Did that title sum you up in a sentence?  Do you write like a shotgun, do you sit down and give it all you have got without any regard for the outcome?  When you pull the trigger on a shotgun, it goes off, it doesn’t think about whats in front of it or the damage it may cause, it is simply an instant reaction.  Many bloggers perform the same way, they sit down and right without any thought of what they are writing about or where they want to go with the article or the possible repercussion of their words as they spill onto the screen.

Thoughts and ideas need to be developed and built upon to form an article.  Simply slapping text on the screen is not enough.  Readers are often aware when you have given little thought to an article because it reflects in your work.  It often results in a short, poorly written piece with little interest or emotion.  Some commonly seen blog posts that are a result of no thought are “5 links of the day” or a simple paragraph explaining somebody else’s post with a link to that.  These types of posts bring no interest to readers, anyone can develop a list of more than five links, but you chose not to spend the time doing so and it makes you look bad.

Devote Time to Your Blog

Devoting time to your blog is crucial to its success.  Many shotgun bloggers find themselves trying to cram a quickie article in before they go to bed, usually because they neglected to write anything the rest of the day.  Even if you work or attend school you should devote a minimum of an hour to writing every single day.  If you give yourself an hour, you should have ample time to construct an article and respond to comments from the day before.  Create a plan for your blog, give it some direction and things will naturally come easier as you move ahead.  Many blogs that are not given enough time eventually sizzle and die and it is unfortunate because had the blogger worked a little harder and devoted a little more time, they would have had a potential for success.

Think of your blogs as children, they require attention, time and love to grow.  You can’t just leave them off to the side or they will eventually get into trouble.  You have to be passionate about taking care of your blogs or perhaps you should consider doing something else.  Your writing needs time and shouldn’t be rushed, so create a schedule and go by that, your blog and readers will thank you.  If you are unsure if blogging is right for you, take a look at Blogging 101, Introduction to Blogging, for a better understanding.

Whether your horrible at managing your finances or you just don’t have any money to manage, these Facebook applications are probably for you. Who new that a social networking community could not only make you money but stabilize the process at the same time. Thank you Facebook!

Pay Me – This handy little app allows all of your friends to securely send you money through PayPal’s payment service. Maybe your selling something or maybe people just feel like your a good cause, either way this app will get the money in the bank.

BillTrack Bill Reminder – Use this application to manage all of your bills such as rent, internet, gas, cellphone or any others right from your Facebook profile.

Make Money-Cash for Free – Get free cash in exchange for completing surveys and other free activities. There is no purchase or credit card required, just sign-up and make some money.

Cash Cliques – Get paid for clicking on ads and referring friends that click as well. This app also gives out random cash prizes just for using it.

Stocks – Have you considered investing in the stock market? This little application the Forbes.com stock app keeps you up to date on the companies your interested in investing in.

JunkYard – Sell your old stuff to the Facebook community and make some extra dough. Everyone got some sort of junk laying around, so just get rid of it and earn some spending cash.

Debt Manager – Anybody owe you money? Don’t forget and let that debt go unpaid. This app allows you to easily add all of those unpaid debts as a reminder to collect.

Lending Club – Don’t run up your credit cards with those high interest rates. Lending club allows you to borrow money from other members in the Facebook community at low interest rates.

Dneero – Get paid to take social surveys. You will get paid via Paypal when your account hits $25 dollars or more.

Online Coupons – Obviously we all have to make a purchase at some point in time, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get a good deal while we are doing it. This Facebook application lists a bunch of money saving coupons for your favorite stores.

Leave your comments and let me know if any of these have helped you financially. Or maybe you have some great apps you use, share them with everyone.

Unless you’ve been living under a heavy rock for the last few months, I’m sure you’ve heard of the webs newest social networking site called Yuwie. Yuwie is strikingly similar to the bigger sites in the social networking game, with one exception – Yuwie pays you to be a member.

At least, that’s the theory.

You see, Yuwie is still pretty new to the social networking arena, but with so many people joining and a total of nearly 130,000 members, its gaining steam, and fast. Looking at the simple chart they have on their homepage, it looks like they are averaging a few thousand new members per day. I’m sure you could discount some of these numbers due to spam and people trying to “game” them, but never-the-less they’re growing at an impressive rate.

With theoretical promises of upwards of $10,000 per month assuming you refer a certain amount of people, and since the referral levels go ten deep, they are definitely attracting the crowds of people trying to make a quick buck on the internet. A great marketing strategy, even if it’s still in its infancy. The only problem with sites like this that promise to pay big money if all of the stars align, is the heavy dark cloud left over by AGLOCO. AGLOCO had just about every webmaster and blogger in the world promoting their site, but a pending bankruptcy and unfulfilled promises of riches proved otherwise. If a site like Yuwie wants to make it without losing their “you-know-what’s”, then they need to have a sound strategy in place and need to be prepared to shell out some serious dough.

Yuwie pays out based on many different actions of the user, ranging from clicking other profiles, uploading pictures, creating new blog entries, recruiting new members, and many other actionable actions. This pay comes from advertising revenue that Yuwie makes on a monthly basis, and on the 15th of each month, Yuwie decides how much each user gets paid out of their advertising earnings from the previous month. After digging around a bit in the search engines, I found that most average members made a couple of dollars, while some of the more popular bloggers and webmasters were in the $50-$90 range. Not bad, but a far cry from the $10k that users hope to be making in the future as the site grows.

After checking some statistics on smartpagerank.com, Yuwie was registered back in May, making the site close to five months old and it’s reporting around 54,000 pages indexed in Google. Of course, there is no PageRank, but that’s because there hasn’t been a PageRank update for quite some time now. One of the most impressive stats is the Alexa ranking they’ve attained already. For a 5 month old site, they’ve climbed the Alexa ladder to a 3 month ranking of around 5,000. Not too shabby…

Only time will tell if Yuwie is worth signing up for. With so many other social sites out there, unless the money is really rolling in, I can’t imagine juggling another social networking site. Give Yuwie a couple more months to see what happens, and if it’s still going strong as some predict, then it just may be something to check into.