Many bloggers that I’ve met online are engaged in earning money through their blogs, helping to supplement their family’s incomes. For our family, writing sponsored blog posts means that we can pay for our internet, for some it means additional grocery or clothing money.

I’d like to share an article and video explaining how a dictation software can enable bloggers to generate higher returns on their blogging efforts.  It specifically addresses Pay Per Post opportunities, but you can apply this scenario to Social Spark, or any of the other paid blogging agencies out there.

Nuance is allowing my blog readers can also Get Dragon Naturally Speaking using Discount code DNSMBG for a 25% discount. In order to qualify for this discount, click through the animated image below the video and use this discount code. You will need to use both the link and code together, or the discount will not work for you.

Now, if you aren’t a Windows user (Dragon Naturally Speaking is for PC’s), you can also get 10% off MacSpeech Dictate if you are a Mac user - like me!

The full white paper on Dragon Naturally Speaking can be found here.

This is an excerpt from a white paper discussing how bloggers can earn more money through several different monetization and freelance writing services. It shows that bloggers that utilize Dragon Naturally Speaking can earn more money through these various services and how fast these extra earnings will pay for the software itself.

Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 Blogger Break Even Analysis with High PayPerPost Earnings

In this article I’m going to walk you through another scenario focusing on how much extra you could earn if you wrote for PayPerPost.com. Now at PayPerPost.com, the amount of money that you earn for your writing is not paid on a per word basis.

PayPerPost.com offers up opportunities, they call them opportunities, but you can also think of them as piecework or a job, and these “opportunities” typically have a minimum word count. The minimum word count is typically 200 words for your average article. In general the average article at PayPerPost on a high earning blog pays about $28. Sometimes they pay a little less, and sometimes they pay a little bit more.

Now if you are paid $28.00 to write a 200 word article, which breaks down to about 14 cents per word. That is about 200 times more than what you can make at textbroker.com. I mentioned that only for comparison purposes, because PayPerPost.com limits you to writing three articles per blog per day. That means that you can’t write there all day long for your single blog. (If you have additional blogs, you might be able to write additional articles on those other blogs.)

But if we assume, just to have a comparison to our textbroker.com example, if we assume that you could type articles at PayPerPost for fifty minutes straight, earning 14 cents per word, and you could type 35 words per minute, and then you could earn a $245 dollars per hour at PayPerPost. Now obviously, there’s not that much work there, but this does point to the rate at which you can earn things with the work that is available. That $245 would be the earnings you could make from about 8.8 Opportunities at $28 per Opportunity.

So bear with me with this example.
So what can faster typing skills do to help you earn more money and PayPerPost?
Well if you could type at 150 words per minute with Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and you currently type at 35 words per minute, then you could earn about $805 per hour more!
Reminder - This would assume that you could type articles nonstop at a hundred and fifty words per minute for fifty minutes. For most of us, that doesn’t mean a whole lot.
But to put this in better perspective, if you earned $245 from writing about nine articles, and those articles were each 200 words long, then you would have written a total of 1800 words.

• 1800 words can be typed and 50 minutes at 35 words per minute
• 1800 words can be typed in 12 minutes at 150 words per minute

Dragon NaturallySpeaking can essentially save you 38 minutes when you write nine articles.
Now with those additional thirty-eight minutes, you can spend more time:
• promoting your blog,
• networking with people,
• researching other projects,
• taking on other work from other networks
• building up a new blog to command $28 per article!

You can pocket your $245 from twelve minutes worth of work. You can then spend the rest of that hour, working to ensure that the blog you publish those on performs very well. But the point is this, Dragon NaturallySpeaking can save you so much time, that it will pay for itself very quickly.

Your average part-time blogger may easily afford to pay for Dragon NaturallySpeaking with the additional profits that they would earn from using Dragon NaturallySpeaking in less than 30 minutes worth of blogging. 

Plus just think of all of the time, that you would now have to make yourself and your site even more successful!

Now if only I could catch all of those opportunities…or maybe, one day Google will finally give my blog a PR!

If you’re like me you find adding photos to your blog posts rather tedious.  Downloading, uploading, resizing, aligning etc.  It’s all such a big job, sometimes it seems easier just not to include many pictures.

But what if you knew of a site that had FREE photos, that you didn’t need to download, upload, resize or align?  What if you knew there was a site where you could choose a photo from a variety of categories, selection your options, copy your code and voila?

Well, take a look at this!  I certainly didn’t take this photo!  We don’t have manatees here in Alberta ;).  Signing up for Acobox allowed me to find this photo from a selection of many free blog pictures that I can use on my blog.  You can use them too, just swing by and see what they’ve got.

Some categories are better serviced than others, for example there is quite a selection of mammal photographs, but no babies or children that I could easily find.

Acobox’s photos are free, optimized, hosted and licensed for your personal use!  It doesn’t get much easier than this, so if they have a photo you’d like to use, why not take them up on the offer?  It’s as simple as copying and pasting a short string of code!

I’m a bit behind listing my top 10 droppers on Entrecard for October, but here goes! Thanks to everyone for your visits!

#1 - Sound of a Soft Breath - 28 visits

#2 - Chica and Pumucki - 28 visits

#3 - MJG’s Rambling Thoughts - 27 visits

#4 - Internet Marketing Blog - 26 visits

#5 - Thrifty Momma Ramblings - 25 visits

#6 - A Second Cup - 25 visits

#7 - Money Saving Pro - 22 visits

#8 - Nathan Deschamps Footbager - 20 visits

#9 - Urbanswirl.com - 16 visits

#10 - Proud Mommy - 15 visits

Thanks again for your visits and enjoy November!

I’ve never used a stock image myself, but I know that many bloggers use them to spice up their blogs, and many website designers use them as well, incorporating these images into headers and throughout pages.

If you’ve ever looked online for professional quality images that you can use on your blog without infringing on someones copyrights, you know that it’s difficult. I’ve literally spent hours looking for photos online, and never finding what I needed. How frustrating. It would be worth it to purchase some credits at a stock photo supplier, and get great photos at blog resolution for around $1.00 Canadian each. Hmm, why haven’t I done this before? It looks so easy!

123rf.com has royalty free images that you can purchase as stock photos to use online or in print for LOW prices.  They even have free images you can use!  Right now 123rf.com is having a contest - 123rf Search and Win.  Pretty simple, you just search on their site, and if you see one of the winning pictures click on it, and you’ve won a Wacom Bamboo a nifty digital device you can use to sketch, draw or write with on your computer. Click on that link to see some work done with a Bamboo. I’m definitely NOT that talented :).  There’s a picture of the device to the right. They’re giving away 120 of them as well as photo credits. So why not head on over and check it out?

I have yet to figure out how to put one of those twitter plug-ins in my sidebar.  But it’s official.  I’m now on Twitter!  And it’s so terribly fun!  So if you want to be amongst the first to hear the news from our house, follow me at http://twitter.com/quivermamma for the latest book reviews, personal insights and general jabber.  You know you want to!

My apologies to those who have been expressing their interest in joining the Christian Carders list hosted here at Quiverfull Family.

Regrettably I am experiencing some technical difficulties when trying to edit the page to add new links.  Other posts are still editable, but for this particular page I’m receiving the following error message:

Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in /home/miabella/public_html/wp-includes/wp-diff.php on line 217

So Wordpress geniuses, any assistance?

Sorry for the delay for those waiting for their links to go live.  Any suggestions welcome!  If you want to join the list, still leave your comment, once I get this glitch worked out I’ll add you to the list!

Thanks to my top 10 droppers for the month!

Tara’s View of the World - 30 visits!  Yay Tara!

Carole’s Thoughtful Spot - 29 visits

Proud Mommy - 28 visits

Acakadut - 26 visits, she still has her EC widget up, but her blog has been removed from Entrecard.  She still gets a link though!

Sound of a Soft Breath - 24 visits

MJG’s Rambling Thoughts - 23 visits

Happy Thoughts, Happy Tot - 23 visits, seems to be having a page loading error tonight, but hopefully that will resolve itself!

Havoc & Mayhem - 23 visits

A Second Cup - 23 visits

Ima Blogger - 21 visits

Thanks for loyally visiting the blog!

Hands free blogging.  Now, that would be the life!  Like many mommy bloggers my hands are often full of baby, toddler or a big girl, making the time to blog difficult to come by.  But imagine if I could sit in my rocking chair, which is near the computer, nurse my baby and blog or send email at the same time!  Woooo!  Now that would be multi-tasking.

I think it would be possible with the help of Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 Standard.  I’ve heard of voice recognition software before, but never though that it could be so simple and straightforward, the software even comes with it’s own headset!  How convenient.  Take a peek at these videos:

Colour me impressed! It even filters out background noise like, say…children…What a fabulous innovation for mothers who blog from home (I know, where else is there to blog from?). There is also a NY Times Review of DNS10 available if you’d like to read what the ‘experts’ have to say about this product.

Now, because we’re Mac users here, and not one of those fancy, innovative Windows hybrid machines my husband keeps telling me about, Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 Preferred won’t work for us, these programs are PC only.  There is a solution for us Mac users though in MacSpeech Dictate (you have to buy your own Mic for this one).  I’m going to have to talk to my husband about this when he gets home!

How can you see yourself taking advantage of this program in your blogging pursuits?

Long time blog readers may recall when I mentioned BloggerWave as a supplementary income source for bloggers.  I’m afraid I must retract my recommendation of that company.  On June 11th, 2008 two posts I wrote for them were aproved by them, each valued at $10 each.  After waiting several months I emailed them, with no response after three weeks.  Another email, no response.  It is now September 21st.  I am now deleting those posts from my blog and posting this public retraction of my suggestion that bloggers sign up with them.  It would now appear that they do not follow through on their committments financially.  My apologies for suggesting a paid blogging company without first determining that they would follow through in their committments.

Thanks so much to Melissa of Green Acres for awarding me another Brillante award!  I’ve already received this one, but still appreciate the sweet gesture!  The section of the small town I grew up in was called Green Acres, as was the elementary school I attended there.

Since I’ve been tagged with a number of awards lately I’m running a bit low on the usual suspects to award them out to.  So in this case, as I’ve already received one of these, I’m going to direct everyone to the first time I received this one, to see who I nominated for the award!  I’m sure you’ll find some interesting blogs amongst those listed there!