Blogging For Money

I've been busy due to a side effect of a certain large hurricane. My family is fine, but others' are not. Craziness. My blog has been hurting a bit as a consequence, it's amazing how fast traffic falls when there is no update. My feed now has no readers. It's a bit disheartening, but I like what I am writing about so I'm not anywhere near stopping. Tomorrow is another day!

It's Monday and work stank, so today I did nothing put post 1 entry in DaBlog. I decided to check and post my StatCounter stats:

Day	Date	Page Loads	Unique Visitors	First Time Visitors	Returning Visitors
Monday	29th August 2005	86	47	43	4

Not bad! When I get to 100 unique visitors a day, I will start to think about putting up some ads.

Money made so far: $0. (No ads or affiliate links up)

(Again, first did my post of the day and surfed some)

Today I decided to do some simple search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is the art of optimizing your site, so that your site ranks high in search engine results for certain keywords. This results in more visitors, and more visitors equals more money. I don't profess to be an expert on this at all, it is truely and art there are almost no limits on what you can do. But I will offer some tips.

1. If your post is on 'how to raise pet iguanas', don't veer to far off topic. Keep your post about that, and if you want to write something else, make it another post. Pick the main theme of your post, and use words that relate to it generously, like 'pet', 'iguanas', 'reptile', 'exotic pets', etc. (Note how many times I mention SEO in this post).
2. Title your posts clearly. If your post is on pet iguanas, put that in the title. Don't call it 'freaking cool green things'.
3. Make sure your titles are links. Any link to your content is a good link. For example, the post title of this entry is a link to a page that contains this entry only (try clicking on it, if you are on the front page). Therefore, I have a link saying 'Basic Search Optimization' that leads to my page, with a title 'Basic Search Optimization'.

Ok, first I did #1 and #2 (no potty humor, please). 1 fresh content post, and 1 visited some other blogs and commented. By now I've discovered some new cool sites that I really like reading and learning from. If the site isn't too well-known (and therefore probably slightly egotistical) then there is a good chance that they would like to swap links with you. That is, you put up a link to them on your blog, and they put up a long to you on theirs. This way, both blogs can generate more traffic for each other, and more of a community forms.

See the right sidebar --->

If you'd like to swap links with me, I'd be happy to (assuming you're not a scammer or spammer). Just e-mail me at robasmithATgmailDOT.com.

First, I did my two daily activities:
1) Write 1 post
2) Publicize your site and learn by leaving useful comments on other blogs (Should be easy if you like what you are doing)

Next, now that you've left some comments, and are continuously adding new content to your blog, it's time to try and get some more traffic! On of the easiest way of doing this is via a blog traffic generator like BlogExplosion, BlogClicker, Blogazoo, and BlogAdvance.

Basically what happens with these sites is you are directed to view other people's blog for at least 20 seconds or so. For every 2 blogs that you view, you get 1 visit to your own blog. Sounds great right? Just do it all day mindlessly and you'll have tons of visitors! Well, maybe, but many of them are doing the same thing you are if you do that, just clicking on by. It's very hit and miss. My recommendation is to do it only a little bit each day, as part of your daily activity #2. The sites may not be ones that are similar to yours, but it will still attract some people interested in your content. Also, these programs allow referrals, so put up links (like me) so that when new people sign up, you'll be getting free residual traffic!

Also, when you sign up for these traffic exchanges you'll be listed in their directories, so you can also get visitors that way.

Ok, so by now you've probably had a couple of visitors due to your comments, and hopefully a few comments of your own! I haven't gotten any. But that's ok, I did get some visits.

How do I know? I use StatCounter. Statcounter is a free and invisible hit counter and website visitor tracker that you can use to help keep track of what people are doing and where they come from. Here's some of what StatCounter can tell you:

Where they came from (referring website), so you can tell which comments or links they used.
Keywords Used: If they came to your site via a search engine like Google, what were they searching for?
Popular Pages: What articles are they reading?
... and more: Visitor country, the page the came in on, the page they left from, and so on.

Best of all, it is free and you can make it invisible, so nobody but you has to know that you've only had 5 hits ;). You just have to copy and paste some code into your blog template, usually in the footer area is a good place to put it.

Ok, now you've got a tracker. It can be very exciting to see your hits go up as the days pass!

But from now on every day you must also to two things:
1) Write at least 1 post. Really. Fresh new content is key to getting and keeping readers.
2) Publicize yourself at least once or twice via comments or posting in discussion forum with your website in the signature. Keep spreading the word, and creating new opportunities for people to find your site!

p.s. I just got my first hits from Google and MSN! Already!!! And I haven't even gotten into Search Engine Optimization.

Unless your blog is about selling ice to eskimos, chances are you're not the first blogger in your topic area. Today, I went out and found some fellow bloggers and posted some appropriate comments (NOT spam) on their site, and also put my blog address down in the approximate box. You could also directly link to your site if their comments allow it, but for now I think that's too much. I just want some casual visitors coming in and looking around. From this day on, you should spent at least 10 minutes surfing other blogs and leaving comments. This will help develope a community of similar bloggers and then you can cross-link to each other. Don't ask for link exchanges yet until you've gotten a good number of posts under your belt. Go on, get your name out there!

Ok, I spent all day today putting together some good posts for my blog. High quality, spell-checked, well-linked stuff. I wrote 5 good posts, and I published all but one. I spent more than 15 minutes on this today, but you'll want to at least get 3 posts done. You'll want enough to at least cover the front page and make the blog look "lived-in" instead of all those "Hi This Is My Blog" blogs with one post.

Ok, time to make your blog your own.

You probably have picked your title when you picked your site address in Day 2. If not, make it a short, memorable one, like Gizmodo.com. There are a bunch of pre-made templates for Wordpress that are really easy to install. To see some really popular ones and how to install them, click here. Now, if you pick one of these be sure to change the header image or something to make your blog unique. These themes are almost as popular as those default Blogger themes already.

Next, you'll want to set up your site's RSS feed. Chances are you already have a feed being produced by your blog software. But in order to see how many people are actually subscribing to your blog, and who's clicking on the entries and actually visiting your site, you'll have to jazz it up with a tool like Feedburner. Basically, you tell FeedBurner your default feed, but you give out your jazzed-up Feedburner feed. For example, the FeedBurner feed for this blog is http://feeds.feedburner.com/BlogForMoney. Now people can read your blog in Newsreaders.

I recommend putting out "Full feeds" initially, to draw some readership. Later on, if you are so popular that people are stealing your content (called scraping) from the feeds, you can switch to Partial feeds.

If you're feeling up to it, you can also put up your first post - something that tells the reader welcome and what to expect from the blog. Your mission statement, as it were. (See the first post of this blog). The one on DaBlog is all up.

Now you have to reserve a cyber-place to hawk your wares. You have two basic options:

1) Go with a free service, like Blogger. The pros of this are that it's free, and you can start blogging right away. The cons are that the customization tools are not nearly as cool, but as you can see with this blog you can still do some neat things with some skills. Also, Blogger has had some sporadic downtimes which have been really annoying.

2) Buy your own domain and webhosting. The pros of this are that you will seem more legitimate (so many Blogger blogs are just spam sites), search engines will like you more, and you will have complete control over your site. The cons are of cours that this costs money. I'd say if you think you have a really unique and powerful site idea and you are motivitaed, buy your own domain. If you are just going to blog about yourself and how your day went, stick with Blogger. I went with #2 for 'DaBlog', since I wanted my own site.

For hosting, I just read some reviews and chose DreamHost. They have been great for me, good service and great features. One of their best features is their "One-Click Install for WordPress". I'm not a computer guy in that way, and they literally get you up and running in less than 10 minutes. But the main reason I picked them is that I ran across this code, 'DH82GD', that gives you $82 off one year of hosting. With their basic plan at $9.95 a month regularly (which I use), that comes out to $37.40 for a whole year including a free domain name. That's like $3 a month. There are also other cheaper hosts out there I found, like E-Rice.net for $5 a year with no domain name, and ShieldHost at $22/year with no domain name and less features.

Ok, so after the one-click install, WordPress is up, and I'm ready to go for tomorrow.

First, you gotta figure out what the heck to write about. Things to think about while choosing a topic:

1) Are you interested in it? Stick to something you really like doing already, preferrably something you have a certain level of expertise it. Otherwise you'll get bored really easily. Trust me. After your 50th post you really need to like it.
2) Does it pay? That said, blogging about your love of toejam won't get you many companies knocking on your virtual door to put up some ads on your site.
3) Is it unique? Fine, you love Harry Potter, but there are tons of sites about the wizard boy. Maybe if you could blog completely about that Hermione chick, her favorite ice cream, who she's dating, etc. you could find a niche audience.

I started a blog about a year ago since it seemed like something to do with my boredom. It ended up getting a bit of traffic. I added some ads in the form of Google Adsense text ads. I made some money. I added other forms of monetization. I made more money. Now I'd like to do it again with a different topic (and make more money). This blog will track the progress of my new site, which I will keep anonymous and simply refer to it as "DaBlog". Hopefully I can learn what works and what doesn't. Hopefully you guys can also tell me what works and what doesn't before I have to learn it the hard way.