This blog is relatively new. It is just over three months old. It gets a steady amount of traffic, from Entrecard, StumbleUpon, Google and directly. The traffic doubles every month, so does the income. I have a feeling that it will never be enough, traffic or money. It is not greed that drives my efforts but the fact that I constantly want to make this blog better and better. Making money blogging can be easy and difficult at the same time. Based on my experiences, I know exactly what to do and what not to do to get any blog to reach an average of at least 200-300 unique visits a day and bring in at least $20-$30 dollars a day. There is a list of things that anyone can do to get any blog into a groove; a traffic and income groove. I am even thinking of putting everything together on a PDF and make all the advice available to anyone interested. I can even charge money for that book. I am thinking of charging anywhere from $0 to $0.01. Why? Because I don’t feel that this information is that special. I am not doing anything special or groundbreaking or new. I am just reading information available online, testing what works and what doesn’t and then apply it here. Sometimes I test things out and rule out what doesn’t work. If I can do it, you can do it, anyone can.

After posting daily for a couple of weeks, I realized the importance of doing so for a blog that relies on Web 2.0 applications for traffic. As I post daily, traffic remains steady with over 200 visits a day. Past week I posted once and traffic fell to about 100 daily unique visitors.

I haven’t posted so much this week not only because I thought I should take some time and do other things, but because I wanted to see how it would do. The results were not that pleasant. Nevertheless, the drop in traffic will not deter me.

The reason why there was a substantial drop in traffic is because this blog relies mostly on Web 2.0 applications to get traffic; Entrecard and StumbleUpon being the primary sources. As the number of posts decreases so does the traffic.

In the past week I decided to change that. I want to take action and begin restructuring this blog so that it can get most of its traffic from search engines.

I have tried a few things here and there and can say that I have seen some success. I got on the first page of Google for the keywords “make money blogging” and a few others. Make money with Entrecard, Entrecard Tips, The SEO tree, just to mention a few.

Since I got on the first page of Google for the keyword Make Money Blogging and due to the competitive nature o f that particular keyword, I have dropped a few pages to number 3.

My ‘Make Money with Entrecard’ post is still number one for that search, and so is my post titled ‘Entrecard Tips’.

Even though I managed to get these two on the first page, the amount of traffic I am getting is still not significant. What I want to do is to try to get on the first page for the keyword Entrecard.

The Goals

What I am aiming to do is to get back on the first page for Make Money Blogging and perhaps some other ‘make money’ keyword as well.

Get all my Entrecard related posts on the first page for the keyword Entrecard.

Once I get back on the first page for all of these keywords, I will continue to practice with other keywords and start planning what other Marketing blogs I can create and use the same method to start making some money.

The Method

Plain and simple SEO

I did it before I can do it again.

Make Money Blogging is a difficult keyword to rank high in. So I wll need to put in some work. I will start by putting together some posts on making money, how I make money blogging, write and publish articles for backlinks, and continue to do what I have been doing but better.

To start I will wite three posts, one on how to make money blogging by writing reviews and posts, one more comprehensive one about Adsense and one more about Entrecard and how I profit by using the system.

I will focus on these three fields and see how well I do.

Make Money Blogging with Entrecard

Make Money Blogging by Writing Reviews

Make Money Blogging with Adsense

I don’t know how long it will take to complete these goals but I am thinking it should take a few weeks to a month.

Things to keep in Mind

I will try to make every post keyword intensive,

Every post will be lengthy, over 1000 words,

For every post I write I am going to publish 15 articles with backlinks using all of the methods outlined in previous posts.

By keeping my efforts focused I am certainly going to be able to see the best results possible and in the end I will know what works and what doesn’t.

If you have read up to here, I am really eager to find out what you think of all his. I am open to suggestions and recommendations.

Feel free to comment, and/or subscribe to my feed and let me keep you posted on how all this will work out.

So you have a blog… Congratulations!

Now what?

Establish a Strategy

After you create a blog and you satisfy that burning urge of yours to get what you think online, you need to figure out a few ways to engage your readers. Assuming that you have visitors you need to offer something to make them want to come back. Good content is usually the best way to go. Writing a few good posts on a particular topic can give you that edge over other blogs in that particular niche. It is all about focusing on one thing a bit more, rather than a bit less on a few more things…

In the case of make money blogs, competition is fierce and there are always going to be blogs that have been out there longer than yours and mine. Those are the ones that will be getting the bigger piece of the pie. So once you start your blog and you start receiving some visits you automatically get a little piece of the action; a really tiny slice of the “pie”. How do you proceed on making that piece larger? You have to strategise.

There are a few things you should focus on aside from writing, SEO, networking and then some more SEO. This post will be about how to prepare material for your posts in a way that allows you to become an ‘expert’ on particular niche.

Once you find a topic of your interest, research things and info of that topic that are current. Start your post series by writing a news piece, something new and current. Josh Witford at his Unconventional Marketing blog wrote about some tips you can use to always be on top of what is going on in your niche.

Be current

Write about what is going on in the blogosphere right now. Be informative and present new topics and opportunities to your readers. Research your nice daily, and try to find new services, new opportunities that you can present, help promote and as a result inform. Don’t hesitate to contact companies or bloggers directly ask them questions, learn about what they do and include the information on your posts. If you are in the business of writing reviews….even better.

Be Evergreen

Being current is important. Aside from writing about what is going on right now, you should frequently write about topics that will never loose their appeal. Solid advice regarding your niche, blogging in general, topics that will be searchable and bring in traffic for months if not years to come. Topics that will stay relevant are the ones that have to do with tips, advice, motivation and ideas. When you discover a current topic you enjoy, write a few posts about it, elaborate on it, the broader ideas relating to it. Once you write about something new, write the next post about the idea behind that. If you discovered a new way to make money blogging write a post on how to maximize that revenue. Or, if you write about a new social networking site, write a few posts about social networking. Write about the significance, the evolution, present tips and advice.

Be Helpful

You should always be able to write a post that will make someone’s life a bit easier. You can do so by presenting personal experiences, perhaps a milestone of yours. I try to do it as well. I start writing a series of posts that I plan out from before. I try to document my actions and in the end I usually post about how I achieved a particular goal. An example of this is the post I wrote about getting on page one on Google for the keywords Make Money Blogging. Everyone likes to read tips and advice on how to achieve a similar milestone or just to satisfy their curiosity. In the case of my milestone, I would suggest you read the posts in the Search Engine Optimization section.

Be Motivating

Present compelling ideas that make your readers relate think and reply to what you have to say. Encourage readers to leave comments and engage in conversation. Keep doing this for a while and other bloggers will start linking back to you. As the linking increases so will your ‘authority’ as blogger.

A few additional Tips:

Make sure your posts are not too long but not too short either, structure them like essays, with an introduction and a conclusion.

Have the search engines in mind. Optimize and then optimize some more. If you do keep optimizing traffic will be flowing in for years to come.

By following these simple steps on every topic you write about you will eventually have plenty of good content ranking well in searches. Going in depth, helps you gain authority status on certain topics.

More Blogging Tips

If you came from Entrecard you might like:

Make Money with Entrecard

If you came from StumbleUpon check out:

StumbleUpon Tips

Here is the link to my feed.

Blogging is not Rocket Science

Anybody can launch a blog, get it going and possibly make a few pennies doing it. All you need to do is follow a few simple steps and repeat them frequently.

Repetition is the key to learning…repetition and persistence, I think, are the keys to unlocking your blogs potential.

There are three things that every blogger should do as often as possible to get a blog going. By going, I mean getting at least 100 visitors a day.

These three things are:

Writing
Optimizing
Promoting

With the tons of advice about writing, and the countless options to optimize and promote it is sometimes difficult for someone to decide what to use and where to focus their efforts.

This is a just a simple list of simple tips that I follow.

Writing

Writing often is usually advised by most bloggers out there. The reason why it is popular advice is because it is based on the idea that daily posting shows that you are committed to what you do and could increase traffic by making people want to come back and read what you’re up to. Personally, I think it could have the opposite effect. When I visit a blog for the second time, I usually do it to re-read something or find something relevant to what I read. Having to dig through a bunch of new posts, 1, 2 sometimes 3 a day is a big turn off. In these cases I will just use a search engine to find what I am looking for. Furthermore, the 2^nd and 3^rd posts of the day are usually of lesser quality due to writers fatigue and therefore less interesting.

Instead of posting 3 times a day just post once a day or once every two days or even better whenever you think you have something interesting or useful to write about. Put some though in your posts, give your readers a reason to come back and always avoid bombarding them with clutter.
How many times have you heard or read the phrase…content is key? Well it is! Don’t waste your time writing about 15 different things a week, focus your effort on a few good topics. OO

Optimizing

SEO

Don’t rely on social networks for your traffic. Although it is an easy way to generate traffic you should always spend some time to make sure your blog and posts are properly optimized to rank well in search engine result pages. It only takes a few minutes. Make sure your titles are relevant to your topic, make sure you refer to your topic keywords throughout your posts, and make sure you tag your posts properly. Also make sure to interlink your posts with older relevant posts.

Write and publish articles

Don’t only rely on other bloggers to link to you. Create backlinks to your blog by submitting articles in databases. Take that post you just published, cut it up, make it a bit more focused, delete all the unnecessary links and only keep one in the end linking back to your blog with the desired keywords. Do the same thing for every post. You can easily create 10 one way links to every post in less than half an hour. With every post try to fit in a link back to your main page. In my case, I will re-write this post a couple of times incorporate the link Blogging Tips at the end and make sure I throw in the link Make Money Blogging in the writer’s id section.

Once a week or once every two weeks, use Google Webmaster Tools and see which posts of yours showed up in search engine result pages. Go back to them and optimize them. Add more keywords, make the title catchier, tag them better or even elaborate on certain things you wrote and think will help them rank better in searches.

Promoting

Participate in Social Networks

Make blogging friends, join blogging communities and do some bookmarking as well. Stick to what works best for you!

Entrecard
Blogcatalog
StumbleUpon

Entrecard Tips

Entrecard is excellent for promoting your new blog and getting targeted traffic. The best thing you can do is be active. Drop the maximum amount of cards per day, if not every day do it often. Spend the credits you earn and buy advertisements on other blogs. The simplest way to drop many cards fast is to add your favourite Entrecard sites to your Firefox bookmarks. Categorize them in 10 batches of 30 and open them all at once. Then drop your card on one after the other. Make sure you pick ones that drop back so you can maximize your credit-earning-potential.

Blogcatalog

Use Blogcatalog to make a lot of friends. Spend 5-10 minutes a day and add 50 new friends every day. Then every time you post use the broadcast function to broadcast to all of them.

StumbleUpon

Start stumbling different sites and blogs. Make sure you write reviews for the ones you like and try to bookmark sites, blogs, photos and videos that haven’t been included in StumbleUpon. Do the same thing for your blog and posts when there is a new one. The more sites you stumble the better the traffic results as your StumbleUpon clout will increase. Making a lot of friends also helps.

All the above can be achieved with 10 hours of work a week.

3.5 hours writing

3.5 hours optimizing

3 hours networking

More Blogging Tips?

Write all your posts at once, optimize them before you post, and do a bit of networking and bookmarking every day.

If you want you can subscribe to my feed

Here are some other things you might find helpful

Get Backlinks

Build Backlinks

Make Money Blogging With Reviews

How to Write Great Blog Posts

The template for this blog was changed. You might have noticed... I am still working on getting things up so please be patient. I decided to stay with a three column template so I can have enough space to place advertisements and suggestions. The older design was getting on my nerves and it was hard to navigate. I will update this post sometime with all the cool features on the new one. I hope you like the new look…

A tip: If you change your template, make sure the first thing you do is place the tracking code for your statistics! I learned the hard way.

Anyhow, for those interested in this template you can download it at no cost from: eblogtemplates.com

It was really hard to find a good template for blogger and I am really happy I found this one.

This and other similar widgets have been going around for a while now. I had entered my URL in the past and got $0, then something like $24 and hadn’t checked in a while. So I entered my URL today just to see how many millions my blog is worth. Fortunately, I didn’t have to call my accountant and figure out how to deal with the new asset because with 600 dollars I am still staying in the same tax bracket. Phew… So as you can see, my blogs worth is calculated at 600 smackers!

My site is worth $600.
How much is yours worth?

I don’t know how accurate this thing is but it supposedly calculates your sites worth based on your Alexa Traffic Ranking, Google Page Rank, and backlinks. I don’t have a Google Page Rank yet, but I got an Alexa Traffic Ranking and a few backlinks. If you haven’t checked yet or recently and have some time to kill go ahead. You never know, you might be worth millions. ;)

One of the things that Blogger won’t allow you to do is categorize your posts. There is a way around that. I came across an excellent, detailed, step by step article on how to use del.icio.us and categorize your posts. Blogger Tips and Tricks is a great source of information.

I found this at buzzpop. I thought I give it a try.

According to "The Blog Readability Test" they read, analyze and classify your blog based on content. Here is what it said about mine:

Get a Cash Advance

I had a nice laugh!

Try it. Find out what "level of education is required to understand your blog".

Happy New Year Everyone!

May the new year bring happiness to all.

Don't forget to share the joy and subscribe to this blog. Use RSS or e-mail

This is something a came across recently. Rollmio is a “consumer generated creative network where anyone can participate as a creator or promoter.” As a creator you are asked to create a commercial advertisement for the Rollmio clients. As a promoter you must post the video on your blog or webpage. Compensation is based on project. At this time they are running a campaign for their brand.

I think that it is a great way to promote new talent; it is excellent practice for someone who is interested in taking his/hers first steps in making commercials. They also compensate the creators which is nice.

Regarding the promotion of the video, It all sounds good. You create a post about it and feature one of the videos they have. It didn’t hurt me to do so…Now, regarding the compensation for that they are a bit vague about who will in the end be compensated. Although from my understanding anyone can post a video, what is not clear is who will get compensated for that.

Nevertheless, Rollmio is something worth mentioning.

You can watch the video I picked bellow…

For more videos, rollmio.com

creative marketing
rollmio,

I have changed my blogs layout with a template I found at Webtalks. They have 3 column versions for all the blogger beta templates. The one i got works fine!

I really like the extra space. Found it just in time for Christmas!

Merry Christmas everyone!

Does it pay to have an opinion?

Can I say what I want, write about what I think is interesting, point to what I feel is cool, talk about what I want to talk about and actually bring in enough pennies to sustain this process. Is what I have to say, what you have to say, what you are interested in, what you want to read, actually worth any money?
Since I am in the process of making money, or better hoping to make money I will try not to spend any money.

Well here is my blogging Strategy

After creating a blog, this blog, I started snooping around for information, for advice and any kind of direction regarding what course of action I should take.

By reading one or two of the tons of sources of information that are widely available online, just google your question and u can pretty much find what you need, I came across many articles that pretty much suggest two things (to sum it up):

1. Write interesting- write often, and

2. Get the word out.

Regarding writing interesting articles… that’s something that I won’t take in consideration because of the nature of this experiment, which is:

Write what I feel like writing about!

However, I will suggest tips regarding compiling work for the novice blogger as I become more knowledgeable, hopefully in the near future.

Getting the word out

Here is what I have done so far:

I have suggested this blog to the directories of Yahoo and Google for free.

For yahoo visit yahoo.com and at the bottom of page click on “Suggest a Site” and follow the process.

And for Google follow this link:

http://www.google.com/addurl

What happens then is the search engine ‘crawls’ your site (your blog) and based on what kind of material you have on there, you get incorporated. I think I did. It takes a day or two.

However that is not enough because there are countless of other sites out there and even when you search in the engine your site won’t show up.

What is suggested by most blogging gurus out there is that you register your blog with the different databases-programs out there. What I have done successfully is register with:

technorati.com
dir.blogflux.com
blogrankings.com
bloggingfusion.com
globeofblogs.com
blogher.com
blogcarnival.com

For some of the above you will have to create and account. Also, for when submitting your blog you will be asked for the title, the url, key words, and brief description. You will be better off if you open a text or word file and have it all ready. That way you can copy and paste and thus do things a bit faster.

I tried some other ones as well but with no luck. I was turned down because I either didn’t want to pay their fees or because my blog is new and doesn’t have enough hits.
For example, Text link ads did not accept my site due to low traffic.


Setting things up for revenue

Then as you can see, if you scroll down my page, I registered with Google AdSense.
It is the service by Google that places related ads on your page and then pays you when people with different IP’s click on them.

So this is what I have accomplished by now. I am thinking that my next post should be about what else I have tried; ads affiliate programs to give this blog the potential to become profitable. At this point I am determined to try everything to make this work. Till next time….