Flashmint Blog Design is holding a contest for both bloggers and designer where designers can win $500 for there theme design and three bloggers can win $500 for just blogging about the contest.

Designers:
All you have to do is just submit you theme zip file and a screenshot with 300×300px before September 1st 2008. The winner will be announced after 2-3 days and get the prize money – $500.

It should come with the following features:

• 3 columns
• fixed width (optimized to 1024×768 resolution) and widget support
• coded
• The colors and style of the theme should correspond to Flashmint design!

Bloggers:
This is lovable part of the contest is bloggers just have to blog about the contest and the three bloggers who will drive largest number of visitors to them will win $300, $200 and $100 for the first, second, third largest number of visitors respectively.

The rules are quite simple:

• Just add the code fragment under your latest post. Get the code here.
• Surely you can make minor changes in the text of the paragraph at your discretion, the only request is to leave the anchor texts just as they are, and the links should be “dofollow”.

Thats not all the reason for blogging is that am going to design a wordpress theme for this contest so just thought it might interest you too

Show off your skills in a competition for bloggers and designers at Flashmint.com, a famous Flash Web Templates provider, to gain from $100 to $800. See the details.

Check out the most popular wordpress plugins below:

• Get Recent Comments – This plugin displays excerpts of the latest comments or trackbacks of your posts in your sidebar. You will have a comprehensive control on how they appear. It ranges from the number of comments, to the length of the excerpts up to the html layout. This plugin also lets you to order the comments by the corresponding post, or simply sort them by date. Even you can filter the unwanted pingbacks, which originate from your own blog. And it is a widget.
• Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator – This is really a smart plugin that generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. The generated formats are supported by Google, MSN, Yahoo and Ask.com Search. XML-Sitemaps will help you to get indexed by the major search engines.
• All in One SEO Pack – This plugin Optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engine Optimization(SEO). To help your blog better index.
• WordPress Database Backup – WordPress database backup creates backups of your core WordPress tables as well as other tables of your choice in the same database.
• Gravatars – Automattic, the company behind WordPress, recently acquired Gravatar. In case you don’t know, gravatars—or “globally recognized avatars”—are images that you can associate with an email address, so a picture of your choice can appear alongside your comments on many others’ blogs.
• Akismet – Who can? You have better things to do with your life than deal with the underbelly of the internet. Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again.
• AJAX Comment Preview – Other preview plugins don’t know what sort of changes WordPress will make to a visitor’s comment, but this plugin uses AJAX to send each previewed comment through WordPress’ inner voodoo in order to figure out those changes.
• Subscribe to Comments – Subscribe to Comments is a simple wordpess plugin that allows commenters on your blog to get e-mail notification of further comments. It is one of the most popular WordPress plugins out there for the simple reason that it helps foster a community around your blog by encouraging commenters to come back and stay engaged in the dialog.
• Comment Relish – This is one of the rare and most wanted plugin for a blogger to boost there feeds. When a reader makes his first comment on your blog then it will send a Thank you mail to his email.
• Most Commented – Retrieves a list of the posts with the most comments.
• Skype Smilies with Wordpress – If you are really bored with the normal yahoo and msn smilies then you must try these sweet Skype Smilies which your readers will love to leave a comment with them
• WP Ajax Edit Comments – WP Ajax Edit Comments allows users and admins to edit comments in a post. Users are enabled to edit their own comments for a limited time, while admins can edit all comments anytime.
• WP-Cache – WP-Cache is an extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make your site much faster and responsive. It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and then building the page from the database. WP-Cache allows to serve hundred of times more pages per second, and to reduce the response time from several tenths of seconds to less than a millisecond.
• Popularity Contest – Popularity Contest keeps a count of your post, category and archive views, comments, trackbacks, etc. and uses them to determine which of your posts are most popular. There are numerical values assigned to each type of view and feedback; these are used to create a ‘popularity score’ for each post.
• WP-PostRatings – Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page.
• NextGEN Gallery – The NextGEN Gallery plugin really simple to installed and display your photos or pictures in cool style.
• Simple Tags – Simple Tags is the successor of Simple Tagging Plugin This is THE perfect plugin to manage your WP 2.3 and 2.5 tags. It was aimed with this philosophy : more secured, best performances and brings a lot of new functions.
• Embedded Video – The plugin is made for easily embedding videos into a blog post. The videos can be integrated from external portals (like YouTube, Google Video and many many others) or they can be uploaded to the web server or a remote server and integrated as well. Additionally a corresponding link to the video on the particular video portal page or a download link to the local file can be generated automatically, if demanded. The linktext is also configurable individually. Furthermore a fixed prefix for the linktext can be determined. The videos can be integrated easily by using the built-in WYSIWYG editor. The plugin generates XHTML-valid code and works from WP 2.5.
• pb-embedFlash – PB embedFlash is a filter for WordPress to show any flash content in valid XHTML 1.0 Strict code offering the possibility to specify attributes and parameters individually. It is really a easy to use but the final appearance of your embedded files can be modified heavily.
• Lightbox 2 – Lightbox 2 allows you to present images in a slick window, while darkening the rest of the page. It makes your site look professional, and adds very little to page load times. It does not require any browser plugins to work, and works on just about every web browser out there! When a browser doesn’t support javascript, the code fails gracefully.
• Wordpress PocketPC(windows mobile) PDA & iPhone – This plugin lets your readers to view your blog in a pda or iPhone browser.
• NoFollow Free – This is one of the most usefull Wordpress plugin that removes the “nofollow” attribute from your wordpress blog comments (precisely from the author’s links) or from the comments text links and it inserts (if you want) an image band at the top of your pages with the phrase: “NOFOLLOW FRE” to encourage your users to submit comments.
• Flickr RSS – This plugin allows you to easily display Flickr photos on your site. It supports user, set, favorite, group and community photostreams. The plugin is relatively easy to setup and configure via an options panel. It also has support for an image cache located on your server.
• OIO publisher – OIOpublisher is aimed at blog owners and webmasters. It is being continually developed into a complete advertising solution, which means not only creating the ultimate sales solution, but also focusing on traffic and content development.
• AdSense Manager – AdSense Manager is a Wordpress plugin for managing AdSense ads on your blog. It generates code automatically and allows positioning with Widgets.
• WP-o-Matic – WP-o-Matic makes autoblogging a snap by automatically creating posts from the RSS/Atom feeds you choose, which are organized into campaigns.
• Broken Link Checker – This plugin will monitor your blog and looks for any broken links and let you know if any broken links are found.
• RSS Footer – This plugin makes it easy to add a line of content to the beginning or the end of all the articles in your feeds, for instance to display a link back to your blog.
• Simple Twitter – SimpleTwitter allows Wordpress blog owners to add Twitter messages to their templates. Once installed, the plug-in is used by adding the following call in a template.
• Full Text Feed – WordPress 2.1 introduces a nasty “feature” to feeds. Instead of abiding by your feed preferences, WordPress will truncate your feed’s content anywhere you insert a more tag. Full Text Feed undos this functionality, allowing your feeds to contain the full text regardless of usage.
• Commentluv – Plugin to show a link to the last post from the commenters blog in their comment. Just activate and it’s ready. Currently parses with wordpress, blogspot, typepad and blogs that have a feed link in the head section of their page.
• Download Counter for Wordpress – This is nice plugin to display your product download stats in your admin panel or even you can show them to your readers too
• Digital Fingerprint – This a smart plugin that detects any content theft.
• Related Posts – This is must plugin for your wordpress which enbles your readers to spend more time on your blog by showing the Related Posts in your blog posts.
• Random Stripe Ads Plugin – This plugin helps you to keep as many as referral links or any single line information at the very top of your blog which rotates randomly, each time the page is loaded or when the visitor clicks on the “Next Tip” link just after your refferal link at the top.

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Here are some quick Ten steps that can help our blogs generate revenue without using direct selling methods.

Where should you start?
Are you a first-time blogger? If you are, then you should begin with free hosting services. Starting with a free service allows you in blogging with little or no knowledge of hosting, programming and scripts.

In such cases, you are only concerned with filling quality content in your blog rather than paying high bills. You should upgrade to paid services when you feel that your contents are actually attractive to viewers of your choice.

1. Using appropriate niche
   Niche is targeted products, services, or topics. You should always be aware of what is suitable for your working style. Choosing areas where enthusiastic writing from your end on regularity is possible can work for you. Through keyword researching services, you should find search topics that are most popular. Even if your topic is interesting, it has no value without any adequate audience support. Again, tedious topics with quality content and viewers support can earn help you in generating profit from your blog.

2. Regularly updating your blog
   It is one of the most imperative points to remember while thinking about developing a profitable blog. Regularly updating the blog with quality content not only allows unique viewers to increase their visits, it also helps your blog to have an impact on search engine rankings. Posting 2-3 unique content regularly can help you in generating more attention from viewers on the blog.

3. Generating traffic for your blog
   There is no secret to the fact that you require trafficking in your blogs for generating revenue. There are several techniques for generating revenue on the web. Paid advertisements, free advertisements, search engine marketing, viral marketing and RSS/XML feeds forms some of the ways that can help you in getting the desired traffic. Again, you should use the blog URL in your signatures of forum posts and emails for getting it noticed on the web.

   Submitting the URL to blog directories and search engine can also help in generating the desired traffic. There are some blog owners, who publish their contents in paid or free article submission directories, to accomplish the desire task.

4. Keeping track of the traffic in your blog
   
   You should always try to keep a track of the traffic in your blog through different online counters. They can help you in knowing the performance of your blog on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis in terms of traffic generated and the number of unique visitors without any hassle.

5. Be open for suggestion from your audience
   While keeping track of your audience count (unique and new), you should also be prepared to bring in changes into your blog, as desired by your viewers. This helps in leaving a sound impression on them and might lead to getting desired consumers in the future.

6. Using multiple blogs

   By using several blogging accounts, you can attract a greater number of viewers. You do not require developing unique contents for all of them, as copy pasting is acceptable in such cases. Having multiple blogs with separate hosts is similar to posting in different newspapers, which can only work in your favor.

7. Using concise content for your blogs
   Looking at the readers view is always helpful. No one wants to go through lengthy contents. If you can develop attractive and brief contents, you will be popular with web audiences in no time.

8. Using Digital Art as a source of promotion
   You should try including non-advertising pictures, art, graphics, and photos along with contents in most blog entries. Using adequate graphics can give life to your blog and make it more understandable to viewers, who have little idea about the topic.

9. Keeping the blog and its content personal
   Using personal experiences as content of a blog is the perfect recipe of a successful blog. Even if the content is more fictitious than true, still such style of writing is preferred more by viewers than professional ones.

10. Interacting with your regular visitors
    Once you get the visitor count to your desires, you should start interacting with them. By posting useful tips and pictures (It should always be based on the theme of your website) in a section, which changes frequently, you can entice your readers to pay a regular visit to your blog in anticipation of something new.

If you use these tips and keep the process of promotion and content developing simple, your blog can become a money maker in no time.

These blogger get “kudos” points based on their activity on the site and most importantly the popularity of their posts.Kudos are converted to money and the highest ranking bloggers is invited to become editors of a particular city section and the published guide book.

The bloggers guide runs monthly travel writing competition for writing views.Topics are provided.

The best was New York City Guide by torimcm.Has lots and lots of quality articles,photos,recommendations etc.This editor is thoroughly talented.I loved his work.

HostGator.com is a privately owned company that has been providing services to several popular websites around the world. The company is the current leader in providing web hosting services to most of their clients, especially bloggers. They have six years of experience in the field and over the years, winning great number of prestigious awards for their exemplary services has been their main forte.

Services provided by the company not only allow clients to get websites, it also allows bloggers to get help in developing attractive blogs. Bloggers can choose from a wide range of templates from their domain for building blogs. The features provided by HostGator are best suited for bloggers. By winning innumerable awards for their contribution, they are easily “eating away their competition” in the market.

Role of designing a proper blog for your success:
Building a good blog is necessary for the success of any blogger. Taking the services of a web hosting company allows a blogger to build attractive blogs for promoting their business. They are not required to trouble themselves with the complexities of building a blog. There are available opportunities that allow people to build blogs for themselves and provide the bloggers with all minute trivialities required for developing one. With growing competition in the market, the current lot of web hosting companies sees to it, that every blogger is provided with the best services, so that they can be ahead of their competitors.

Features that are offered by HostGator to a blogger:
There are several features of HostGator, which allows them to rank higher than any other firm providing services of a web hosting company.

Large Web Space: HostGator allows a blogger to use a web hosting space of 600 GB.

Higher Bandwidth: The 6000 GB bandwidth helps in faster access to the blogs of their clients.

Script and Database: The websites that are built by the company for a blogger uses scripts and databases including CGI, PHP 5, RoR, Perl, MySQL, SSH, SSL, IMAP and POP.

Hosting unlimited websites: HostGator allows a blogger to have the option of hosting more than one blog with their help. There is no limit to the number of blogs that a blogger can host through them.

Round the clock support: In case, their clients need to get in touch with them for any reason, it is necessary that the company should be available round the clock for solving their problems. HostGator allows their clients to get help any time of the day.

Money back guarantee: In case, a blogger is not satisfied with their services, they can expect to get their money back within 45 days.

No hidden costs: You are sure to find no hidden costs or fees from a deal with HostGator. There is also no scope of any contracts involved.

Why HostGator is popular amongst most bloggers?

The benefits that bloggers get to enjoy when they use the services of HostGator are manifold.

Website assistance from edit.com: The expert team at edit.com provides bloggers with 100% satisfaction in all the services they require, be it the designing of the logo, the banner or the complete layout of a particular blog.

Merchant Services: HostGator allows their clients to make the choice on how to accept online payments through their blogs by providing them with prices and information that would allow them to know ‘how to get a merchant account for their business?

Easy domain registration: Bloggers are provided with the chance to get the blog extension of their choice. They can choose any one of the following domains like .com, .net, .biz and .info. It is very simple to register with HostGator and get a domain. The cost involved is also very less.

Getting SSL certificates: As online payments are made through credit cards, it is very important that the blog (if used for making online payments) should have SSL certification that helps encrypting the credit card numbers and their passwords. Bloggers can get SSL certificates by paying a small sum to HostGator.

Trouble free installation of scripts: The most difficult part while building an attractive and user-friendly is installing a script in it. Bloggers just need to send an email to HostGator with the name of the script, they are interested in installing and the company handles the job for a small service charge.

Why HostGator is one step ahead of other companies providing services to bloggers?

There are several web hosting companies promising to help bloggers build excellent blogs for promoting their business. However, not all of them can offer quality and efficient services, as it is provided by HostGator.

• There are some companies that allow bloggers to have a large web space for their blogs. However, bandwidth, which they provide, is very less. HostGator has bandwidth provided with respect to the space.
• Again, there are many firms charging a great deal of money for their services and having several hidden charges that fool a lot of money out of their unassuming bloggers. With HostGator, you can be assured of getting a clean deal with no facts hidden from their clients.
• It is very important that the hosting companies maintain available round the clock to take care of the problems of a blogger. Failing to do so would lead to a great deal of problems. HostGator has customer services available for their clients on a 24×7 basis.
• It is equally important that the company should have a good reputation in the market. Unless, they have a good reputation, it is unwise to trust their services. HostGator has a great deal of reputation in the market and over the last six years been the proud winners of many prestigious awards. Again, the exemplary services offered are unmatched by any similar concern in the market.

If the large number of satisfied bloggers are to be believed, utilizing the services of HostGator would only help you in making your blog grow to greater limits in a very short time.

And thats not all you can even make $125 per referal sale you make, thats means you can are getting the world class hosting with the worlds best affiliate payouts at all Hostgator

Win Cash Prizes for FREE with Wild Treasure.

Wild Treasure Hunt is a social networking treasure hunt game.Treasure hunt is a puzzle,which when solved you could win $$$.It is a place where you can individually or with a team solve puzzles, challenge others and participate in discussions.Wild Treasure is free to join & play.Play as many Treasure Hunts as you want. There is no limit on how often or what you can win at Wild Treasure.Check out the sample image of my Treasure quests.The best and most easiest one was “Explore the world of fitness”. Directly paid me $10.

Wild Treasure has made making friends easier than in real life. All you have to do is send a request to your potential friend and wait to see if they want to let you into their inner circle. If not, who cares – send out more requests to others. Why join those social networking giants like facebook,orkut when Wild Treasure can provide all those features and also do something good along with your friends.

Wild Treasure hunt also have a referral program for user accounts. Any of our users can refer other users and receive 5% of the value of any cash prize won.Pretty easy to earn $$$ huhhh….!

Sign Up Now

My Home Page Friends pays approximately 1 pound for 100 searches,which sounds very less.But as you go you won`t even notice it.At present you mite be making hundreds of searches on the internet.As you use the internet, be for it researching, finding new stuff etc,you would probably use the google search bar or something similar over 10 times a day.Well all this can be done with My Home Page.My Home Page Friends provides the search box that is built into your browser (this works with both Firefox and Internet Explorer) using the plugin that they give you and just search as usual.I uses yahoo search engine and is will be adding more search engines,giving meta search results.

There are many ways to maximize your earnings from My Home Page Friends.Here are some

1. Search More

Why not type the website address in the search box instead of the address bar

2. Referrals
You also have the chance to benefit from those you recommend to My Home Page Friends. You get 10% of their earnings and I think even a small portion of their referrals earnings.

Entrecard.com is gaining lot of popularity these days.Every Blogger knows about it,as it helps to get lot of visitors to the blog.EntreDropper is plugin for Wordpress ,which allows any one to get backlink from the website by dropping entrecard.It is very helpful if your blog is hungry for backlinks.

Here is a preview website using this plugin Tiny Goa.Visit the website and drop entrecards to get a backlink on it.

If you are planning to use it on your own blog,you need to have Wordpress installed on your web server.But before using it,please do read the entrecard guidelines.

Installation is pretty simple

1. Download the plugin file, unzip and place EntreDroppers.php in your plugin folder. (donot upload the folder)

2. Activate the plugin

3.The plugin is widget-aware and will appear in your widget list. Go to your widget screen and add EntreDroppers to the sidebar.

Alternatively, if you don’t use widgets, add this snippet to the sidebar file in your theme:
<?php entredroppers(); ?>

This tells WordPress where to put the widget.

4. Configure the widget
The plugin can be configured both from the Settings pane or from the widget control area, by clicking “Edit” on the widget. Most of the options are self-explanatory, but you will be needing the EntreCard Latest Droppers RSS feed to power the widget.Get it from the RSS icon in your entrecard dasboard.

The 100% Rev Share promotion was just launched!

If you’ve been considering trying Kontera In-Text Advertising on your website or blog, July is definitely the month to sign up.

That’s twice the normal 50% terms.

Kontera’s publishers benefit from:
» Increased Revenues
» Simple Integration
» Complete control and customization
» Easy sign up and approval

Sign up now and take advantage of an amazing 100% Rev Share

Remember this is a limited-time offer available through July 2008 – so the sooner you sign up to Kontera the sooner you can start earning 100% of all revenue generated by your site.

How is this for a summer bash?

There are many ways to make money online, but did you know that you could be paid to shoot and post videos online? This is a trend that is catching up quite fast worldwide. If you have internet access and if you love to record interesting action on your phone or handy cam, then there is no stopping you from making money online.

With so many videos web sites on the net, people are finding it easier to search for interesting videos online. But with every plus comes a minus. These popular web sites are being flooded with spam. So for every quality video that you need, your search gives you a hundred irrelevant videos as well. This is a problem for the video hosting web sites too. They want people to visit their site and watch quality videos. Their popularity level will determine the cash they make from ads.

How many times have you uploaded your catchy videos on the net for free? Why not use this very method to make some quick money as well? Video hosting sites are willing to pay users for high quality videos that they upload. The deal is this: if your video is popular and gets lots of clicks, then traffic is obviously high for that page. This means that companies are ready to pay cash to post their ads on that page. Naturally, the video hosting site will earn revenue.

How does this benefit you? As the user who posted that video, you will get some cash incentive from the site owner. Think about it. Most people who can’t bear long movies will also love to watch short yet interesting video clips on the internet for free. You can have the option of getting paid per click. So when visitors to your video page come across the relevant ads, you will get paid for attracting them over.

Here are some tips you can use:

• Make sure the videos are your own. Also ensure that you have the appropriate permissions for uploading the video.
• Learn about what people love watching. Most people love watching bizarre and funny videos. Others love to know how things work and so on.
• First show the video to friends. If most of them love it, so will thousands of visitors to that page!
• Submit videos to top video sites that already have lots of visitors per day. This will mean that hundreds of people might accidentally stumble upon your page even without you promoting it in any way.
• Make sure your videos can be seen by all viewers. This means that you need to avoid hateful or religious content.

Watch the Insight Video on Making Money From Videos below:

Irrespective of your reason for making use of videos to help make money online, you should have a goal for catching the eye of actual targeted audience. Search Engines are the best way for seeing any website. Although the technique of optimizing the website is dissimilar in these video uploading sites with lesser competition, there are several ways to get your video noticed by the audience to earn you the desired revenue. They include:

Research on keywords
For using videos to help make money online, you should catch the eye of target markets suitable for your video. You can do that by finding popular keywords, which are relevant with the video and the market.

Researching other videos
There are several videos, which have incredible viewing and are quite popular in the domain. You should find out the exact reasons behind their success, especially their title, thumbnail picture and keyword tags. Who knows they might work for you too.

Meta tags & keywords
Meta tags & keywords play an important reference in optimizing your domain.

Quality & multiple tags
If you are looking forward to get most from your customers, you need to utilize quality and multiple tags. You should always find scopes for making your targeted market search for you rather than vice versa. Using quality tags in abundance will be beneficial in achieving this task.

Title
While choosing your title, you should reassure that the title contains several keywords. You should be creative in the title of your video for getting most out of it.

Organizing the data
You should be organized in keeping all the data in connection of your video. You should make a list of all the keywords that you have collected from your research. There should also be a datasheet for inputting date, count of views, rating in recent times and keyword strength. For earning maximum from these online videos, you should have a track of your progress. There are chances that your first video might fail. However, you should not back out and try again with another video changing the flaws in the earlier video.

Following these ways, you can make a name for you and your online business within no time through your video and eventually potential customers will be knocking your door.

All The Best

There is also a contest going on ClickConsultants and TheUniversityKid blog on making money with videos online!