I’ve been blogging for just over two years, but I’ve only been trying to make money online with blogging for the last 6 months since I lost my day job.

I’ve been very pleased with the results and in 12 months I’ve managed to increase my income from $573 in October 2006 to $15,179 in October 2007 - that’s a 2549% increase in 12 months and an annual salary of over $180,000!

Obviously writing good posts and writing frequently are important, but so is ensuring that when the traffic arrives you are ready to take advantage. I’ve tried to condense into one post all the advertising schemes, site modifications and SEO tweaks I’ve made on my blogging journey that have allowed me to generate a $180K annual salary in just twelve months.

Affiliate Schemes

• TNX: A new network that is taking the blogging world by storm. Not only does it offer an amazing way for publishers to sell contextual links on their site, it also has one of the best referral schemes available
• CashCrate: Amazing scheme that allows you to make money directly by completing offers, but also through a brilliant referral scheme - you even get paid for the referrals that your referrals signup. Payout per offer ranges between $1-35 per offer and you get 75% for offers you complete directly, and up to 30% of your referrals earnings.

Advertising Networks

• Google Adsense: The most popular scheme for bloggers to generate money from their site. The scheme works by serving contextual advertising so a high click-through rate (CTR) is acheivable thanks to ads being served that are relevant to your content. A very generous revenue share of approximately 60-80% is also given

• Text Link Ads: Another popular scheme with bloggers and for many bloggers it is their biggest earner. Adding your site to Text Link Ads is easy and depending on your Page Rank and traffic up to $300 per month can be earned. One of the advantages of the scheme is that most advertisers automatically renew their campaigns each month

• Review Me: ReviewMe’s marketplace of advertisers is growing each month who want to pay web authors will review your product or service on their Web site. Payments vary between $50-500 per review, and some bloggers regularly write a couple of reviews each month

• Chitika: If you have a product related blog then adding Chitika eMiniMalls to your site could prove a better move than adding Adsense units. eMiniMalls show product offers from Chitika’s product partners, and remember that Adsense now allow you to contextualise these links

• Vizu Answers: Vizu Answers is an innovative, reader-friendly way to monetize your Web site traffic through the addition of Polls. The polls can be formatted to match your own content and all traffic stays within your site. Typical CPMs are $1.50-3.50

• Intellitxt: Only sites with over 200k page impressions a month can join the Intellitxt network that adds in-line adverts to your site. If you can get accepted then these links can be quite lucrative. The Intellitxt team are quite slow with processing applications, but being referred can speed up this process. If you want to be referred please email admin@connectedinternet.co.uk

• Tribal Fusion: Again a minimum traffic level of 200K page impressions is required, but if you can hit this level of traffic Tribal Fusion is a good scheme to join as payments are CPM not CPC, with rates of up to $5 achievable depending on where adverts are placed

If you are anything like me, you probably have dozens of unread messages sitting on your Gmail account. I try to keep my inbox zeroed through out the week, but sometimes you just can’t handle the amount of incoming messages.

Other times you leave some messages unread on purpose, because you know that you are only going to need them in the future (that happens when you run a contest or a competition, for example).

Now when I first started using Gmail, I would run through all the previous pages in order to find those unread messages. Needless to say it was a boring and time consuming task. Then one day I thought: “hmmm, there must be a better way to do this.”

There was, and it was pretty simple. All you need to do it is to search for “label:unread” on the Gmail search box. This will filter only the unread messages.

What other Gmail tricks do you use frequently?