They are a work from home opportunity and can help you make some extra money in your free time.

Paid Surveys are free to join and usually give rewards ranging from $1 to about $25 per completed survey.

Once you sign up to a paid survey company, they will send you an invitation to take their available surveys on the email address you have provided them. You have to answer their invitation and then wait to see if you qualify for that survey.

Usually US residents have bigger chances to qualify for surveys. So, this can be a disadvantage for residents of other countries.

Warning: Beware of any website that asks you to pay them a fee in exchange for survey opportunities! These sites are SCAMS. The real surveys are FREE to join.

Why do these people like working from home? Well… there are many reasons. In this article, I will list some of them.

They gain time

Many people barely have time for anything except their day job. This can be very disturbing to parents who cannot spend as much time as they would like with their kids. Many times parents can only see their children in the evening and are missing out on their growing.

Also, these people who are too busy often don’t have time for regular exercise, leisure or friends.

Not enough income

Some people search for a work from home job in order to supplement their income and earn more. Many people are involved in more different jobs at a time and they want to replace at least one of their jobs.

Other people just don’t earn enough and want to replace their salaries so that they can quit their day jobs.

They dislike their jobs

Many people quit their jobs even without securing another one because they couldn’t stand it anymore. Most of those people are trying to find a work from home job and earn doing what they like to.

Of course there are lots of reasons why people search for work at home jobs, these are just the most common ones.

I personally prefer to sell ad space on my own, but for those who use AdSense, Kontera, Clicksor, Text-Link-Ads and so on, here are some tips to increase your ad revenue.

1. Improve ad placement

When trying to increase your website’s revenue, a very important step is the placement of your ads. A small change can significantly increase your CTR and thus, your ad revenue. In the image below listing different ad placements, the best ad positions are colored with red, so if you opt for one of those your CTR should be quite high.

2. Write about higher paying topics

If for example you have a website or a blog about insurance, to find out the higher paying ‘insurance’ related keywords, search for ‘insurance’ in Adwords Keyword Tool and click ‘Show Estimated Avg. CPC’.

After looking at the list you will see that ‘home insurance’ costs an advertiser $7.04 CPC while ‘auto insurance’ costs the advertiser $32.76 CPC. If you have the choice of writing a page about ‘auto insurance’ or ‘home insurance’ go with ‘auto insurance’ since those ads pay more than 4x as much as ‘home insurance’ ads.

3. Don’t use more than 2 ad programs at a time

There are 2 big disadvantages if you use many ad programs on the same page.
1. some visitors will click-through the low earning programs when they could have clicked-through a higher earning one
2. each ad program will give you an external javascript file. Just imagine how drastically would 5+ separate javascript files increase the page loading time.

4. Find the programs that work the best for you

There is no guarantee that an ad program that works very good for your friend will work good for you as well. For example there are websites that earn very good with AdSense, but, on the other hand, there are websites that earn way better with Text-Link-Ads or Kontera.

You should test multiple programs to see which work better for you, but test them one or two per page. Test them for about a week or two, compare the results and stick with the best ones.

5. Target good traffic sources

Another important factor is your traffic source. The best type of traffic in terms of conversion is by far the search engine traffic.

For example, if a visitor arrives at your site after searching on Google for ‘Ways to Make Money’ and he/she sees an ad for ‘Make Money Online’ that person is quite likely to click it, but if your visitor arrived from StumbleUpon, MySpace or Facebook and sees the ad for ‘Make Money Online’ he/she will most likely ignore it. So, this is just another reason to focus on SEO.

1. HeadSpace 2 SEO

HeadSpace 2 is a great all-in-one SEO plugin. It will help you manage your meta-data: you will be able to create custom titles, descriptions and tag your posts.

2. Google XML Sitemap

Google indexes articles much quicker if you have a sitemap. This plugin will automatically create an XML the sitemap for you and will notify Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask about the updates on your blog.

3. WP Super Cache

This plugin  will speed up your blog significantly and make your pages load way faster. If you have many visitors on your website this plugin is definitely for you as it will prevent your server from crashing.

4. WordPress Related Posts

This plugin will display contextually related posts. If a visitor likes one of your articles then one of the best things that you can do to make him/her stay more on your blog is to display a few articles on the same topic.

5. WordPress Comment Remix

With the help of this plugin you can add a reply link to each comment. This will help you encourage the conversation and get more comments.

6. WP-DB Manager

Using this plugin you never lose your content. The plugin can email the entire WP database to you every day.

7. Akismet

Akismet is a great tool to fight against spam. It is very useful especially if you receive lots of spam comments.

8. Sociable

This plugin will automatically add social bookmarking buttons to your posts, pages and RSS feed.

9. WordPress Popular Posts

This plugin will display your most popular posts. It is very useful as it will make your readers visit more pages and spend more time on your website.

10. WP-Gravatar

This plugin lets you use Gravatar, OpenAvatar, Wavatar, Identicon, monsterID or Favico.ico files with your comments.

11. Upcoming Posts

Upcoming Posts will notify your readers when you will post a new article. This plugin is helpful to maintain your visitors’ interest.

12. WP Greet Box

This plugin detects the referrer URL (where your visitors are coming from) and automatically displays the corresponding greeting. You can also set a default greeting message suggesting your new visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed.

13. Vidoop Connect

Vidoop Connect make it easier to sign up to your blog by allowing your visitors to use their existing Yahoo, Google, Facebook and MySpace accounts.

14. Top Commentators

This plugin is useful to increase the number of comments on your blog. It will automatically display the persons with the biggest number of comments.

15. WP125

This plugin helps you manage 125×125 banner ads on your blog. It adds a new “Ads” menu to the WordPress admin and offers you plenty of options for displaying the ads.

What can you do to increase the number of comments on your blog?

Ask your visitors questions
A good way to encourage your visitors to post comments is to ask for their opinion at the end of your post. When they are asked, people are more willing to give their opinion or share their experience.

Don’t ask your visitors to register before posting comments
Many bloggers require their visitors to be registered and logged in to be able to post comments. This option is useful if you want to avoid spam, but it will also decrease significantly the number of comments on your blog.

Get involved in the conversation
Interact with the persons who leave comments on your blog. Make sure you always answer their questions. If you have a big blog this will be a hard task for you, but it will encourage more visitors to join in the conversation.

Use Top Commentators plugin
If you use Wordpress, install the Top Commentators plugin. After you install it, it will display the top commentators on your blog. This will encourage your visitors to keep commenting.

Remove NoFollow attribute from comments
You can use a DoFollow plugin to remove the nofollow attribute. Other bloggers or website owners will be tempted to comment on your blog in order to increase their site’s link popularity.

Hope you enjoyed this article and that you’ll manage to significantly increase the number of comments on your blog.

How Do You Find If a Blog Is DoFollow or NoFollow?

There are a few ways to do it:

1. Use the free FireFox extension SEO for FireFox

Search for “SEO for FireFox” on Google it and it should be the first result

After you install the extension you will see a SEO icon at the bottom of your browser (if you don’t see it restart FireFox). Once you are able to see it, all you have to do is go to the blog where you want to post your comment and scroll down to the comments section.

If the comment name has a red background, it means that the blog uses the NoFollow atribute.

2. Check the “Page Source”

Open the blog where you want to post your comment then select “View” on your web browser and then “Page Source”. This will show you the HTML of the page. Click on “Edit” and then on “Find”. Do a  search for the words “dofollow” and if they are found, it means that the blog is a DoFollow one.

You can also search for the word “external”. If you find in the page source something like rel=”external” it means that the blog is a DoFollow one. If you find the attribute rel=”external nofollow” it means that the blog is a NoFollow one.

Once you’ve found DoFollow blogs in the niche of your website, you can increase your link popularity. However, you shouldn’t overuse this method. If you place too many comments search engines will penalize you.

Here are some tips on how to increase the number of backlinks to your website commenting on DoFollow blogs.

Posting comments on DoFollow blogs is a great way to generate free backlinks to your site. For those who don’t know, DoFollow is a small HTML code that tells Google and other search engines whether to value a backlink.  So, if you want your backlinks to have a positive effect on your search engine optimizationis it is important to obtain DoFollow links.

If you don’t know whether a blog is a dofollow or a nofollow one, read my article: How do I know if a blog is a dofollow or a nofollow one?

Many webmasters use blog commenting in order to increase the number of backlinks pointing to their websites, but only a few know how to  utilize this method in the correct way so that it helps them in their SEO efforts.

How Can You Make Your Comment Be Approved?

First of all, your comment must be relevant to their post. If you only post a comment saying “check out my website” you will only be considered a spammer and your comment won’t be approved. Be responsive to their post and your comment will have far greater chances to be approved.

How to Make Your Link More Valuable?

Try to embed a few of your keywords in the comment as any backlink surrounded by relevant keywords will have a far greater effect on SEO. But if you do this really obviously the site owner will notice your intention and as a result, your comment will not be published.

Too Many Backlinks From Comments?

Do not post more than 20 comments a day or you risk to be considered spammer. Make sure your site doesn’t depend on blog comments. Try to obtain as many backlinks from websites or blog articles as you can. Build your backlinks slowly (not more than 800 backlinks a month) and Google will like it.

In this post I will talk about 5 good and FREE ways to increase your site’s popularity and boost the traffic on your website.

1. Social Bookmarking Sites

Social bookmarking sites like Delicious, StumbleUpon, Propeller, Digg are a great way to promote your website. However, make sure you add articles from other sites too as you will be considered spammer if you only add your articles. The percentage should be 70% articles from other sites and 30% your articles.

2. Use Press Releases

Each time you update your website, write a short press release and submit it to sites like: 24-7PressRelease, PrLog, i-NewsWire, FreePressRelease, PressMethod, PrUrgent, Pr-Inside.

3. Social Networking Sites

Effective ways to increase your site’s popularity are social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace or Yuwie. On Twitter for example, you can keep your followers’ interest in your website adding a tweet with a link to your website each time you  update your website with a new article.

4. Free Classified Ads

Use free advertising sites like: FreeClassifieds, BestAds, Ad2Go, AdToad, 1Second, CraigsList or ClassifiedsforFree.

5. Use FreeTrafficSystem

With Free Traffic System you get free one way links from thousands of blogs inside their system. How it works: you write an article and you place inside it a link to your website. They will place your article on up to 30 blogs related to your topic. So, you can get one-way backlinks and of course, more visitors.

All these methods above are free to use and can significantly increase the number of visitors on your website. Good luck!

There are 2 ways of using effectively your eBooks:
- sell your eBooks for profit
- give away your eBooks and include a link to your website on every page

In this post I will talk about the second one, how to boost your traffic giving away eBooks.
First of all, if you don’t know how to create an eBook, read this article: How to create an eBook.

It’s well-known that people like free stuff. So, a good way to gain more credibility and get subscribers is to give away a free eBook from time to time. People will see you want to help them with useful information given for free and that profit is not your unique goal.

For example, if you have a newsletter, give your new subscribers a free eBook as bonus. You will see a boost in the number of your subscribers in no time!

Another great advantage of giving away eBooks is that they spread easily. If the book is good, and free, the persons who own it will likely recommend it to their friends. And if you have a link to your website on every page, you will see a boost in the traffic of your website…this is called viral marketing.

In this post I will tell you how you can increase your site’s popularity by creating a forum (message board).

Many people prefer websites that have either a forum or a blog as, this way they can easily contact the webmaster and they can ask for tips and advice from the community. So, a good way to increase your site’s popularity and credibility is to add a forum or a blog to your website and interact with your visitors.

How to Add a Forum

If your web host (the one that hosts your site) offers a forum platform, you will have your forum up & running with a few clicks (and with no cost). You will have both your website and forum hosted on the same account.

If your web host doesn’t offer a forum platform, you will need to buy a forum software that is compatible with your hosting. A well-known forum software is vBulletin. But this way you will have to pay both for your web hosting and for the forum software.

My recommendation is to pay attention when choosing your web host. Make sure it offers a platform so that you can add forums, shopping carts, datafeeds, blogs and other server-side functionality, as well as unlimited disk space and unlimited monthly traffic, so that you can extend your website whenever you want without extra costs.

Here it’s a list of cheap web hosts that offer all the above mentioned features.