I signed up for Chitika a few years ago and to be honest, I just hadn’t done anything with it. I didn’t invest time in learning the setup or even exploring the advantages. I just signed up, set up a few referral buttons and let it go.

It wasn’t until I got a notice that I had received a payment from Chitika that I even thought about looking into it further – but hey, if someone is paying me, I’m thinking if I made money for doing absolutely NOTHING, I wonder what I could make with a little effort.

Chitika is an alternative to Google AdSense Contextual Pay-Per-Click Advertising. I run Chitika on a couple of my blogs. It performs best on product related blogs, but can achieve good results on blogs such as this on also.

Here is a snippet from the Chitika Publishers website that contains two stats that show Chitika is a respected Ads Publisher:

Fact 1: Chitika has over 70+ power-packed revenue earning ad units, the largest collection of revenue-generating solutions catering to publishers of all sizes.

Fact 2: More than 17000 bloggers and publishers are already using Chitika’s ads to earn revenue.

Fact 3: Chitika passes over 50,000 publishers in June 2009

One of the greatest advantages to using Chitika is that you can use them on the same page as Google AdSense. This allows you to maximize the earning potential of your blog. Chitika tends to have a higher CPC than Google AdSense in alot of the areas I have used it in.

Since Chitika is still kinda sorta new to me, it will be a short while before I can give you much detail on profits – but I’d say $50 for absolutely NOTHING is something. What I can tell you however, is it is currently outperforming Google AdSense on two of my blogs and I’m only a few days into actually using it.

What you waiting for, You should sign up for Chitika Now!!!

Do share your personal views or experiences with Chitika and how it has performed or is performing for you.

Many online professionals have warned against using free hosting to build your online presence. These warnings come for many reasons including the risk of losing your content.

In a recent sweep, a free WordPress blog hosting website called Blogetery.com that hosted around 73,000 blogs shut down July 9, 2010.

Blogetery was a free blog service hosted by BurstNet, Inc., a company that has been established in the web hosting arena for nearly 14 years.

Explaining the reason why it had to take down Blogetery’s server BurstNet told that it “was a critical matter brought to our [their] attention by law enforcement officials” and in that case they had very little choice but terminate the account. BurstNet further stated that Blogetery was terminated due to “history of abuse and ongoing abuse”.

When you’re looking at making money online, and you are using a free hosting service, in a way you are at the mercy of everyone else using that hosting service too. Don’t run that risk. Put your blog or website on a REAL hosting service that actually manages their business and protects their clients.

I’ve seen lists of things your blog does not need, some of which include:

1. Background Music
2. Animated Gifs
3. Comment Verification
4. Badges and Awards
5. Flashy Backgrounds
6. Social Bookmarking Buttons
7. A Really LONG Blogroll

The only one on the list that I really don’t agree with so much is the social bookmarking buttons. The jury is still out on that one.

There seems to be a lot of people using them – especially the Tweet option – but for now I’m on the fence.

What are some things you think should be added to this list?

Any you don’t agree with?

Unless you are blogging about topics that require you to provide the latest and greatest such as news or celebrity gossip, you should focus your writing on timeless content.

Timeless content is content you write that can be useful today, tomorrow, and even as much as 5 years from now.

It’s been my experience and observation that blogs designed around news or current events die as soon as the posts stop coming on a consistent basis. So unless you can blog or have a team of bloggers who can write on a daily and sometimes multiple times daily – you really should consider developing your own set of timeless content.

With a library of timeless content, people will be reading your blog for months or years after you stop writing as long as the content has some value for them.

When you think of timeless content, what do you think of?