Blogging For Money

Affiliate Links

2005-11-22T16:58:00.000-08:00

As the holiday shopping season nears, this is when many sites who are all about physical items like digital cameras, computers, clothing, books, and so on make a lot of their money. I think I read that 80% of the money spent online this year will be spent in the next month and a half. This is due to commission links, where if someone clicks through your link and buys a toy or something, you get something like 5% of the money spent paid to you.

Places to sign up include Linkshare and Commission Junction. You've probably clicked through one of these links at least once, if not just today while browsing for gifts!

Google Is Brilliant.

2005-11-17T14:09:00.000-08:00

No, I'm not another blind-faith Google worshipper. But, you gotta respect their vision. They give away free blogs and hosting to anyone who wants it (including me). I mean, all these blogs are probably sucking up some serious bandwidth. The key is, no ads! Geocities, Tripod, all those other "free" webhosts make you put up ads on your site. Blogger? No ads.

...enter Google Adsense. Now, you put up their ads for them, because you get a cut! Notice that they don't tell you how much of the actual ad revenue they keep. Brilliant, I tell you. When's the last time you went to a Geocities webpage?

Back on the Wagon

2005-11-17T13:50:00.000-08:00

Stopped bloggin' for a while. I gave up and put up some Google Ads on my site. I've gotten about 5 bucks total for the last couple months, which has almost paid for the domain name so that's good!

I actually have a Google PageRank of 4 now, which is exciting. I also notice that this blog has a PageRank of 3 too! This basically means that my links "mean" something to the search engine gods, so if I link to someone with the link "Lindsey Lohan Drunk" then when someone searches for that phrase, it is more likely that it will turn up. Very neat. This will inspire me to start posting again!

Boo!

2005-10-31T14:15:00.000-08:00

Happy Halloween Everyone. I finally get some time in front of the computer, to look at my vast lack of activity. Sigh.

Falling Off The Wagon

2005-09-14T15:59:00.000-07:00

Things at work have been hectic, and I haven't been walking the walk after talking the talk. The surprising thing is traffic is picking up at my blog. I've developed some good relationships with some fellow bloggers, and they have added me to their links, so I am getting some traffic from people interested in my subject. Also, it looks like MSN Search has indexed my site, which means that I am showing up in their search engine. This is great news. Hopefully Yahoo and Google will follow shortly. Google always seems to take the longest, so I must keep writing. I'm still not putting up any ads, but things are looking pretty good. Gettin back on the wagon!

Oh, I check all my blog stats by putting up a free invisible tracker from StatCounter.

Days 15,16,17: Labor Day Lull

2005-09-07T01:09:00.000-07:00

Not many people online over Labor Day, I know I wasn't. My readership is steady, and I am getting a decent stream of comments. Only 2 people read my RSS feed, though. I'd like to get at least 100 visitors a day and 20 readers before I start any kind of ad campaign. There's really no point otherwise. I've discovered that my niche area doesn't really pay that well. There are tons of sites trying to sell you the best paying keywords, but after talking with some people in the area and reading some, my area isn't as hot as say, gadgets.

You can also see what's hot in the search engines currently with Yahoo Buzz. Too bad I hate American Idol.

Days 13 and 14: Whew!

2005-09-02T23:26:00.000-07:00

My traffic is returning a bit now that I am posting again. I'm sure there will be a lull as Labor Day weekend comes around. I realized why I was having zero RSS subscribers - I was giving them the wrong RSS address!!! I guess what I've learned from this is that most people are lazy (me included). If something is broke on your site, chances are nobody will tell you! I fixed it, and I also found this cool plugin for WordPress, that helps you track your subscribers better by redirecting everything correctly to Feedburner. Let's try this again!

Deal: Domains for $1.99 a year from Yahoo!

2005-09-02T12:20:00.000-07:00

I'll be back posting soon, but for now you can get a domain for two bucks at Domains.Yahoo.com. Even if you want to stay on Blogger, you can register it and have redirect to your blogger webpage. I would've bought blogformoney.com, but it was taken.

Days 11 and 12: No Progress

2005-08-31T21:01:00.000-07:00

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!

Day 10: Taking A Break

2005-08-29T00:48:00.000-07:00

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)

Day 9: Basic Search Optimization

2005-08-28T21:37:00.000-07:00

(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'.

Day 8: Start Link-Swapping

2005-08-27T23:34:00.000-07:00

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.

Day 7: Use Traffic Exchanges to Jump-Start Your Blog

2005-08-26T00:31:00.000-07:00

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.

Day 6: Track your Visitors, and Get Into A Routine

2005-08-26T00:11:00.000-07:00

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.

Day 5: Reach out and Publicize!

2005-08-25T01:20:00.000-07:00

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!

Day 4: Get Some Content!

2005-08-24T00:37:00.000-07:00

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.

Day 3: Setting up my blog - Titles, Feeds, and the First Post

2005-08-23T00:05:00.000-07:00

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.

Day 2: Staking out my site (on the cheap)

2005-08-22T00:07:00.000-07:00

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.

Day 1: Choosing the topic

2005-08-21T01:38:00.000-07:00

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.

Day 0: Background

2005-08-20T23:40:00.000-07:00

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.