It may not have necessarily started with Cash Quests, but the whole “make money online” phenomenon has certainly exploded since Cash Quests started showing you how to turn your blog into a money making machine.

Blogs pushing the “make money online” trend are popping up left and right, but many of these die off within the first couple of months because their owners lose interest or get disappointed with the seven cents they’ve earned in Adsense.

Some guy named Angel is not prepared to give up. Instead, he’s ready to take on the pro bloggers of the world, attempting to prove that an average guy can make money online too. World of Angel has been set up to document his journey.

Who is Angel and Why Should I Care?

I don’t know about you, but when I see a website that’s trying to make money and it features someone named Angel, I can’t help but think that it has something to do with porn, online dating, and other services like that. Angel, to most people, is a typically feminine name, which is why it’s pretty off-putting to discover that the Angel behind World of Angel is a dude.

According to the About page, this “nobody in the blogosphere” is “just a regular English kid, 24 years old, living and working as a journalist in Southern Thailand.” We know that he loves to write and he embraces other cultures: he’s working in Thailand and he enjoys “reading Japanese literature and watching Japanese cartoons.” An open mind is a good thing. By his own account, Angel is not a dot com mogul. In this way, if he attempts a monetization experiment, you can have some assurance that the results can be trusted. He has no special mogul powers to rely on.

Angel is a nobody, but he’s “going to put what the money making websites tell us to the test.” His goal is that after one year of blogging - it started on July 11, 2007 - he will be “turning in four figure adsense checks… and the rest.”

Some posts to give you an idea what to expect from Angel:

• Use your picture to define your status as a pro blogger
• The importance of backing up your blog from the beginning
• Don’t publish your posts until they are finished
• Can I really make $840 a month in paid reviews?

The Good, The Bad, and the Angelic

Let’s start with the good. I commend Angel on his goal to take on the pro bloggers. We can really see that his ambition, drive, and determination are there. The color scheme and general layout of the blog are also quite clean and easy to read. The entries, while not being the most insightful, are honest and very readable.

In terms of the bad, the top banner is far too overwhelming. The huge font attracts far too much attention and isn’t in line with the design of the rest of the blog. Yes, you want branding, but that’s just sickening. The monetization could also use some serious work.

The advertising integration is poor for someone looking for four figure checks. To make money, he could easily insert a lucrative inline 300 box. He’d even be better off trying a 768 banner near the top or perhaps a 160 skyscraper in a sidebar. If you go all the way to the bottom, there’s also a 300 box for Advertlets.com; this makes for a huge amount of white space.

In fact, the content in the sidebars do not warrant the need for two sidebars! There’s a lot of unused white space on the bottom-right of the screen and it just looks ugly. That’s not how you make money online.

And the Angelic… well, the anime figure in the header image is pretty cute.

Be An Angel, Win $100

In order to garner some attention, Angel has decided to run a blog contest where he’s giving away $100 to a random winner. To participate you need to do three things:

• 50+ words in a blog post, linking to the contest post
• Stumble worldofangel.com
• Subscribe to the RSS feed (full feed)

On a side note, the animated RSS icon is pretty nice, but I’d recommend using Feedburner instead of hosting the feed yourself.

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