Ok, this post is yet again made due to continuous requests from people (uuhm like two or three in total) who are interested to know how much this blog earns and from what. First of all, it’s new, it was only launched in December 2006 and was not heavily monetized right from the start, as my main aim was to get it ranked good and have a high PageRank, so I actually started to work on the material side of it only 2 months ago. Hence, at present, this is how it works for me (I refer to toptut.com’s revenue only).

Google Adsense - my most beloved source, you can see I put it in “we use and recommend” box. With the present design the ads are allover the place (by the way, you can read the blog without ads through the feed, if you subscribe), so I am hoping for increasing the revenue (up until last week it was only a text banner at the end of each post). Roughly speaking, so far (this April) it was making about 1,10$ a day.

Text Link Ads - another money making program I strongly recommend to use. Unlike Adsense, it won’t take up much space as these are “just” text links. I made 22,50$ this month from 3 text links ads sold on this site and 50$ from 2 new publishers I referred, so let us say, compared to Adsense, TLA occupies little space and bring bigger revenue.

ReviewMe - this month one review was sponsored by an advertiser at ReviewMe and put 30$ in my little porcelain piggie.

Adbrite - I don’t use it “full time” on this blog, no interstitials ads, no inline ads, no banners. There is only one text link ad that has been sold here (I mean I only provide space for one text link advert) and it was sold with 0,10 $ CPM. Since I only put it here 2 days ago, and the ad was sold yesterday for 3 ad companies, I still have no clue how much will it bring me, so let’s leave it open for now.

BlogsVertise - As unbelievable as it sounds, they are one of my main revenue sources. They work on a basis of offering you to review sponsors or place text links. They either assign you a task or you can grab one every day (!), if you want. As been lazy I don’t track the tasks and only choose from offers they send me by email, naturally I decline most of them (low paying and irrelevant) so from the very few I did pick, I made 68,50$ this month.

Direct Ad Sales- I don’t do it often as I have no time and it’s a lot of hassle updating the website’s code. It’s far easier for me to sign up with network-based-ads that will do the job for me looking for advertisers and displaying ads though .xml or java file. However, some offers just came by to me and I did accept. This month ad space on this blog was sold for, if i am not mistaken, 20$, which is dramatically less than last month because like I just said, I do not look for it anymore.
How much do I spend on toptut.com?

Read More  "How does toptut.com make money?"

When I was in Czech Republic this supper and spent some unforgettable time there, I was taking some pictures, though at that time I didn’t even consider opening this blog (as it was only born in December) and the online photo stock did not exist as well. These were just pictures taken for a private home collection, yet now that I practically put every bit of what I have online (great demand, ya’know…) I realized it would be a shame not to use all the pictures I collected in some positive way. Let’s say, sharing them.

However, there are tons of photos of Prague and Karlovy Vary, no one would be impressed to see same old statues from same old angle in same old light, so I just composed them in wallpapers, each photo is now wrapped in a (tasteful, I hope) composition and ready to go on your desktop. All the images come in 1280*1024 resolution (for 19″ monitors), I apologize for lack of consideration towards the smaller screens here. Anyway, Enjoy! Click on the image to get to the download page.
All the photos and wallpapers are a copyright property of Liza Kliko © TopTut.com

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  "Do I need brilliant brain to make a lot of money?"

I am happy to announce yet another release of a free WordPress theme designed by me. This is a more “dreamy” of my first theme - Lorelei Bliss 2.0. This one was developed in cooperation with my friend Tom and I want to use this opportunity and thank him for working with me and hope we will release some more themes developed together in the future. Hope you will like this release!
Specs: 3 Columns, Fixed width, Widgets ready, optimized for 1024*768 resolution, best viewed on 17? or 19? monitors. Easy to modify and optimized for fast loading.

Lizommi Free WordPress theme Terms of Use:

1. This 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 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.
3. Should you have any questions regarding the Terms on Use, please contact me at lorelei@loreleiweb.com
4. Much as I’d love to help everyone, I am sorry but due to very busy schedule with my other websites and blogs, 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 Lorelei Web Forum

NON-sponsored themes are offered for a download for a limited period of time. This theme is no longer available for a download.

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.

This tutorial will show you how to easily make frame such as the one you now see in Windows Vista releases or the so-called “aero vista” style design. There are a several techniques for making these semi- transparent frames around the picture with rounded edges, I will show you the technique I use.

1. Start off by making a background. Since this will probably be a graphic for a website, and we want to stick with the web 2.0 standard, I suggest making a gradient bg, with slightly darker hue at the top, fading towards the middle, but do not make the hue dramatically different. Same colour only a tiny bit darker.
2. Take some picture you are going to put inside your Vista-like frame. We will go ahead with the style and use a photo of a leaf with some water drops on it, which I pulled from Photoshop Photo Stock website. This image is not free for commercial use so we only put it here for learning purposes. Take your picture, copy and paste it unto your gradient background. Make sure there are at least about 50 px of distance between the image and the edges, otherwise we will not see the frame properly.

3. Select the layer with the image, and go to Layer >> Layer style >> Stroke

…and add a wide white border to the image, as shown on the screenshot. You must select the mode “outside”, otherwise your border’s edges won’t be rounded. Also, they will only be rounded if the border is thick enough, i.e. you won’t see much of the rounded effect on stroke settings below 5px.

4. Duplicate the image with white border layer. Select the upper layer and go to Filter >> Blur >> Gaussian Blur. Apply the blur settings and shown on the enclosed screenshot. Roughly speaking, the more blur you add, the wider will be your semi- transparent frame later. Ideally keep it approximately as wide as the white border, this way the proportion will be reserved; otherwise having a too think white border or a too wide transparent frame will not look organic.

5. Go to the layers panel, and select the upper (blurred) layer. Reduce it’s opacity to about 30%, (or less, or more, depending on how lucid you like your frame to be). You will be seeing it on your screen as you reduce the opacity (opacity, not the “fill”).

6. Select the lower layer (not blurred one) and go to Layer >> Layer styles >> Drop Shadow. Add shadow settings as shown on the screenshot below. This will give your frame some more depth.
7. Now we will add some shiny / glossy effect to complete the result. This step is optional, as many people are not big fans of shines. Create a new layer. Using the Elliptical Marquee Tool, draw a circle as shon on the screenshot, which will cover approximately about 1/3 of the image. Choose the Gradient Tool (from white to transparent) and draw a line from the top of the circle to it’s end, or a bit more than the end, as we will only fill the selected area in the circle anyway. Once your ellipse got filled with gradually fading white, Select the eraser tool and remove the white circle from outside the picture, so that only the piece inside the picture will remain.
And… here is your final result:

Click HERE to download the free .PSD file of this tutorial. The download was available freely for 30 days, now it’s for Lorelei Web forum registered members only.

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:

I recently wrote an article about it on my other blog, Now G Net, but thought I’d share these thoughts and info with this blog readers as well. The article mainly discusses what are the advantages and the disadvantages of having 1 OR many websites. Both “techniques”, if we can call it like that, have their up and down sides. That post also went up on Pixel2Life and Tutorialized, so I guess it was not that a bad article.

While writing I was mainly inspired by my personal experience, and how which technique played to my benefit. Like many, I started off with a small “starting capital”, if we can it a “capital” anyway, and slowly developed a network of websites. First I only had once website and it had advantages (which I discuss in my article), but after a while, when I decided to expand my little empire I realized I need more, much more websites, and moreover I need to “throttle” the subjects to avoid making a messed up huge site that can’t possibly get targeted visitors due to been too busy. This is why this blog is separated from my other blogs and websites.
You can read the entire, very comprehensive overview of the online strategy HERE. Here is a small summery…

My personal opinion? I’d say make a few sites, and make them different. There is no point in making 10 stall sites about articles with similar layout, structure and more or less identical content, because if your visitor did not like the first site, he wont find the others any useful as well, while if he did like it, he will stick with the site he visited first, bookmark it and won’t look further. Some people find bright layouts to be irritating, others love it. Some websites’ content are more targeted to the older audience while others are mostly visited by teens, and if you have a wide variety of website, you can play wise with your traffic and make the maximum out of it, for both yours and visitor’s benefit.

Read the full overview of making 1 website vs. 100 websites .