In the last few weeks I heard about YouSayToo.com and decided to join this blogging network because they offer AdSense and Amazon Affiliate Revenue sharing and I am always looking to test out new ways to potentially earn extra income from my blogs or online in general.

One thing about YouSayToo.com is I didn’t realize the site is as big as it is, having an Alexa ranking under 9k means it gets a decent amount of traffic and there must be thousands of bloggers already in the system. 

All you have to is sign up for YouSayToo, create your profile, set your Revenue Settings and then import your blog feeds.  You do need to put the YouSayToo badge on your site if you want to participate in the social network but this is hardly unusual as most blogging networks require a small banner or badge to include you in their system.

They do tell you to create a new AdSense URL Channel for www.yousaytoo.com so that you can separate track how much of your AdSense impressions and earnings are coming from your articles shared on YouSayToo.  This is a wise thing to do and I highly recommend it.

I unfortunately forgot to do this when I first set everything up two weeks ago, so I am still waiting for the next 20 days to report on how many impressions my articles get on YouSayToo and how much of my AdSense earnings come from this network.

Currently, I only listed my personal blog and poetry blog in YouSayToo.com I may add DragonBlogger.com later if I find the site to be particularly favorable.  I also added a Widget Exchange to my poetry blog only, this allows you to gain more traffic by showcasing other YouSayToo blogs in exchange for yours being showcased on other sites as well.  It is a mutual traffic exchange type of system and I am just testing it to see how much traffic comes in from YouSayToo.com to my Poetry blog.

One thing I like about the system is when you add "Interests" to your profile, you immediately see all other bloggers who added matching interests.  This  makes it easy to add them as friends and connect with others who share the same interests.  The system is also lightning fast for me, you can add people in seconds, pages and profiles load so quickly.  It is refreshing considering the slower speeds of many other blogging networks honestly.

Here is a breakdown of how your articles list on YouSayToo.com:

• The site does a good job of integrating AdSense blocks on the top and bottom of articles and these are the AdSense blocks you get a % of the revenue sharing for.

• YouSayToo does also use InfoLinks to make money from your articles but does not do sharing from Infolinks scattered on your post.

• YouSayToo.com does read in your blog RSS feed, so if you have your feed set to full feed then the entire blog article will be read in.  This means a user who reads your article on YouSayToo may not go back to original article on your site if they can read full article here.  If you do have full RSS Feeds, then at least use the RSS Footer WordPress plugin and brand your footer with copyright and ownership information.

In Summary

YouSayToo has brought in some traffic to my personal blog, but mostly I have seen quite a few votes and comments on my YouSayToo articles submitted to the site.  As it only imports your current articles going forward, I only have about 40 articles in the system (compared to 3000+ on all my blogs).  So as you have more content fed into the system, presumably you get more pageviews, more revenue and more traffic to your sites. 

I think even if there was no revenue sharing the more you can expose your content online the better, and the social networking aspect appears to be pretty good though the messaging system is kind of unusual in that you handle everything in a popup from your little top right profile area of the screen.  You deal with messages, friend requests all from this little dialog box that expands which took some getting used to.

It is too early to say what the revenue sharing looks like, but so far this looks like a blogging social network I will keep active on.

Feel free to connect with DragonBlogger on YouSayToo and I will be happy to add you to my network.

-Dragon Blogger

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I started DragonBlogger.com on August 23rd 2008 and this blog has come a long way in just two years.  I have written around 1100 articles myself with another 20 or so guest posts contributed to my blog over the past two years.

I never realized when I started blogging that I would become so instantly passionate about it.  Two years later people come to me for Blogging advice, WordPress consulting and just by “doing” and experimenting my reputation as a blogger, internet entrepreneur have reached levels I wouldn’t have thought possible from just running a few blogs and being social on Twitter and a handful of other social media networks.

In two years DragonBlogger.com has had over 308k visitors and very close to 500k pageviews.  This is on this one site, my other 2 blogs are nearing 2 year in September and all of my sites combined are very close to 1 million pageviews.  You can also see that over two years 62% of my traffic comes from search engines.

My site also now averages between 900 and 1,000 unique visitors per day which is 2-3x as much traffic as 1 year ago, and 12x as much traffic as 2 years ago.   I was fortunate to have some great posts early on that brought my site almost 100 unique visits per day within my first 60 days of blogging.

In two years, Blogging itself has earned me $5,095.35 dollars from my 3 blogs combined.  Considering that I blog only about 20 hours per week and blogging is just a hobby and a side project of mine I am quite proud of this.  Just click on my make money online link to see what programs I used to earn money on my sites, though different programs work better for different people mine have been very consistent for me across my sites.

I have made a high number of mistakes early on in blogging that cost me a lot of time and slowed the traffic growth of my sites.  In the end the experience and lessons learned were worth making some mistakes, but I would share with you which mistakes to avoid.

Know What your Blog Niche Will Be

This is a big one for me, when I first started DragonBlogger.com it was my first blog and I put posts about anything and everything.  I always wanted it to be a Technology and Blogging blog, but I also mingled in political posts, personal updates, poetry…etc  This was a big mistake and I got complaints from people who were interested in one thing that weren’t interested in other unrelated niche topics.  This caused me to branch out to 3 blogs within 30 days of starting DragonBlogger.com.  I created JustinGermino.com to be my personal blog, WandererThoughts.com to be my poetry blog and left DragonBlogger.com to be dedicated to all things Technology, Internet with some Entertainment thrown in.

Start a mailing list sooner than later

I waited almost 18 months before I took this serious and starting a mailing subscriber list, you can reach audience members in a different way here by showcasing articles, products as well as doing polling and giveaways.  You can build a trust with your mailing list that works a little differently than your blog readers or people who randomly hit your site from search engines and it is something you shouldn’t ignore.

Tune Your AdSense for Optimum Performance

Again, I waited sixteen months before really taking the plunge and putting actually effort and testing into my AdSense banner sizes and found a great combination that increased my earnings by over 300% within 2 months of tweaking the banner sizes and placements.

Summary

Those are some of the bigger lessons I have learned but some others I would include are not visiting other blogs enough and leaving comments, not submitting enough guest posts for other blogs…etc.  Some of this was because I simply don’t have a lot of time and I already write 90 articles per month with only 80 hours of blogging time dedicated per month.  I deliberately try to limit myself to 20 hours per week or less of blogging time.  I have a full time job which consumes 50-60 hours per week and I have two young kids and a family, so I need to make sure my work home life balance stays in order and blogging doesn’t interfere with my family time.

That is some of the many lessons I have learned from the past two years blogging, know this though.  I believe mistakes are key to learning and you have to try and experiment with as much as possible (especially early on) so that you can learn and become a better blogger.

-Dragon Blogger

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Though DragonBlogger.com doesn’t yet make the earnings I am trying to accomplish in actual revenue, I have crossed a new mark by giving away over $1,000 in the month of June in prizes via contests. One thing I had always wanted to do with my Dragon Blogger Technology and Entertainment portal is to give away software licenses, products and other prizes in contests. I wanted to eventually leverage the site’s popularity and traffic to convince companies to allow me to give away licenses for software to my readers.

This is working out really well for me, as most companies would rather give away a few free licenses keys rather than pay cash for a product review. The reason is that it actually costs the company nothing to just generate a serial number and the advantage to doing product reviews for free license keys is that you are giving away stuff to your readers. With my latest contest where I feature the WonderShare DemoCreator, the company contacted me about doing a review. I was immediately interested to see how the product would stack up to Camtasia Studio which is among the most popular Screen Cast software programs in the business, so I had asked for a full license for myself to test it and some licenses to giveaway to some readers in a contest. This would actually generate more buzz about the product, and bring in more traffic because it was an active contest spanning several weeks which kept the post alive and active for a long period of time.

Now, this method works for various blogs but particularly if you are a software/technology blog or can give away prizes that aren’t “physical” which require you to pay shipping (or ask your winner to) then it works out to be a no cost way to reward your readers and help highlight your sponsors.

I am looking forward to getting bigger and better prizes in the future and my next big contest will be when I offer a Brand New Nintendo Wii and give it away to one of my readers. I have to procur the Wii first (I won it as a prize from LeapFish), once I receive it, I will be creating the contest and giving it away. How many other bloggers out there have used contests as a way to entice and reward readers?

-Dragon Blogger

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I have decided to enter the Good Mood Gig talent search to become a SAM-e Blogger for six months. I am an up beat person in a good mood who loves sharing information and tips with my readers on everything I have learned. I think I have what it takes to be a SAM-e Blogger and I am hoping you take a moment of your time to vote for me.

Click on the button below to “Vote 4 Me” to be the next SAM-e Blogger.

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