If you’re looking for an alternative to the usual lenders out there, or would like to lend yourself, Zopa may be for you.

Zopa is UK-based and is said to be the financial equivalent of eBay. It puts borrowers and lenders directly in touch with one another.

Zopa has a very good management pedigree, it was created by the team that setup Egg, an online bank associated with the Abbey.

Pamela Atherton of the Telegraph writes: “Zopa was launched in March 2005, and has approximately 90,000 members. Sixty-three per cent are borrowers and 37 per cent lenders, with about 50 per cent of active lenders having already added to their original lending outlay. Zopa is coy about providing specific lending figures but insists that millions of pounds have been transacted since the launch, involving thousands of lenders and borrowers, and that more than 5,000 new members are being signed up each month.”

Another string to yet another financial bow.

How best to invest your cash in the UK is always a tricky problem, especially if you don’t have specialist knowledge.

Here are a few pointers that may help :

* Check out the internet-only accounts, which often pay the highest rates.
* You can put £3000 ($5640) in a cash Isa account every tax year. Interest, which is currently over 5pc, is tax-free.
* Some accounts offer guarantees — e.g. Investec’s Hi 5.
* National Saving’s index-linked certificates are definitely worth considering if you pay higher-rate tax.
* Spread money over several accounts. If you opt for a one-year account for some of your savings, you could earn 5.5pc or even more.
* You should be able to earn at least 5pc at today’s rates. Don’t settle for less. Monthly-paying accounts pay around 4.75pc.
* Less fashionable banks sometimes pay more. You can check if an institution is registered here: fsa.gov.uk/consumer.

Finally, be aware of rate changes and read the financial press.

The most obvious way to make money online is through writing, i.e., becoming a “content provider”.

You might, for instance, sell your work directly to one of the many blog networks now out there. Or you might become a problogger, like Darren Rowse, which means tailoring your writing to specific niches so that well-heeled search traffic will find you and click on your contextual advertising, like Google’s Adsense. By adding to your “page views”, they will also make it easier to sell paid advertising off the site.

We’ll be looking at problogging later in this series. For now, I want to concentrate on direct publishing, selling your words themselves in a print format. Here’s an example that popped into my inbox this very morning:

Marti Lawrence runs a blog called Enter The Laughter, which rather speaks for itself. However, to monetize it further she has decided to put her blog posts into book form using one of the “free” publication tools now available on the internet.

Using Lulu.com Marti has stitched her posts together as: Queen Klutz – The Misadventures of a Very Clumsy Woman:

It takes a bit of work to do this, and it’s not as free as you’d think — an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) costs $99, for example. But Marti has done it, cheerfully confessing her lack of technical know-how in this field.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dave Sifry, head honcho at Technorati, the blog search engine, has given us another State of the Blogosphere assessment. Essentially he says:

* The blogosphere is now 100 times larger than it was 3 years ago.

* The blogosphere is doubling in size every 200 days.

* 175,000 blogs are created each day — two every second.

* 70 pc of pings that Technorati gets are from spam blogs.

* Daily posting levels are at about 1.6 million posts per day (18.6 per second).

* English has retaken the lead as the most spoken language in the blogosphere (Japanese is only 1 pc behind).

All this shows what a great market the Web is for commerce of all sorts. Take the business behind this Website, Syntagma Media. Over on Syntagma, there’s an assessment of its growth in July:

In the month of July Syntagma Media’s basket of key indicators showed an increase of 20.8 pc. Annualized that represent a 250 pc growth rate.

July, of course, is traditionally a slow month for commerce, the exceptions being anything related to travel, tourism and vacations in general. So our true growth is probably somewhere between 300 and 400 pc — a rate that outperforms even Hong Kong in its heyday.

As we often say, blog networks — whether interpreted as geeky outlets for techy types, or online, distributed magazines, like Syntagma — are a good business to be in.

To press this message home, we’re going to be running a new series titled, Making Money Online.

Stay tuned for that one.