As been a psychologist, I thought.. what if I give my readers a few strictly professional advices? Just as a psychologist, and not as a fellow blogger or internet money making machine. So, here are a few tips. They are not a must, feel free only to implement those you feel good about and those that won’t change dramatically your way of blogging, unless you feel it needs to be changed. Anyway, let’s get started…

1. Don’t be so money oriented. The only way to win your readers *love* is not to talk with them about money, at least not all the time, unless you actually teach them how can they earn them themselves. People, who’s only concern and value seems to be money, tend to put off. Promote high values instead.
2. Win your readers’ trust. You know how much fraud there is today on the internet. Everyone is looking for someone genuine, someone real and honest who will tell them the truth about some product or network and won’t try to promote them just to get a commission, never mind what crap they are selling. I refused tons of reviews offers and advertisers’ links only because I felt their products could not deliver what it promises. All these e-Books that guarantee to make you a millionaire… they do pay good money for advertising, but I knew that if my readers will see that I promote such websites, or buy that products and end up disappointed, and, will remember how ardently I was recommending it, they will never trust any other review I make or product I recommend. Basically, advice your readers to use only what you used successfully yourself. If you need to make money with a sponsored review, accept only relevant offers that you believe in yourself, and make it clear to the reader that the review was sponsored, either by placing it in a “sponsored reviews” category, or state it in the post. US law, for instance, demands disclosure of sponsored posts.
   
3. Don’t lose your dignity in readers’ eyes. Talking about your downfalls and how much you need financial support, for example, is needless. Begging for donations under some poor excuses such as you can’t pay the hosting bill - won’t make you look good in readers eyes. Some will feel sorry for you and leave a cheering comment, others will throw a few bucks your way, but others will just not respect you as an online entrepreneur. I mean, you can’t cover 10$ a month? Okay, some of you can’t, and I am not saying there is anything wrong with not been as well-off as Darren Rowse, but letting the whole world know about it - is wrong. Most people tend to respect successful bloggers a lot more than beginners who struggle to make a cent out of their online business. Sad, I know, but this is how the world works.
   Read More from "5 psychological tricks for making money with your blog"

Okay, I pretty much stole the idea from John Chow and do not anticipate his success, but lemme try and recreate it here in this blog. So, basically the deal is: You review my website, and get a link on this blog, without “no follow” attribute, i.e. this link will be perfectly fine and very beneficial for Search Engines, Technorati profile and most of all - traffic. (By the way, when you leave a comment, “no follow” is automatically added to your link so these never count towards your ranking.

EDIT: The thread with Spring Reviews has been added.

• Review Rules:

1. This has to be a real review of my site or a particular post in here, not just a link pointing to toptut.com, buried in irrelevant content. Please make it 75+ words long. Of course I am not going to stop you if you want to make it significantly longer.

2. If you do not review any post in particular, please use the following anchor text (any of your choice) to link to us: Photoshop tutorials, Promotion tips, Free WordPress themes Wordpress themes, Making money online, tutorials, Liza Kliko, Lorelei or free downloads. If you want to make any other anchor text - I will leave it to your creativity.
3. Please also include a link to this post, mentioning that I am giving away backlinks to *anyone* who reviews my blog.

4. Please note that your review does not have to be positive. Not saying I am seeking critique and getting myself a bad name, but you are in no way encouraged to write in a positive light if this is not reflect your real opinion. Be objective and write about anything you liked or disliked, if you complain about something, I will definitely look into improving.

5. Once your review is posted, please reply with a comment below, including a link to the post you made, it will be added to our list of “Spring Reviewers”. A thread for Spring Reviewers will be made separately in about a week from now, and will be updated weekly.

• Best Review Gets…

Every season, I will pick the “Review of the Season”, and the author will get a FREE sitewide link on this website, which at present worth 15$ /month + link on Lorelei Web worth 25$ / month, all this for 3 months (aka for the next season)! My pick will not depend on your PR, traffic or ranking, but on the quality of your review *only*, judging my originality and how enjoyable was it.

• TopTut.com’s current worth:

Daily traffic: 1300+ unique visitors.

Alexa: 173,373
PageRank: 4
Blog Juice: 2.8
Technorati Rank: 27,219

Alexa: 124,287
PageRank: 4
Looking forward to see your reviews!

Yay, it’s been a long time. 6 months it’s about 180 days, which is about 4320 hours.. let’s not keep trying to split it to molecules and atoms, you got my point - the blog have had a long life so far!  I do remember how I registered this domain because it was catchy and related to tutorials, I still remember it was generated by an online domains generator for the keyword “tut” and I also remember I got it only with one intention - to pull it to a good PageRank and resell for a good price. I never had the intention of starting my own blog and wasting time writing anywhere else except my forum, but after one month already I realized that a blog is a part of you, and there is no chance on the planet that I would ever sell this site.

As a reward, Google gave me PR5 upon the first update (which has now collapsed to PR4, but most PR’s experienced downgrade this update, so I am not worried and know it will be back).
Some (interesting?) info about TopTut.com:

1. This blog we redesigned twice, starting off with the Thirteen theme, and now uses a customized version of Icbto Theme.
2. TopTut.com has more traffic from Google then the rest of my sites altogether.
3. TopTut.com has never been submitted to Google. (Honestly I just forgot to do it).
4. At present, it costs me 2$ a month to keep it online.
5. 65% of our traffic comes from USA, 12% from UK and 10% from Canada.

6 months online, and what did we achieve?

1. Google PR5 for a start.
2. There are currently 2,770 results for “toptut.com” in Google.
3. Blog Juice: Total Blog Juice: 2.6.
4. Alexa Rank: 210,024 (yes, within 6 months online).
5. 268 blogs listed in Technorati link over here.
6. Toptut.com makes over 250$ a month from sponsors.
7. Technorati Authority: 121

Wanna keep been updated? Don’t forget to subscribe to this blog, so you will be instantly notified once we celebrate 7 months online.

Yes, no tricks, no hidden fees, no details or donates required… You can view and read this website through RSS feed and browse it without any sort of adverts at all. If you feel that Adsense and sponsored links provided by other third parties irritate you or slow down your pages loading time, you can easily get rid of it.

• What’s my benefit?

No benefit at all, serious.

• Why do I do it then?

Well, the logic is pretty simple. At present (April 2007) this blog gets about 1,500 unique visitors daily. Those are not subscribed readers and often do bring profit from viewing the adverts displayed here. If you are a returning visitor, you will tend to ignore the space dedicated for advertising anyway, and concentrate on the written or graphical content, so since you already became a part of my “audience”, I see no point in keep showering you with java codes. Don’t worry about my big loss from your subscription; first of all, I know not everyone would want to read a feed, most people like the experience of visiting (my!) website, not everyone is a returning visitor and not everyone knows how to handle a feed, how to subscribe and where to read it, so I am only risking to lose, in the worst case, 10%-15% of my CTR.
So, do not hesitate, click here to subscribe and view this website without ads and enjoy the ads-free browsing.

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Normally, I’d say - yes, definitely. In today’s life you can’t make much waiting tables, cleaning shelves in a supermarket or sitting in someone’s office, answering calls and afraid to arrive 5 minutes late to your work in the morning. Average job brings average income, which leads to an average standard of life. However, unfortunately, not everyone is able to reach this “average” job as it mainly requires a college or university degree, which as we know not easy to get, not due to lack of brain but rather due to lack of founds. Personally, I wanted to study in university and get a degree in psychology (as I only have my college degree in Social Science) but these plans were stopped by a five figures sum which stood between me and uni’s gates. Before you shed a tear - don’t worry, I do not regret it anymore

So, if you want to make big money and reach to a high standard of life, you need either to start your own business (which is, once again - a huge initial investment, in most of the cases) or be truly, and I mean it - *t r u l y* brilliant, and set up a corporation with minimum material investment and maximum brain work, recreate the success of Bill Gates, Michael Dell, or someone else, but try not to invent something that has already been invented, and I am sorry to discourage you, but most of the things a human mind can think of, has already been brought to light in this way or another. It really won’t be easy to get your photo published in Forbes without massive business creativity and some mind-blowing market model.

Yes, it’s pretty disappointing, you need to be extra smart with unbeatable ambitions, strong nerves, starting capital and preferably located in the USA where the market dominates the world. However, this all applies to real life, not Internet. Over here, in the cyber world, the rules are different. So many housekeepers are making huge money out of the invisible cyber channels, without any degree or extraordinary abilities. Of course, in order to start your online business and milk impressive revenue, you do need brain, but a lot less than in real life, and - no one cares how old are you, what’s your education level and where you are from. Nothing is relevant except for what you can actually produce and put online.
Read More from "Do I need brilliant brain to make a lot of money?"

Ok, I was just introduced to this niiiiiice way to estimate blog’s worth in money, thanks to one of the SEO guru’s who uses it to check how much his blog worth, based on Technorati popularity and probably something else. This is my result for toptut.com, you can go to their (PR7) website and recheck. This is NOT a joke tool…

(Oh and, I am not selling my blog this cheap! )

Of course I know it’s not the real price of this blog, I am been objective about it and can say that real price is probably 5-10 times less, however, it’s a very smart and tricky way for the guy who made this tool and powered it, to get tons of free backlinks, especially from high PR sites, as naturally everyone wants to brag, hey, look how much my site worth! Unlike Blog Juice or other tools who can mercilessly show you that your site doesn’t worth a broken penny, this one is been generous (who cares, it’s not like they would pay this sum to you) and therefore get rewarded for their generosity. Damn, smart move.

I know picture and theme is not something that would fit perfect in blogs tutorial, but it’s just a must. Perfect illustration for love that has no boundaries…

I found it on some site where most of the pictures are about funny animals, pulled together from some other sites… Here are a few more I particularly liked:

Please read the Terms of Use of these WordPress Themes before downloading:

Terms of Use:

1. These WordPress Theme was released for free under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License, therefore please do not remove the credits and links to loreleiwebdesign.com or/and Toptut.com at the footer of the template.
2. You may offer this template on other websites for a free download, as long as the credits are reserved intact. Please do not hotlink the download to our server.
Should you have any questions regarding the Terms on Use, please contact me at lorelei@loreleiweb.com
3. Much as I’d love to help everyone, I am sorry but due to very busy schedule with my other websites, I am unable to provide personal support with regards to installation or modification of the theme. If you wish, however, to receive assistance, please feel free to discuss it in (my) Lorelei Web Forum

Click on each image to go the page with more info, live preview and download details.

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