creeva

Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. Please leave any comments there.

I originally wrote this for Journey To Get Paid.

Any of you that have researched and delved into the world of online advertising to any extent have learned that most of these companies require you to give them your social security number. You may wonder why you have to do this and the answer is quite simple, they report the expense of paying you to the IRS. The IRS at this point needs to know who to tax for the income. Any money you make is subject to federal tax laws whether the advertisers report the money to the IRS or not. How you handle your taxes and reported income is up to you but remember the tax benefits for your cost of doing business:

• Write off hosting fees
• Write off domain registration fees
• Possibly write off hardware (I need to look into this one)

What are your choices?

Now we’ve already stated that the advertisers need to tax you somehow and your normal tax ID is your social security number. What other options do you you have? Well lucky for US citizens there are at least two routes you can take, an EIN (Employer Identification Number) or a TIN (Tax Identification Number). A TIN from what I understand works identically as a social security number for purposes such as employment or money received. An EIN gives you business benefits. With an EIN you can open a business bank account and you can apply for a business license.

How do I get an EIN?

Thankfully the IRS has made it easier to obtain an EIN than it has in the past. You can apply online. The IRS has setup a website that allows you to request one in just a few minutes. You will need to give them your social security number, but then again they already have it. You will more then likely choose a sole proprietorship and under business activity choose and other and when they ask for a description type in blogging (that does feel good). You don’t have to be a blogger, but I’m pandering to my audience.

After going through a few screens that are all logical and self explanatory (if you have have questions feel free to email us and we’ll answer them to the best of our ability). At the end of the process you are given your EIN immediately and a PDF with your documentation. While you can retrieve your number at a later time I would suggest e-mailing yourself the PDF for future reference. You now have a legal tax number you can give advertisers without giving them your social security number.

Why do I want this again? Why shouldn’t I just give the advertisers my social security number?

The simplest answer is how do you know to trust them? This is about keeping your social security safe from identity theft. If the advertisers database is compromised your social security number could be released for any and all to use. If it’s a fly by night advertiser that may be offering huge rates - their true business may be collecting social security numbers. By keeping your blogging business separate from your personal finance record you can maintain an easier separation from your day job and your online business.

I hope this was useful for you and it helps insure your personal security

Be warned though - some sites are trying to charge you for the privilege of getting an EIN which is free to you for the taking.

For more information on the online EIN application process go here.

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Posted By Creeva Murkado to Journey To Get Paid at 2/06/2008 05:57:00 AM

Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. Please leave any comments there.

This article was originally published over at Journey To Get Paid.

One of our reader’s (rs - or Tom as he’s known non-virtually) read and commented on the article I wrote yesterday about click through advertising. It seems rs is considering a run for a bit of the advertising dollar but has learned through my article that click through traffic is not all that it is cracked up to be. His site “thought socks” is one of the sites that, like my own personal blog, is witty and insightful and generally smart. This also means he may suffer from the lack of click through traffic that I also suffer. Smart techno-literate individuals click on ads less then other demographics of the general population. This doesn’t mean there isn’t hope.

Instead of getting disheartened and giving up (like I stated you shouldn’t do) rs devised a unique method to generate interest in advertising on his blog. He is giving away advertising space for free. Now you may ask if he is giving away the milk why would someone buy the cow? There are many reasons for this but he didn’t post his authoritative reasons I will speculate some logical guesses.

1 . Offering free advertising gives him a track record he will be able to show either the person taking advantage of the free space in the future or another possible contact and turn it it into what they they should expect going forward for impressions.

2. This will allow him to work on growing his readership instead of worrying about making money. This will allow him to becoming a brand that he can market off of later.

3. Getting the right advertisers will be a learning experience for him to get to know expectations on both sides of the advertising fence.

If he manages to make this work correctly he may make it to the point in advertising that most bloggers want - page impressions. Page impressions means you get a small amount of money (usually a few cents or fraction of a cent if your not large enough to command higher dollar) for each person that visits your site and loads the ad. In the next week or so I will be writing more about page impressions. I for one wish rs the best of luck and if my graphic designer had gotten my banner and button ads finished I may have taken advantage of the offer.

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Posted By Creeva Murkado to Journey To Get Paid at 2/05/2008 07:25:00 AM

Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. Please leave any comments there.

Originally from journeytogetpaid.com

I’m Going to Be Rich….Not!!

While all of us would hope that click through advertising would pay for our home on the beach, for most of us that doesn’t seem to be true. I’ve been using Adsense for about 4 months now and so far the whopping total I have made is $0.11. Now I hope that I don’t spend all of that in one place. Wait a second upon reading the terms of the Adsense account it only starts to pay out when you reach for first $100.00. I guess that this means my great grand kids may be able to buy a candy bar when inflation has caught up to the point of the pay out.

Does This Mean I Shouldn’t Use Click Through Programs?

No, it doesn’t mean that at all. This means you are going to have tailor your site to give you the greatest likelihood of getting click through traffic to work for you. At this moment I’m going to tell you that I don’t have the answers. This is honesty and hopefully we are working on this journey together. Over time we are going to investigate on this journeytogetpaid.com on how to make the money you so crave to have. Does craving money make you evil? No, though it shouldn’t be your single goal in life. I never personally thought of Scrooge McDuck as evil, did you?

Why Doesn’t it Work?

Well the honest answer is that sometimes you are too smart for your own good. Do you write pieces that bring in people at your same intelligence level? Do you write a lot about technology and innovation? These really are things that work against you, and more then likely you should move to a page impression based advertising system (I don’t have one that I can recommend to you yet). The reason that it doesn’t work is think about yourself, when was the last time you clicked on an ad and actually purchased something? If your like me probably never or very very low chance. This means if your readers are as intelligent and interested in things that you write about as you are - you are gathering people that are less likely to get ads.

What Can I do Now?

The quick answer is start a new blog with a new focus or re-purpose your existing blog. Instead of dealing with technology or personal interests you should pick topics with a more wide spread appeal. If it’s something you can write about coherently it is never a sell-out approach anymore then you doing the normal 9-5 job. It is providing a service. If you are uninteresting on topics such as mortgages, pet products, or the average income of a laden swallow in India; you won’t get a reader base. If you don’t have a reader base click through ads still won’t work for you.

So I would say your best bet is to write on something that can be monetized to a level you feel comfortable with interacting with people. There is a chance you could start a spam blog based on a typo - but the rewards can be very low. While you’ll hear Internet legends of the squatter that has made millions of dollars off one typo - this really isn’t true. Maybe once upon a time but write now people are fighting over every last penny available online. I think you should maintain and use click-through advertising from which ever company you find is the best fit for you. I can say that it’s not the magic bullet you are hoping for.

Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. Please leave any comments there.

Journey To Get Paid wants to bring you into the world of brand management.

Now the first thing to know as a blogger that you are your brand. Whatever you do positive or negative effects your brand in tremendous ways. It also effects your SEO in a way also, but I’ll get to that towards the end. You have to decide how you want yourself as a blogger to be perceived. If you want a spam blog that may or may not generate yourself a ton of money please stop now because some of the things I’m going to explain is just going to out you quicker to the general population.

You as a blogger is the primary asset for your brand, that being said if you have a collaborative blog, that blog in itself is a brand name and the authors are their own brand names. If you are insightful, engaging, humorous, or interesting you can gain an audience. The audience you wish to reach depends on yourself. The blog I’m going to use for example is my personal blog at creeva.com. This blog is the core of my internet persona (ironically not really the core of my journey to getting paid but my core nonetheless). Where ever I post across the blog-o-verse I cross post the article to my home blog. This allows ease of backup and exposure to the few people that take interest in me.

For those that don’t care about the fluff or personal lamenting I have the on topic blogs I work on (journeytogetpaid.com) this immediately separates readers from the two brands I wish to confer on to them, the brand of myself as a blogger compared to the brand of one of the blogs that I write. This allows for a more personal dynamic of engagement between yourself and your readers. You should always be personal - but I’ll never get asked if my cat is feeling better at journeytogetpaid.com.

Honing into the fact that you are your own brand management (Scobel is king of self-brand management) you have to target your own peer group. This includes allowing other methods for readers and friends to contact you. This gives multiple levels of engagement where you still have some control over the boundaries. I went from google telling me “did you mean cirev?” when I did a search for creeva - to the fact now that I have over 6k hits on that name. Is that good? Well my friends can find me through all the various services I use - or the can engage me at my home blog with aggregates the data from far and wide.

Let’s take this story I’m writing right now. When this is published it will be published on journeytogetpaid.com and crossposted to journeytogetpaid.blogspot.com (google crawls itself first hence the blogspot mirror) and creeva.com. You may think that is the end of i, but far from it. At creeva.com I allow my friends to read me from whatever social network they use and wish to follow me on. Here is a run down to what happens when this story is crossposted and published over at creeva.com.

Creeva.com crossposts to the following sites

My livejournal which in turn syncs with my dandelife account

My Vox

My MSN Spaces

My Old Blogspot Site

My Xanga Site

It also through RSS feeds goes to these sites:

Sends an alert to my twitter readers

Sends a notification as a blog entry into my myspace blog

Cross posts into my facebook profile

Archives as a line in my old tumblr account that I don’t know what I’m going to do with

Archives to my old suprglu account that I used to use as my lifestream.

Theoretically before anyone reads this article it will be published 13 places. This is also before the spammers get to it and repurpose it for their own means. My wife says she is going to blame me when the internet crashes. Behind the scenes there is even a bit more that goes on, but that really isn’t publicly accessible since it has nothing to do with branding.

Why do I do this?

Different people know me at different places, but my writing is all me and I wish to share that with all of them. I’m not as bad as some. I actually at one point crossposted every song I listen to, thankfully I’m more selective at what I crosspost at this time. It’s more relevant to what is going on and family and friends can have different levels of engagement with m.

I also use many activity specific type sites like flickr and digg which I don’t cross post to but have a level of engagement with other users there. But of course my profile links back to my main site. Whenever I crosspost I also include links back to where he article was originally published at. This allows readers to traceback and find the information at teh correct source. I use no subterfuge or magic mirrors to hide what I’m doing. It’s all plain as day.

Seeing this is my journey to get paid I’m sure your wondering how I can monetize all these sources?

In short - I can’t, but passing the message and advertising myself to those that show interest hopefully have them trace back to the original article. If not I have methods of importing comments from these diverse locations into creeva.com. So if you leave a comment on my facebook account or my flickr account it get pulled back into creeva.com. This allows full engagement with my readers and what they have to say.

So all I have to do to be popular is push myself out everywhere at once?

No, if your not interesting and don’t have any friends now, propagating your information will not help you get anymore. If your not clear on your intentions or your readers think your being shady it can back fire on you. It can get you on the dreaded spammer list in people’s minds. Yes I could theoretically start 2000 blogspot domains and crosspost to all of them, but I don’t. I just maintain the links I already have in the communities that I already exist. I’ll migrate the method in which I interact with a service by sourcing material from the one I primarily use, but I don’t abandon the community I left behind.

This of course in some ways hurts me from a monetary perspective - but my branding gets better and recognition improves. You will always have to write something people wish to read if you want to gain a steady and growing following instead of single SEO tricks to get people to click links without giving them any substance (that’s cheating). Work on your own writing and enhancing the communities around you, this is what gives you a following and brand loyalty.

Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. Please leave any comments there.

While you may be read this from one of several sites or feeds, the homepage for this post is at Journeytogetpaid.com. Why is that important to know? All in all I guess it isn’t. Pages on the web are fleeting and data unfortunately is not forever. I am about to work on a web site with a series of friends and want to document this experience.

For those that have read me regularly on my home site, you know I aggregate all of my data there, so my posts form here will be available. I also have this going to a blogspot site. Hoping to raise awareness and optimize myself.

Why did I start “Journey to Get Paid”?

I wanted to document and see what it takes to be a paid blogger. I know a couple and while I may ask for them advice as I go along, I’m basically starting at square one at this time. I know very little about SEO, though some of my pages rank very high in search engines. I know next to nothing at this second on getting paid to blog. This sucks for me, but will be great for you.

I’m going to record the options that work and the ones that don’t. I’m going to help you, and I hope you help me to chase this dream. Most sites that start out blogs of this type are trying to sell you something. I’m not here to sell an e-book or program. If I ever do it will be a compilation of posts which regular readers can get for free. While I want to get paid, I’m not working on working unfairly off the backs of others. This means if I find something from another blog that I’m trying I will link to the original article. I will fairly give credit where credit is due.

Things I’m not going to do is to pay for SEO services or any traffic generators. This site costs me $5.95 a month in hosting and 6.95 a year for domain registration. For the moment I think that is truly enough cash outlay for the blog until I get something back from it. Further monetary investment will wait until makes it a decent monthly profit.

I do have a day job thankfully, which means at this point in time I can’t blog and research 24×7, though I would love to. The crux of that goal is what journey to get paid is all about. I do have designs for other web services which may or may not ever to get off the ground. While I would love to try those I’m preferring to write more and more. I would love to be able to live off of blogging if possible.

To fully live off of content creation like I would want I need to work at getting blogging to pay as much as my day job. I also need at least a few months of income saved up. The latter should be easy since if it does start to pay the bills the money will go immediately into expenses first, trying to get the modern american dream or living the way we want and debt free.

I’ll add more information onto this blog as it comes - I’m hoping to add information daily or at least every other day.