One of the best ways to make money online is to buy established websites and blogs and improve, optimize and tweak them to perform better.

In fact, you can get better returns from websites and blogs than almost any investment in the world. Its a very low input, high output situation.

I thought we’d do something a bit different this weekend (instead of nothing) and try a little exercise with a neat little prize.

Leave a comment answering these two questions:

• What blog or website would you buy assuming money was no option?
• How would you improve on it?

This type of thing is an extremely good way to learn about the valuation of websites. And if you are trying to grow a blog to make a living or an eventual sale you will need to become an expert at this.

What are the rules?

• You cannot choose Google or Facebook
• You cannot choose an adult or gambling website
• You have to improve the website within a year
• Your improvements cannot cost more than 5% of your chosen website’s (guessed) income (ie you cannot just spend a million dollars on advertising)

What is the prize?

I’ll have a look at the answers and see which one I think has the most merits. The author of the entry that I like most will get a free Blog Consult by me valued at $299. I’ll take a look at your blog and send you suggestions on how you can improve, tweak and change it to grow a bigger audience and make more money.

photo credit: notsogoodphotography

photo credit: .Cest.

We all want a huge mailing list. I’m guilty of it. Take a look around the archives of Blog Tyrant and you’ll see all the references I make to building a huge list.

But, if I’m honest, a huge list is totally irrelevant unless the subscribers are engaged.

So what’s more important? Building huge relationships.

In this post I want to take a look at why you need to get your list engaged and addicted to your content and give you some tips on how to do it.

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photo credit: mugley

The world is in a debt crisis. Governments are bailing out the banks. But, there is no one to bail us out. So we have to cut our debts. And as I found out this week, it is possible to cut many of your blogging, office and home bills by up to 55% with as much as a phone call.

I even got a new iPhone!

In this post I am going to show you what I did this week to cut many of my home [office] bills with just a few hours work.

After that, I’d like to see as many comments as you can muster with all your debt and expense reduction tips and tactics.

They all have to be legitimate and totally legal.

If you know someone in a tricky financial situation please forward this post to them. I’d like to accumulate as much expense-reduction knowledge as possible for anyone out there who is struggling.

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photo credit: ktylerconk

How do you know when you are done? How many hours, days, weeks and months do you put in to something before you realize that it’s just not going to work for you?

This is a question I have been asking myself a lot these days.

In this post I’d like to ask a few questions, and come up with almost no answers.

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photo credit: Caveman Chuck Coker

Have you ever seen one of those “buy me a beer” buttons that allow you to donate to the blogger? They used to be everywhere.

In fact, I know a few bloggers who would rake in four figures a year just from their donate button. Pretty amazing right?

So where did these buttons go? Why aren’t we all using them? And why is the donate button almost dead?

How did the donate button work

The donate button was a pretty simple invention. Using Paypal’s donate feature you could add a snippet of code to the sidebar of your blog and take money from generous people.

Most of the time the blogger would add the catchy “Buy Me a Beer” phrase to the top of the button to make it seem more casual and friendly.

Other times people would have a little bit of text explaining how the money would be used; server costs, time writing more posts, etc.

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