The Always Frugal Blog

Check out the latest Carnival of Personal Finance. My favorite entry this week was:

Eating Healthy and Inexpensively

This blog highlights something I've noticed on the frugal forums I hang out on.  Many of the people there will load up on starches like rice and beans or Ramen noodles because they are cheap forms of calories and then a disproportionate amount compared to other people I know seem to have diabetes. It seems like people who are frugal because they have to be get caught in a Catch-22 situation of low cost starches now - health issues later.

1.  Think about the topics you may know something about - more than the average person. My first web site was on some weird health problems that ran in my family and how we corrected them. It turns out the problems weren't as rare as I thought, and now that site gets thousands of visitors a day. Try to write about a topic you enjoy.  Then writing about it won't even seem like work. My first sites had thousands of visitors a day before I even realized I could put ads on the sites and make a living just by making web sites, writing about my hobbies and solutions to health issues.

2.  Start out not investing any money in your web sites at all.  Okay, maybe you can buy your own domain name.  But really, you don't need to spend a lot of money to make money on the web. My first web site was on the free hosting from my ISP.  I got kicked off of there eventually for using too much bandwidth as my web site grew in popularity.  Your best investment is most likely going to be really interesting articles that just take time to create. You can do this with a totally free blogspot blog.

3.  Start out with easy to rank for terms.  The longer the term, often the less competition there is for that term.

4.  Get links for the easy terms first, start ranking, get traffic and then if people enjoy your articles they will give you free "natural"  links and you will soon be ranking for shorter, more competitive terms. Links from other sites are currently the currency of the web.  The more links you have, and the higher the quality of the sites are that are giving you those links, the higher your site will rank in the search engines. My main Always Frugal site started out ranking for the terms like  "how to make extra money when you don't have a job" .  It's a long term for sure, but in the current economy I actually started getting traffic on this term.  Eventually, without much extra effort on my part, I started getting traffic for the shorter term "how to make extra money" and other variations with more traffic.

5.  Look for topics with lots of advertisers but not a lot of competition. If you enter a term in Google and there are lots of ads long the sites of the listings, that is generally a good sign.  If you enter a term and there are no ads, then write about your topic it if is a hobby topic but don't expect to make a fortune from it even if you end up getting traffic.

6.  Don't get discouraged.  Many bloggers fail because they are only making $1 or so a day from their blogs and give up.  Remember, most bloggers and web site publishers don't start out on day one with thousands of visitors.  If you know how to make $1, then repeat what you did to make that $1 and start making $2 a day. 

1. Make your own greeting cards for free.  The Hewlett Packard site has hundreds of free downloads.  Invest in a pack of greeting card paper, select the card you want, print it and you are good to go. I just made a store quality valentine card for my husband in under 5 minutes.  Four of those minutes were spent finding where I put the card paper stock. You can buy a pack of greeting card paper with envelopes for about $9, so each card can be printed for around 30 cents, plus a few minutes of your time.

2.  The actual, official free credit report site is at www.annualcreditreport.com. This site allows you to order a credit report once every twelves months from each of the nationwide consumer credit reporting companies: TransUnion, Equifax, and Experian.

Many of the free credit report offers online are in fact scams.  If you sign up with them, you (maybe) get one month for free and the get your charge card billed for access to credit reports monthly until the end of time. In a way you have to give admire the diabolical cleverness of the credit reporting agencies for finding a way to make money for a problem they helped to create (easy credit fraud).

3. You can get many free books online at books.google.com and www.gutenberg.org.

4.  Get free books, audio books, DVDs and subscriptions from your local library.  Most people know that libraries offer free book rentals, but these days the freebies don't just stop at books.  My favorite freebie from libraries is subscriptions to online journal and magazine sites.  Most libraries subscribe to a number of these subscription services.  If you write for a living like I do, or do other kinds of research, access to these online services is a fantastic resource. In California you can get a library card from many different cities, and correspondingly many different journal services, as long as you are a resident of the state. If you live in California, or a state with similar library rules, stop in to various libraries whenever you travel and get a card. This will give you access to a wide range of online, free full text articles you won't find in the search engine listings.

Hint: The libraries in cities with the highest home prices tend to have the best online research tools.

5.  If you have a Kindle book reader, there are some books you can download for free at Amazon.com.

6. iTunes has many free podcasts.  I like to download the self improvement topics, like the ones from the nutrition departments at colleges on how to eat healthy.