information about your widget and I will give you a price quote.

468×60 Top Ads:
The 468×60 banner ad that you see prominently at the far top of my blog is available for sale for $200 per month. Every single visitor to this blog notices that banner ad next to the logo as one of the first things they see.

120×600 (160×600 also accepted):
The sidebar advertisement that you see on the right sidebar is available at $60 per month. (That is only $2 per day for a very large advertisement).

RSS Advertising:
Text advertisements go under each blog post in the RSS feed, and you can purchase one for only $30 per month. A maximum of five ads will be listed at one time. You are also allowed to put your text link in a 150 character sentence/description if you wish.

If you are interested in any of these advertising deals, please contact me.

I would also like to thank JollyJo.org for the contest that they ran for the free John Chow review. I was the winner and will be using that free promotion for a big contest which will be the topic of my next blog post. Go take the time to read up on Jollyjo through their About page. If you like what you see, consider subscribing to their rss feed, only after you subscribe to mine of course!

PS: If you have already seen this in your RSS reader, it is because I had some rss troubles.