Since I’m involved in activities that generate spam, it goes without saying that free email accounts are a necessity and my hands-down favorite is Google’s Gmail. The one reason that puts them head and shoulders above the rest in my opinion, is the ability to forward automatically to another account.

You can have as many as you want, so I use one main account to act as a receiver and several disposable accounts that forward to it. If I get one that starts getting flooded with spam, it’s a simple matter to delete it and set up a replacement.

Click on Settings at the top of your account page and then Forwarding to set up where you want it to end up. Make sure you use the drop down box to delete Gmail’s copy so they don’t pile up.

There are tons of other useful features (like built in chat) but forwarding should be enough to get you interested, then you can have fun discovering the rest.

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Plenty of online Guru’s will tell you that to bring attention to yourself and therefore make more money online, you need to write and publish articles with a resource box at the bottom. I can’t disagree with that, but there are a couple of things to consider.

The first thing that comes to my mind, is it’s a LOT easier to bang out a short blog post than a full length article. It’s also easier to get it read here than posting it in with thousands of others, some by much better authors than I am.

Finally, I guess you know who gets paid if you click on any of the ads you find on the article websites, right? With thousands of would be authors pounding out thousands of pages, the odds are in their favor. Some can even afford to share a little of that revenue with their authors, but not too much.

So I may still try pounding out a few articles for Associated Content, but only because now I have this blog to bring any interested readers to, if in fact there are any.

Oh I almost overlooked one big point, that is control. Once you sell your article, you lost it. Then if your opinion changes later on, your article will still be floating around to haunt you. If I change my mind about anything I write here, it only takes a few minutes to make it right.

Now it’s up to you.

I had a few friends check this blog out and one of the questions I got back was how much did I pay for the header graphic I used? I decided years ago. that if I were going to commit to learning this stuff I would have to invest in some good tools (but not too much).

The template for this blog layout was free from Wordpress (there’s a link at the bottom). The hand with the two cents is a stock photo I bought for one buck at Dreamstime and I put it all together with an older version of Photoshop Elements I picked up on Ebay for less than $20 (with a discount). A great investment that has served me well for many years.

The bottom line is, none of this stuff requires anything more than a real interest in learning and basic computer skills. Then when you get a bug like I did when I thought of this concept, you can have it online in a few hours for not much more than the cost of the domain name. I think my total investment came to about $25 for a whole year. It has already made that back and I just started.

Since my desire to participate in the Blogosphere rose from my membership in a Social Network, I though it only fitting to start here. I wish I had a dollar for every Social Network I’ve joined, but the truth is very few were able to hold my interest for long. The big exception was Yuwie, and I rose to become among the top .01% of the active members there. I think it was my blog that spurred me on, so I decided to branch off and start a personal one I could monetize a little easier. You can visit me there by Clicking Here

I got my amazing start with Yuwie from another network called myLot, but the administrators turned out to be impossible to deal with. As I talked more about Yuwie and signed up many of my friends on myLot, they must have feared it would damage their own effort and blocked my ability to post. With over 6,000 active discussions and a position on the Top Referrers page, they should have known I wasn’t going anywhere and strongly recommended others follow suit. So instead of a loyal suporter, they forced me to comment on my own website at myLotScam.com

I get more offers than I can count to try new ones, but if you follow along here I think you’ll learn why I don’t. These communities are fine for making friends and I have all I can handle on Yuwie, but I think making money is better done in other ways and that’s why I’m online.

Stick around and you might pick up a few tips!