Think about Zazzle.com for Long Term Residual Cash

If you have a blog and are looking to monetize it by means other than Google AdSense maybe you should consider becoming a zazzle associate.

In order to receive income from zazzle.com you do not need to create goods for sale. You can create an advertisement in the form of a Flash Panel selling goods related to your blog and placing the ready-made HTML on your blog.

Be sure to create an account with zazzle.com first then create an associate account, very simple.

Then go to "Create a Flash Panel" in the associate menu. You can gather several designers items by using a keyword search or download a panel from your favorite designers goods.

When someone clicks on the panel and buys an item from any zazzle store on that visit you receive both a referral payment and also as the number of your referrals rises you also get an increasing sales bonus which starts as low as just $100 of sales.

You can receive a payment when your associate payments reach $50, payment is then paid to your PayPal account or you may receive a check or bank direct payment with a minimum payment of $100.

If you do not receive the minimum amount in time for payment that cash is carried forward until a minimum balance is held in your account.

You also need to wait three months for a pending sale  payment to become confirmed. This is to allow for any item to be returned by the purchaser.

Only confirmed sales are elligable for bonuses and payments. But as your account grows then times between payments grows less as goods are constantly moving from pending to confirmed.

It is just the initial period where one needs to wait three months that seems to take a long time.

A good reason for taking this option is that you do not really have to work hard at designing. You can always design goods if you like, but if you are selling other peoples goods they create the design and you receive a cut of the sales you generate for them.

Give this system a try. I have found it quite worthwhile generating some useful cash income in recent months.

It costs only a few minutes of your time to set up and once set up you can have as many flash frame store fronts on any blog of your choice  as you want.

Tie in the choice of product with your blog closely and it can pay you well over the long term.

Ancient Greek Inspiration for a Bumper Sticker

So looking around for inspiration for a topic for a slogan I turned to ancient Greece. I have recently read a history of the Battle of Thermopylae, so the first thing that came to my mind was the message inscribed on the monument erected in the 19th Century near the battle site.

"Go tell the Spartans" the message goes on to tell of the heroic stand of the 300 Spartans who stood with King Leonidas and a few Corinthian Hoplites against the massed Persian army.

In the end they bought time for the Athenian navy to defeat the Persian navy at Salamis and thereby it could be said that the stand of the 300 Spartans saved the Western world as we know it today.

A fitting motto for a bumper sticker I think.

Go Tell... Bumper Sticker Click HERE

Broaden Your Horizons

The world of internet publishing is a fickle friend. What with search engine tweaks and constantly rising and falling viewing figures.

The world of community pages such as HubPages is always a dangerous one. At any moment the owners of the community site can throw a spanner into the works and blow all your hard work away.

One tweak of their algorhytm and you are history in search engine parlance.

So for this reason I would say keep as many irons in the fire as you possibly can.  Don't throw away HubPages but spread out to other sites. Blog for yourself, maybe move into online retailing opening up affilate links to sites such as zazzle.com, cafepress.com and godaddy.com.

Affilliate sites pay some good referal bonuses and with sites like zazzle and cafepress you don't even need to produce designs yourself these days you link to a certain keyword product list and bang you can start earning cash without having to make anything.

If you need to write, try squidoo.com too or List my 5.com they are both different from HubPages but they offer you an outlet and a chance of marketing your work if any one of the sites you use botches their search engine standing.

Loss of the HubPages RSS Capsule

If you are like me and have more than one blog you may be looking at the loss of the HubPages RSS capsule with some nervousness.

The Capsule is set to be retired in the first week of February 2013.

My blogs generally get about 50% of their traffic from HubPages and the RSS feeds on various hubs account for a lot of that extra traffic.

Since I heard the news I have modified some of my links to try to help some traffic.

First I set my HubPages profile to show my largest blog as my website.

Secondly I began setting RSS links to my other blogs on my main blog.

This will enable visitors to my main blog to see the latest posts on several of my blogs thereby allowing the blogs to maintain visibility and hopefully traffic volumes.

I estimate a drop off in traffic anyway due to the loss of high traffic hub RSS feeds but hopefully the steps I have taken will mitigate any serious losses.

Time will tell. All the best for Christmas.

Jump in Views over 10,000 views. An Internet Myth?

When I began writing online, just about four years ago now, not many people had seen large viewing figures.

At that time what seemed an internet myth began to grow.

"Get 10,000 views and you'll see your traffic rise dramatically."

Of course 10,000 views is easy to get. Well it took me two years to get 10,000 views on HubPages, less time on Yahoo and even less time on List my 5.

But there is truth in that old internet myth.

Having reached 10,000 views in July 2011 I reached 15,000 views on HubPages just five months later. Now I am well on the way to 21.000 views my goal was 20,000 views by the end of 2012.

This is in part due to luck, one of my hubs about making a cold drink called 'Shandy' was a big hit this last summer. All that thirst and a fifty or sixty view per day hub was not bad.

But all in all most of my hubs are generally evergreen. History or disabled issues, people look for links to disabilities like blindness for hints and tips on resources everyday.

So if you are a struggling writer looking at your viewwing figures creep slowly up towards 10,000 hold on. Relief is coming.

Pass that and my general experience from more than one site is once passed that magical figure, your traffic will jump and hopefully for you so will revenues.

All the best

HubPages to End RSS Feed Capsule

At the begining of February, 2013, HubPages will be retiring the RSS feed capsule in our hubs.

Personally I will be upset to see this. Much of my traffic here on Blogger comes from those RSS feeds through my hubs.

Since I don't get much traffic flow from HubPages where I have not included RSS feeds then I can see a future drop off in traffic to my blogs.

I guess it had to come. We all have to move with the times and things do change. It will be sad to see the RSS feed go though, they did carry information for several posts and it meant the spread of other blogs and past posts was available to a wider audience.

Anyway there are about eight weeks to prepare and I am looking at possible reductions of my blogging and focusing on other things in the coming year anyway.

Cashing In on Cyber Retail

When looking for online cash streams don't forget online retailers such as zazzle.com and cafepress.com.

Both these companies allow you to design products and then print them on demand for your customers as they order.

You have no outlay for stock and processing of orders and your sales commissions are automatic.  You can create a store for a product line and leave it alone  to fend for itself or you can maintain it for the long term and drive customers to your store via blogs and other websites.

Commission is generally paid thirty days after a purchase. This allows a customer to return an item that they don't like, for any reason, to zazzle or cafepress.

After the thirty days your account is credited with the commission, which you can set yourself or accept a default setting from both companies.

Another way to gain revenue with zazzle is to become an affiliate who sends customers to other peoples stores. You install a link to a store with your personal code incorporated in the HTML any purchase that that prospective customer makes will then give you up to 15% commission. Plus as you send more traffic you can receive additional bonuses up to 17% all this on top of your own agreed mark-up on your products.

So if a customer goes to your store through your link b8ut doesn't buy your product. Instead they go to another retailers store and purchase you will get the bonus plus commission for directing the customer.

While Amazon's affilliate program is more popular. zazzle.com's affiliate program does give you much higher returns percentage wise and also gives you two extra and well paying ways of earning cash.

I would say try out zazzle.com and see what you think.

HubPages Women's Shirt by HubPages
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HubPages Going Downhill?

Is HubPages going downhill?

I have to say no. It has changed a lot over the last three years since I first joined.

Some changes have been for the better. The layout of the new designs of hub look far cleaner than the hubs of the old days. Some things are less good. I personally don't like the new profile page layout.

Change happens though and often the reaction of people is to claim that the old thing was better and the new will result in the death of the old readership.

My readership is holding pretty solid. I had a big spike in readership this year as a couple of my mature hubs went through the roof.

My How to make an English Shandy Cold Drink hub added 10,000 readers to my views in just a few weeks. Possibly thanks to a long hot summer.

Don't  write off HubPages just yet. Along with the report of another San Francisco resident Mark Twain, "News of it's demise is greatly exagerated."