A friend, a semi-professional, told me that she is making less money blogging these past few months compared to the bumper years of the past couple of years. I think we are all experiencing the same thing.

Anyway, she told me that because the currency exchange is not as favorable now as it was previously, she is not withdrawing her funds in PayPal. She told me that I should follow what she is doing and buy gold bullion since gold bullion is always better than just cash.

Well, I don’t have experience in investing in gold bullion but she says that if I’m in for the long term, there isn’t much to learn; just buy and keep. Still, I would like to read up more about it first before putting money in.

My friend told me that there is a vacancy in his company and asked if I am interested in it. I told him that I am but we later found out that I do not qualify for the job. My friend asked me why I’m suddenly interested to be employed and I told him that I just wanted a change of environment.

Unfortunately, because of my own qualification and limited experience in the working world, I think that I would be better off continuing with what I am doing. At my age, I don’t relish the thought of going back to school to improve myself.

Because of this setback, I am resolved to set up even more blogs and websites. Some will be my own web properties while some will be collaborative effort with friends. Usually, I will be put in charge of doing the ground work like comparing web site hosting packages and coming up with domain names. I guess just because I work from home, it is assumed, wrongly, that I have plenty of time on my hands.

Luckily, though, with a comprehensive website hosting directory like Web Page Hosting Review, I am able to read through reviews of top web hosts easily without looking up such information all over the web. Hopefully, I will see through my new web projects. I have been known to procrastinate!

*** This post has been sponsored.

My friend, Carol, told me that she has finally decided to be a self-hosted blogger. Right now, she has a blog with a free host and although she is not entirely satisfied with the service, she has continued to host it there because of the nightmare of moving hosts. I can certainly understand her concern but I guess she will have to make the decision of leaving her original blog as is or to move the entire blog to the new host.

Carol asked me if I could help her choose a web host but I think that it is better for her to choose a web host and hosting package herself. According to Already Hosting, hostmonster has a 99% rating but I guess she would have to read up on web hosting reviews of the current top ten web hosts and compare prices and features.

I told Carol that web hosting packages changes all the time with special promotions and perhaps additional features so she really needs to be on the ball until she commits herself to a hosting package. Also, she should also look for a coupon code before subscribing to one or renewing it as it would help her save some money and makes self-hosting a blog even cheaper!

*** This post has been sponsored.

My friend, Carol, told me that she wants to set up a new blog. She said that since she doesn’t want to spend any money on it as she is not serious about blogging, she will set up a blog with a free host.

I don’t think that is a good decision and told her to check out b4udecide.com for the list of top web hosts and their packages. Hosting a blog may not be very expensive, after all, since there are so many different web hosting packages. Surely there is one that is suitable?

Anyway, the best web hosts are always coming up with new and more attractive packages so it is a good idea to keep checking prior to committing to a web hosting package!

Tomorrow begins my one week holiday in the capital city. I am going to stay with a friend who has graciously opened her home to me. This friend works in retail and is always complaining that the hours are too long. She is surprised that I am able to earn some money online so this week, during my holiday, I will be helping her set up a blog and giving her a push.

Actually, she has asked me to help her out since a couple of months ago but it’s not easy to guide a total newbie online. Since I will be staying in her house, I can show her the steps easily and I believe she would be able to learn faster.

My friend had told me that she is satisfied with a free hosted blog but I am going to convince her to buy her own domain name and subscribe to a good web hosting plan. This is going to be the best investment she has ever made if she is serious in making money online.

I know that the reason my friend wanted free hosting for her blog is because of the cost but I will show her that self-hosting her blog need not be a costly affair. If she would only do some research online on web hosts and their hosting packages, she would see that there would surely be one that could fit her budget.

*** This post has been sponsored.

I have to admit that although I embedded the code for Google Analytics on all of my blogs and at one time, I was very obsessed with my statistics, checking my data a few times a day across all my blogs, and that took a lot of time, I was weaned off this obsession the day the PageRank of my blogs were bombed to zero. That woke me up pretty quickly, I must say.

However, if analytics is still a very important part of your blogging life, and you use Google Analytics for it, you may want to know that there are seven new features added to Google Analytics. They are as follow:

Analytics Intelligence with Custom Alerts
Expanded Goals and New Engagement Goals
Expanded Mobile Reporting
Unique Visitors Metric
Advanced Analysis Features
Share Advanced Segments and Custom Report Templates
Multiple Custom Variables

For an in-depth explanation on what each of these features do and how they could help you in your data tracking, do log in to your Google Analytics account for the information. It’s just too long to explain over here.

Having said this, I am still not going over to analyze my blogs. They mean nothing to me now that I don’t have PageRank anymore.

In the past week, blogs and social networks have been abuzz with the revisions that have been made to its advertising practices rules to include online and blog advertising and product endorsements by celebrities. Basically, this new set of rules applies to everyone and anyone who endorses a product or service in any form or medium.

From 1st December, 2009 onwards, the Federal Trade Commission’s new rules will come into effect and bloggers who have been compensated for a blog post will be fined US$11,000 is there is no disclosure. No, bloggers are not TOLD what or how to write, they are just told to let readers know that they have been paid for the post(s), if that is not obvious enough. Of course, this is what advertisers DO NOT want.

Fair or not is not for me to say but there’s no denying that there’s a lot of gray areas here, just like what happened to some blogger friends who blogged about stuff without compensation but were accused of receiving compensation by PPP and hence received rejections for their posts.

Well, let’s just see how this will be implemented.