Student Loan Blog : blogs

NextStudent Web Marketing Team Shifts Direction of Student Loan Blog

Student Loan Girl — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:02:00 GMT

To better serve you and carry out our mission of being your one-stop destination for all your education financing needs, the NextStudent Web Marketing team is moving our Student Loan Blog in a whole new direction.

In the days ahead, you’ll see the Student Loan Blog shifting from a focus on general-interest news and trends to what’s happening in the world of financial aid, student loans, and the congressional legislation that affects you and how you’ll be able to pay for school.

You’ll still be able to find the college advice, smart shopping tips, and lowdown on student life we’ve been bringing you — we’re just moving things around a little bit.

Keeping You Up-to-Date on Financial Aid and Your College Financing Options

Our news-savvy writers on the NextStudent Web Marketing team will be scanning the latest headlines to keep you informed about the legislation changes that could affect your education and the financial aid options that help you pay for school.

We’ll let you know about schools that are trying to make a higher education more affordable, from offering free tuition to low- and middle-income students to eliminating student loans from their financial aid packages.

We know you’re busy and have a million things battling for your time. That’s why we’re making our blogs shorter and more direct, so you can get the news you need faster.

The NextStudent Web Marketing team is committed to helping you make informed decisions about your education through our revamped college-related blogs.

Student Life and Your Pop Culture Fix

But if you think you’ll miss our old stuff, don’t worry. You’ll still be able to find our stories about things like death by popcorn and the short life spans of rock stars.

These blogs will be going on our sister site, The Students Blog, which focuses on college life and technology. Read about how to pimp out your Firefox browser, five free online tools to help you cite your research papers, or the six college dropouts who made millions.

You can also check out our NextPath online newsletter for tips on everything from traveling the world rent-free to buying a digital camera.

So sit back and enjoy the work of our Web Marketing writers who spend hours trolling the Internet to bring you the trends and stories that are fresh and new.

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Not Just Your Virtual Diary Anymore, Blogging Is Big Business

Student Loan Girl — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 23:23:00 GMT

A decade ago, blogging was a way for anyone with a computer to get a high from posting their personal ramblings to the Web and sharing their now-published thoughts with the online world.

Narcissistic? Maybe. Therapeutic? Definitely. Profitable? Questionable.

But not anymore.

Thanks to our obsession with the Internet and our undying need for ever-more information at our fingertips, blogging has evolved into a powerful and profitable business venture that almost anyone can do.

Big-Buck Bloggers

Take Zach Brooks, for example. This Manhattanite has turned his love affair with greasy food into Midtownlunch.com, a blog devoted to spotlighting cheap eateries in New York for nearly 2,000 daily readers.

The website, which focuses on restaurants where you can get lunch for under $10, can sometimes net Brooks $1,000 a month, writes Associated Press reporter Candace Choi (“Casual Blogging Not Just Lunch Money Now,” Dec. 26, 2007).

Then there’s Samuel Chi, who started BCSGuru.com “as a way to demystify the convoluted universe of college football rankings for fellow fans,” Choi writes. This season, Chi, a former sports journalist with a background in statistics, earned about $8,000 from his blog.

With the help of PayPerPost, BlogAds, Google’s AdSense, and similar programs that help advertisers place ads on large and small sites, bloggers, who write on everything from the latest tech gadgets to politics to the celebrity train wreck of the day, can earn money based on their site’s popularity — the more people who click on the ads on their site, the more money they make.

Turn Your Blog into a Cash Cow

Write about your obsessions, make the most of your advertisers, and you may never again have to hawk your clothes or sell your plasma to get that extra cash.

Last year, total online ad revenue was nearly $20 billion, so there’s plenty of money to go around.

The Washington Post suggests a few different ways to get your share as a blogger:

Let online ad programs work for you. Sell ad space on your blog, and you can get paid each time someone clicks on your ads.

Take control of your ad sales. Not a fan of pay-per-click ads? Use BlogAds. Join its database of advertisers — free of charge — and set your own ad prices. Companies then find you and purchase ad space for a set period of time. You keep 70 percent of your add fees and turn over 30 percent to BlogAds.

Be the middleman. Join a company’s affiliate program: Post an ad on your blog that links to their site, and every time one of your readers clicks on the ad, goes to the company’s site, and the visit results in a purchase, you’ll receive a small commission. You can earn as much as 10 percent per referral sale from businesses like Amazon, eBay, and Match.com. Use affiliate marketing networks like LinkShare or Commission Junction to browse hundreds of companies with affiliate programs.

Get your fans involved. Give your loyal and dedicated readers an opportunity to show their support. Post a donation button from online payment services like PayPal or the Amazon Honor System, and set yourself up to receive monetary donations.

Sell blog-branded gear. If asking for a handout isn’t your thing, slap your company logo on T-shirts, coffee mugs or caps and create your own online store. CafePress offers you more than 50 products to choose from.

What Are You Waiting For? Express Yourself.

Know the best places to find a bargain? The best sports bars to watch a game? How to make the most out of your college loans?

Launch a blog. It’s so easy you’ll wonder why you didn’t do it before.

Just go to any popular blog platform site, like WordPress, Blogger, MySpace or Weebly, and create your blog for free. And let your love of all things you make the extra cash for you.

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College Students: Blogging Your Way to Big Bucks

Student Loan Girl — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 17:03:00 GMT

If your idea of an ideal campus job is earning money working from the computer in your dorm room, you’re in luck. Not that there’s anything wrong with the typical on-campus gig where you’re paid minimum wage and have to show up on a set schedule for a certain number of hours each week. But if you’d rather be your own boss, why follow someone else’s schedule when you can make your own?

Are you a recreational or part-time blogger like thousands of other college students across the country? If you are and you’ve been looking for ways to make some extra money, you may want to consider the possibility of blogging for cash.

Not convinced it can be done? Two words: Mark Frauenfelder. Maybe not a household name yet, but according to an article by John Tozzi in BusinessWeek, Frauenfelder may be “the king of moneymaking blogs,” with over a million dollars in revenue in just one year (“How Top Bloggers Earn Money,” July 13, 2007).

Mirror the Masters and Rake in Major Cash

There are more than a few bloggers out there making some nice money from their online posts, with a few of them making enough to drop their regular full-time jobs. In his article, Tozzi spotlights those who are truly masters of their craft, some of whom are six-figure bloggers. Though the average blogger won’t make anything close to that, these guys will give you something to shoot for.

Of the different ways to make money with blogs, selling advertising space—just like magazines and television do it—is one of the more common, and the one that makes most of the über-bloggers their crazy cash. Perez Hilton, for instance, the celebrity dirt-dishing diva behind PerezHilton.com, charges $9,000 for a weeklong ad run in the top right-hand space of his site.

Pay-per-click ad media, like Google AdSense, used to be the go-to moneymakers for the blog-for-cash hopefuls. But Internet ad companies geared specifically to blog advertising, like BlogAds and Crisp Ads, have become the new ultimate tools for elite bloggers looking to generate formidable revenue. But these blog ad companies won’t take just anybody who feels like posting their ramblings online. You pretty much have to have a well-known, high-traffic blog to qualify for the banners and other high-revenue ad placement opportunities these companies will send your way.

Affiliate Sales for the Slightly Less Masterful

For the rest of us somewhat less hyper-popular bloggers, there are affiliate sales. Affiliate sales, where you earn a commission for partner (affiliate) products you sell through your site, are one of our favorite ways to generate income online. You can check out a variety of affiliate options at Commission Junction.

One of the easiest affiliate money-making opportunities, in our humble opinion, comes through promoting e-books on your blog. All you have to do is browse ClickBank, select e-books that either relate to the topics you cover in your blog or that you think will appeal to your blog’s audience, and then sign up as an affiliate. Then whenever your readers purchase one of those e-books through your site, you get a cut of the purchase price (generally, 25 to 75 percent of the total sale).

Companies That Pay You Directly

Over the past year, a ton of companies have suddenly come out of nowhere offering to pay people to blog. Many are blog ad networks—some hire freelance writers to write on-topic blogs as needed; others will pay you to review a particular product , post their ads on your site, or sponsor your blog.

The ones we’re most familiar with and have heard good things about are PayPerPost and ReviewMe. If this kind of blogging for money sounds like something you think you could do, check out this post on Hongkiat that highlights 26 pay-to-blog sites to get you started.

Conventional Blogger Job-Search Tools

Maybe you’re the more traditional type, and you’re looking for more conventional “Writers Wanted”–type ways of making money as a blogger. If you’d rather take on a blogging job that’s more conservative but consistent, there are several sites out there that post job ads for bloggers and related positions in online media.

Here are some of our favorite links for blogger job posts and blogging job-search tools:

On a cautionary note: After amping up all this blogging-for-money excitement, we don’t want to burst anyone’s bubble, but we do want to keep it realistic. Most average college students—or most average people, period—will never earn a full-time income by blogging. On the other hand, it certainly is possible to earn enough money on the side, here and there, to make blogging a viable alternative to a part-time or second job, like waiting tables or mixing triple no-foam lattés.

But you need to be smart about it. Blogging rarely works out to be a get-rich-quick thing, and it’ll take most of you some time (probably more than you think) to get your blog set up, established, and on enough people’s radars so that the money is rolling in consistently.

Whether you decide to become an affiliate promoting e-books or other merchandise, join several ad networks and start posting ads on your blog, or get a more traditional part-time, pay-per-word blogging job, take it slow, at least at first, and be wise. Don’t go off and max out your credit card just because the first few dollars start trickling in. And don’t rush out and quit your on-campus day job either. Remember, this is the Internet, and today’s popular dot-com millionaire could be tomorrow’s out-of-touch dot-com bust.

Talk to the education financial advisors at NextStudent. They have all the information and advice you need on student loans. Check out www.nextstudent.com.

Student Loan Girl

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