The best way to improve as a blogger is to learn from other bloggers.  I'd suggest you follow several blogs in two categories:

Blogs about Blogging

I follow problogger.net,  dailyblogtips.com, blogussion.com, and a few other blogging gurus.  I don't agree with every single thing they say.  In fact, I don't even read every single post--I just keep up with the feed and read posts that catch my attention.  Anyway, I've learned a lot of helpful tips from these blogs.

Blogs in Your Niche

I have a strength and fitness blog, so I also follow a few other blogs in this niche.  I like to know what my peers (or competitors, if you prefer the term) are saying.  Here are a few reasons to do this:

*You may get an idea for a new post of your own.
*You might disagree with what another blogger says and respond with your own post.
*Your fellow blogger may have run across a product that you also want to promote. 

 Hope this little tip helps.

Seems Adgitize is back online.  I'm still having some trouble editing/updating my ad information.  Anyone else having this problem or is it just me?

A few hours ago I wrote a post about Adgitize prices rolling back to 14 dollars a month.  Ironically, their website and service went down soon after.  Not sure what is going on, but it has been down for about half a day now.  Hopefully they'll get things up and running again.  This is the first time I can remember this happening.

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A few days ago I realized the Adgitize prices were lower when I renewed my ads. Today I finally took tome to look over the Adgitize blog and realized prices have dropped back to 14 bucks a month. You just can't beat 50 cents a day for the number of impressions Adgitize gives you.
 
Just click here if you want to try it out: Adgitize - Get World Class Advertising on a Bloggers Budget

Should you use adsense on your blog?  I'd say it really depends on your blog.   As you can see, I use it here at Beginner Blogger Tips (as well as a few of my other sites).

But I don't use adsense on my two most popular blogs.

I decided to completely give up on monetizing my personal blog (kuyakevin.com).  I had two problems with adsense there:

1.  It wasn't earning much money.

2.  Since my personal blog is more spiritual in nature, ads for religious wacko groups kept appearing.

I also removed adsense from my fitness blog (strongandfit.net) once I switched to affiliate marketing.  I was running into two problems:

1. The ads that show often advertise the same products I'm selling through affiliate marketing, which means someone else could "steal" my commission.  

2. The other ads are what seemed to be bogus products ("lose 20 lb in 20 days," etc).

Here are a few more random thoughts:

*I think most blog readers understand that you, the blogger, are personally endorsing whatever product shows up in adsense.  You'll just have to decide what you are comfortable with.

*It's always good to experiment with more than one way of making money.  Adsense may or may not be the best for you.

*Maybe geographical issues come into play here.  One nice thing about adsense is regional ads automatically show up on your blog--this could be a huge advantage if your visitors are not concentrated in one country (or region).

For those of you who are unfamiliar with my story, my page rank at Strongandfit.net was dropped from 3 to 2 a while back, and I was successful in having it reinstated.

Then the same thing happened again a couple of weeks ago--a drop from 3-2.  This time the google gods have frowned on my reconsideration request, so my fitness blog is stuck at PR2 for the time being.

I'm really not 100% sure why my page rank was reduced.  I have a few theories, but I'm not going to worry about it.  My standings in the search engines are really good and I'm still getting plenty of traffic through google. 

This is the fifth post of my Affiliate Marketing: a Beginner's Guide series.

Like many other posts here, I'm writing about the stuff I wish I knew when I first started blogging.  With so many affiliate programs to choose from it is hard to know where to start.  I had a hard time figuring out which affiliate program I should try. 

The "best" affiliate program depends largely on your niche.  If, for example, you write about dating and relationships, your best bet is to sign up with a dating website's affiliate program.

Having said this, let me tell you what has worked best for me and share my comments:

Clickbank has out-performed every other affiliate program I've tried.  Most of the products on clickbank were specifically designed for online affiliate marketing, which is a big advantage.  Many of the clients offer 75% commission to you, the blogger, for sales.  Clickbank also gives you a ton of valuable information in terms of analytics:  hops per order, etc. 

Shopzilla has been a consistent earner for me as well.  It is sort of a modified pay-per-click program.  This means you get paid for clicks (vs sales), but the earning potential isn't as high as with commission affiliates.  I have a couple of pages/posts that regularly earn 3-5 dollars a day with Shopzilla.  This services is more of a slow, steady earner for me: the daily profits ad up. 

Amazon.com has one of the most well-known affiliate programs on the internet, and some bloggers do quite well with them.  I personally have not made much money with their program, but it is a good one to use for book and video reviews, etc.

Commission Junction is the program used by Dell.com and several other well-known companies. 

This is not meant to be an exhaustive list.  I'm just sharing some of the programs that have worked for me. 

Here's a message I found in one of my email addresses. Seems the Nigerian scam has a Filipino/Philippines version:

Hello Dearest One,

I am Mrs Laarni E Enriquez, a Philipino by nationality, And once President, Joseph Estrada courier mistress. Honestly I would like to have confidentiality investment with you,
I want you to know that I am broken heated and needed someone to trust in respect of this transaction without remembering my past and forsaken experiences from close confident and relative/family.

All i want from you is to represent me as my foriegn partner and assist me to claims $18.5M US Dollars. I concealed in a metallic trunk box deposited in a trusted company in abroad, as this was the money that was supposed to be used by the ex-President to acquire some properties in Abroad.

For more details I will forward the deposite documents to you in my next mail for your view. I want you to be honesty and sincere with me in this transaction.

Thanks in advance
Mrs. Laarni Enriquez,

So I'm the lucky one chosen to get $18.5 million dollars? Wow--sign me up!

Seems there's some problem with all my custom domain blogs (including this one).  I can post here, but I can't see the blog.

I'm assuming (and hoping) it is something temporary.  Anyone else having problems with this?

Update:  that only lasted a few minutes . . . it's fixed now . . . never mind.

Apparently my Facebook account is down for site maintenance:

Interesting--first time I've ever seen this on Facebook (though I've seen this several times on Friendster).  Well, no need to panic--there's life outside of facebook (so I hear).

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So I happened to check the page rank of Strongandfit.net again yesterday.  Once again they have dropped it from 3 to 2.  I've submitted another reconsideration request.

This is really weird--I just had the page rank re-instated a couple of weeks ago. 

I don't spend too much time worrying about page rank, but we'll see what happens.