Monthly Archives: December 2009

Writing Articles at Article Directories

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There are a few article directories that I use to get links to Paycheck Blogging. Namely, they are EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com, Buzzle.com, and ArticleDashboard.com. I use these article directories for my niche sites as well, however I must say that I am trying a different article writing strategy for this site.

When I write an article for a random niche site, I do it for the links primarily. An article at Ezine for instance might get a handful of visitors in the first couple of days after I post it and sometimes this results in some adsense clicks and a few bucks. But honestly I don’t write clever articles or resource boxes that beg the person to click through. I figure that the people reading articles about some niche topic, say above ground pool filters, are internet marketers for the most part and not really people on Ezine looking for information about the topic. So I write articles that are just barely good enough to be published, 250-300 word snippets that are anything but gripping.

Like I said, I am writing the article for the links not traffic. But this site is in perhaps the most social of niches as it is about how to make money online. There are lots of people on EzineArticles actually looking for information on how to make money online and there are people who have crap sites about this topic actually looking for content to put on their sites. It occurred to me that if I write articles that are a bit better than the crap that I write for niche sites that some of those articles might be picked up and I could get a lot more links.

This has already happened to a degree and it has me thinking. To date, I have published eight articles on Ezines and another handful on the other article directories. I am getting a trickle of traffic from other domains which have republished those articles on their own sites. Now, I must imagine that these are not very good links at all. But, they are still links and I find myself in a new position.

You see, rarely was anyone picking up my articles about above ground pool filters. But people do seem to be picking up these articles on making money online and I can write a decent 500-800 word article on the topic. It strikes me that I will be far better served by writing the best content that I can for the article directories. Usually, I will write no more than 10 articles for a given niche site because everything that I read suggests diminishing returns for links from the same domain. However, if I am able to get more websites to publish my stuff then I may just writewritewrite as it will continue to do me some good. I think.

Currently, Yahoo shows 15 links for this domain. I think I will try to write a good article for EZA a day and see how many links those articles generate for me over the course of a couple of months. Again, I don’t know that they will really do me all that much good as they will be duplicate content links, but I’d like to see what happens.

Out.

Making Money Online Journey

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Ok, well I’d like to talk today about where I am at in my own making money online journey. I started to get fascinated with the idea of making money through blogging about a year ago. In November of 2008 I bought my first batch of domains. I have to say that at that time, I had no clue about what I was doing. I did not have a strategy in any way, shape or form.

I spent about six months trying various make money programs and ideas and never really had any success. I became disenfranchised in the summer and gave up for a while. In the fall I realized that I had quit too soon and that I needed to give it another chance. Unfortunately, due to other commitments, I did not have a lot of time to focus on the project. But, I had found a strategy.

Following in the footsteps of some bloggers who I trusted, I decided that I could make money by creating niche sites using keywords without a lot of competition. I decided that I would launch 100 niche sites and monetize them with google adsense. The problem was that I still did not have a lot of time. I could only get a few sites out a week. In November I had to scale back my online activities for a variety of reasons. For the last couple of months I have not been devote any time to blogging. However, at this point I am now able to allocate a lot more time to the project.

Currently, I have 10 niche sites up. And I have another 10 sites that I intend to develop more fully. My niche sites are currently earning between $3 and $12 a day in adsense. I think that with another 90 or so sites that I may be able to reach $2000 – $3000 a month which is the target.

I’d like to do 10 niche sites a week for the next month which would give me 50 sites by the end of January. Once I get the content up I’ll do a round of article marketing on Ezine, and Dashboard. I also might throw in some buzzles as well. Then, I’ll see how I am ranking.

I know that with the 10 niche sites that I have done thus far my rankings in the SERPs have varied. I am studying the sites of mine which are ranking well to try to learn from them. I find that for keywords that get less than 1000 exact searches a month that I need to rank in the top 3-4 so if I don’t think that I will able to get there with a minimum amount of link building then I don’t buy the domain.

I have high hopes for 2010. I’d like to be able to focus entirely on my blogs this year. I think that my overall goal is to reach a point in the coming year where I can quit my day job and become a full time internet marketer. To reach that goal I am going to have to work my tail off and be able to churn out a lot more than 10 sites a week so I’m not holding my breath. But that is the goal anyway.

Time to get back to work.

Why I Like Blogging

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Well, it has been a bad night. Not that this is particularly important to you, but tonight is just sucking it up. You see, I like to work at odd hours. I can not always work at night due to my day job, but when I have the opportunity to throw my sleeping schedule off — like right now during the Christmas holiday break — I tend to jump at it. I do not know why I prefer to work the graveyard shift, maybe it’s that I really don’t like people all that much. Who knows… But I am going somewhere with this. You see, I do like dogs. I like dogs a lot.

So, tonight after submitting a few articles to Ezine Articles I decided to go for a late night drive. I think pretty well in the car and I had a couple of things to think about. I was on the feeder road to the interstate highway near my house when out of nowhere a dog darted in front of me. And I hit the dog. I ran the dog over in my car. Damn. That sucks. Now the night is ruined because I like dogs.

So, that said, I am going to switch gears and talk about why I like blogging because that’s what I want to write about. I just wanted to mention the other thing because this is my lousy blog and I wanted to tell you what a lousy night this is and I know that that is neither here nor there.

But I DO like blogging. There are oh-so-many reasons for this, but the main one is one I already alluded to. I can blog whenever I want (like right now at 5:56 AM) and from wherever I want. And, folks, this is a huge part of the appeal. In addition to working better in the middle of the night when there are no distractions, I also work better out of the house. Where I live in Texas there are several independent coffee shops that are open all the time. I find that if I head over to my favorite Austin coffee shop I can park myself in a comfy stuffed chair and work on my blogs around the clock. I will say that this is one thing I like about living where I live as there are many coffeehouses with free wifi — FU Starbucks — that are open after midnight and a few that never, ever close.

This is why I want to be an internet marketer. Yeah, I’d like to make the kind of money that Griz and other IMers make. But the money is not the real draw. The real draw is that I can work at 4 in the morning in the quiet of the night at a chill coffee house where they play music that I would never buy. I like that.

Another thing about blogging that I like is that there are no bosses. There is nobody that you have to report to. There is no person who holds your financial destiny in his hands. There is no kissing ass to get ahead and there is no ironing your khaki’s so that you look like you “belong” in middle management. There is no laughing at the boss’s jokes when they are not funny. There is no freaking boss! This makes the whole prospect of blogging for a living much more appealing.

Well, I should probably stop to remind you that I really do not blog. Blogging is what people do at the Huffington Post. I write content but I don’t write quirky, witty, ballsy, interesting, fascinating, hilarious, incisive, snarky content. I write boring, informative content on various nonsocial topics. So I am not a blogger in the traditional sense. But I prefer the word “blogger” to “internet marketer” so I tend to use it even if it is really not entirely applicable.

I never wanted (nor do I think that I will ever want) to be a famous blogger. I don’t use my real name on any of my websites. I have made up more fake people than you could imagine. I do not want to be famous and I hope you never learn my name. What I want to do is write informative content on topics that you find off-putting. I want you to find my blogs because they rank well and I want you to ask yourself “Who would start a website about THAT?” Because that’s what I do. I start websites about ridiculous topics. I like to find niches that no internet marketer would want their name attached to and then I start a blog about it because I never wanted you to know my name in the first place.

I love niches that are a little bit sleazy, but not adult, because I know that no “serious” company will ever try to compete with me in the SERPs. If you were a reputable company would you want your company’s website to come up for “lactating man boobs” searches? Of course not. When I stay in the muck I compete against other mucksters but I don’t have to worry (generally) about some media giant plopping a page into my SERPs. Though there are some niches and keywords that I wouldn’t want (or even know how) to monetize. But if the keyword is somewhere in sleaze between pawn shops and abortion pills I will try to hit it.

So, if you are reading this, you may be curious if I am making any money yet. At this point I can only report that I am not there yet. I am putting up sites all the time, but in my whole making money online journey I am probably only at breakeven. I have wasted a lot of money in the past year buying make money ebooks, worthless domains, blogging products, and muchmuchmuch crap. I have burned through many, many domains for instance and most of the blogs that I started did not even get past $10 in adsense. So they were money losers for me. A lot of the problem was that I would put a blog up, write one article and then move on to the next one. I wasted a very long time without a strategy. In fact, the domains that I bought were so useless that I had an Ebay auction and sold a whole lot of them for pennies on the dollar. I lost a lot of money. The domains were terrible though. I felt bad for the poor guy who bought them even if he did get a 90% discount off of their face value.

Anyway, you may be wondering why I am writing this blog post right here. This blog post about blogging is not going to make me any money. I am writing it because I need a break from “work” for a little while. Because I just ran over a dog, hello!! The point of it is that this post will make me NO MONEY. But there is another reason why I am doing it. Besides writing boring crap blogs in sleazy niches I am also trying to build authority-type sites in a few pretty competitive niches. I am building a network of thematically related support sites which, once they all have some Page Rank, might help me eventually rank among my significant competition. But, realistically, if I want to speed up the process, I am going to have to squeeze out some decent links from other internet marketers. Now, these might be tough to get. I don’t really know how likely it is that the competition will link to me as I am not in a position yet to contact other IMs and negotiate an exchange. But, one thing I did notice while browsing Grizzly’s Get Links listings was that a great many of the marketers maintained sites in the make money online niche. Certainly not all of them but a considerable percentage. It got me thinking that one asset I should equip myself with is a blog in the MMO niche of my own. If I had a blog in the MMO niche myself with PR that might come in pretty handy down the road.

But, I don’t think that I want to be a MMO blogger. I don’t make money online yet so nobody will listen to me anyway. But, in a year or so this could be a nice site to have in the arsenal. So, you will, from time to time, get quirky, hopefully-interesting posts like this one that do not make me any money and are not meant to induce a click.

Seeing as I do not yet make much money online, I do not have to worry about talking strategy. I could probably tell the newbie what not to do, but I certainly can not tell the noob how to make $20,ooo a month in IM. Maybe one day I will be able to. But, I should probably point out, even if I did make $20,000 a month online there is no way I would tell you explicitly how I was doing it. I mean, why would I? If a strategy works the best way to muck it up is to tell everyone about it on a blog. So, when I talk about how I am trying to make money, I am going to always talk in generalities because to do otherwise would probably hurt me.

The last thing that I want to say is that I am looking for link exchange partners for this site. If you have a site in MMO and you would be interested in an inpost link exchange send me an email: karl.jetta((guess))paycheckblogging.com.

Out

Can You Make Money with HubPages?

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Not that long ago there were a lot of people in the make money online crowd who were excited about setting up hubs on hubpages to make money. First, if you do not know, on hubpages you can upload content and they host it for you and the adsense revenue is shared. If you use hubpages to host your content you do not have to pay for hosting or domains and you can leech off some of the authority they have built up with the search engines. On the downside you only get 60% of the page impressions.

Anyway, hubs seemed like the wave of the future so I set up and account. Over the course of a month or two I created around 50 hubs on a variety of topics. I was inspired to do this by Ben from Make Money Online with Seo who was in on the hub phenomenon early. Ben created a lot more hubs than I did. I think he ended up with more than 500 of them. And for a while he was making good money. But the good times seemed not to have lasted very long.

Hubpages production exploded as internet marketers started writing articles. Google eventually took notice. It is believed that some sort of penalty was assessed to the hubpages domain which makes it more difficult for new hubs to rank in the SERPs today.

My experience with hubpages was more mixed than Ben’s. I would say that he was much more successful than I was. The reason that I only created 50 hubs was that they were not making me any money. I tried to create hubs in any as many different niches as I could. Some were drawing a little traffic from the search engines. In the past month my fifty hubs have had a thousand visitors come by but my CTR is terrible. On niche sites that I maintain I usually get anywhere from 3% to 12% of my intrepid visitors to click out via an adsense ad. But on hubpages? It was terrible. I had a CTR of less than 1%.

Now, clearly I was doing something wrong because others have done much, much better with CTR. I think the entire episode made me about $10 over multiple months. So, seeing as I was an especially slow writer back then, I probably made about $0.10 an hour for my trouble. So, for making money I have not had any luck with hubpages.

At this point the enthusiasm over hubpages has died down. They are probably still good for links, though even on this count I am suspicious. Let me talk about that for a minute. I think it is possible that links to a site from a hubpage that runs the same adsense ID will not be counted or discounted in some ways. I have no proof for this. I just have a suspicion due to the strange behavior of my sites in the SERPs when linking to and from sites with the same adsense on them. So, you may want to consider setting up a sole proprietorship and signing up for another adsense account under your business name. Just something to think about.

In the final analysis, I would say that hubpages have not been especially useful for me. I have had much better success putting my original content on sites that I own. One tip I would give you if you decide to use hubpages: Don’t put all your hubs under the same username, create multiple identities to better cover your tracks.

I’m out.

Why I Started Paycheck Blogging

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This blog has changed quite a bit since I first started it. When I started this blog, I had absolutely no idea how to make money online. I just wanted to be a blogger. I thought that if I wrote a lot of cool content then I would make a lot of money. I didn’t know much about how the game was played. I still don’t know it all. In fact, I still do not make a full time income through blogging. But, I make more than I ever have and my income is growing.

I started Paycheck Blogging because I thought it was a cool name for a site. I didn’t really do much with it for a long time. In fact, up until today this blog had been around for more than a year and only contained four posts. The funny thing about those first four posts is how useless they really were. I didn’t know how to make money online and my strategy for monetizing this blog were laughable. Those early couple of posts are, today, embarrassing. But, I do not want to take them down, because frankly I need the content. So, they will remain as reminders of how little the newbie knows about internet marketing.

You may have realized that I have updated this blog a couple of times today. I am doing so because my strategy has changed. I do not monetize this blog. Not that it would matter as it gets dick for traffic. But, it is still useful to me. The fact is that for most search engine marketers links are very valuable. By maintaining a blog in the make money online niche I equip myself with something very useful. As this blog gains age, content and links it becomes valuable to me as a property with which I can link to my friends.

You see, lots of the top internet marketers have sites pertaining to internet marketing and making money online. There might be a time in the future when it will come in handy to me to be able to shoot them a nice juicy link when they write some really compelling content.

For that reason, I am turning some attention to this little blog. It costs me about $9 a year. It makes me nothing. Yet, I think it can be valuable. Remember that.

Make Money Online Free

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When I first started I had ambitious goals. I wanted to make money online free. Well actually, let me clarify. It wasn’t that I was unwilling to invest any money into an online business. Oh, I certainly was willing to do that. It was more a factor of I didn’t want to get scammed. I came from a long line of failed business opportunities earlier in life. In these business opportunities I was always required to buy something in order to make much more.

For instance, I remember in the late 1990s I signed up with a MLM called Streamline. The pitch was basically that if you bought $60 of vitamins a month, you could turn around and recruit others to buy $60 of vitamins each month. And those people who recruit still others and pretty soon, with all these $60 a month flying around, someone would start to make money. It sounded like a great idea at the time, though I was only a teenager and none too experienced in running a business. But I looked at the diagrams which showed how a tremendous downline could be achieved whereby I would be getting a piece of thousands even hundreds of thousands of people’s $60. I signed up and immediately began receiving vitamins. Of course, I never convinced another person that they should buy overpriced vitamins to get rich and over a few months I lost a few hundred dollars before I gave it up.

When I first started looking into making money online I was determined not to repeat this mistake. This was a mixed blessing. The fact of the matter is that there was not anyone that I trusted who could tell me how to make money online for free. I tried the some forums where they proclaimed that they could teach you how to make money online, but I never really learned anything. And the fact of the matter was that nearly everyone there had a product that they wanted me to buy. So, I had no idea what to do.

But, I was determined to make money with the internet. Finally I bought some ebooks on affiliate marketing and blogging and sat down and read. The lesson I learned was that I had been ripped off yet again. My experience with buying products designed to make you money is that they are terrible. Most of them are, in fact, just funnels to get you to buy more of the author’s products or products he is an affiliate for. So, if you are looking to buy a make money ebook, I would just advise you to save your money.

There are multiple ways to make money and, the fact of the matter is that nearly all of them require some start up capital. There are a couple of exceptions to this rule, but they will not make you money quickly. And they probably will not make you very much money.

The first exception to this rule is Project Payday. With Project Payday you can make money by earning other people affiliate commissions for trying products. These people will then pay you. But, even this is not free. For instance, if you sign up for $50 worth of trials with your credit card you might make $100. So, you need to be willing to spend that $50. As most people would be willing to spend $50 to make $100 you may not have a problem with this. But the problem is that those trials that you signed up for then cost you more money in monthly subscriptions unless you call each vendor and cancel your subscription. Trust me when I say that this then becomes a huge hassle.

The other exception is to write for a site that pays you for drawing visitors to their site. For instance there are sites like Associated Content and even hubpages.com that will pay you for providing them with the content. The way that this works is that you submit articles and then when visitors find your articles and view advertising then you get paid. Actually, in some cases the visitors need to take action such as clicking on an adsense ad. You can make money through a site like this, but very, very few make enough money to live on by doing so. If you want to read up on why it is even harder than it used to be to make money with hubpages you can read through Ben’s archives.

The fact remains that you will almost surely not make money quickly by writing content for other sites. Some people, like Ben, who I mentioned above, were making decent money with such sites. But this was in the heyday of these sites and they were only did so after they had written hundreds of articles. And the people who were making a couple of grand a month knew what they were doing. They knew how to write and promote content that would rank on the search engines. They knew about search engine optimization.

The fact of the matter is that you are going to need to spend some money if you want to make a living online. You do not need to spend tons. In fact you can start by just buying a single domain and hosting. But, trust me here, you are probably going to need to spend considerably before you start seeing any returns. The fact is that making money online requires money. If you want to be a success without spending money you are going to have to invest a lot of time in order to make up for you cheapness.

One of the things that I want to do on this blog is talk about ways to make a good return on your money and time. Because, if you want to be an internet marketer (which is just a fancy name for people who make money online) you are going to learn that time is your most precious commodity.

Still, my advice about ebooks stands. Don’t buy any ebooks (the one exception to this the Griz Ebook compiled by one of his students.) Yeah, actually if you are just starting out and are willing to put in the work to make money online you should just buy this ebook. I recommend it because I know that the strategies work and you will be making decent coin in six months. Grizzly is an asset to the make money online community and I do not make any money by promoting this compilation of his methods.

Ok, so maybe I have given you something to think about and you are thinking about ways to make money online free. I would simply echo my statement that you have to spend money and invest time to make money on the internet. Remember that.

I’m out.

Can I Make Money Blogging?

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There are a lot of bloggers on the web. In fact there are more than 100 million bloggers in the sphere, in fact I think that there are way more. I wonder how many of them are making money. I tend to think that very few of them are earning more than a couple of dollars a month for their efforts. So why do they do it? Most bloggers blog because something bothers them or because they are passionate about a subject. As a result there are a lot of political blogs and sports blogs and personal blogs and so on. For instance, political blogs. Do the big political blogs make money? I would bet that they don’t make a lot. In fact I don’t know if any of them are profitable. And that my friends points to one of the problems of blogging for income.

Let’s say you’ve got a really popular political blog. You write from the left or from the right (it doesn’t really matter) and you’ve got a loyal readership. Why aren’t you making any money? Because readers don’t make you money. It’s that simple. What does a reader do when they come to your site? They read. They freaking read. That’s all they do. Do you think that makes anybody any money? I know when I go a blog that I like, I consume the information that they present and then I leave. I do not buy anything. I don’t click on adsense ads. I read their piece of information and then I go about my day.

The fact of the matter is that blogging for most people is not a lucrative endeavor. I bet that the majority of blogs that I read for their content make less than $500 a month from their blog. Certainly there are exceptions like a few of the top internet marketers that know how to monetize traffic. But, for the most part, blogging is not a money maker.

I started this blog, for instance, about a year ago, and I haven’t made one red cent from it. In part this is because I choose not to monetize it but in part this is because blogging doesn’t lend itself to making any money. I’ll get back to this in a moment.

The blogs that do make money do so in two ways. They either sell a product, and usually this is through a recommendation of something that they get an affiliate referral for, or they make money by redirecting their traffic to someone who is willing to pay for it. There are lots of examples of bloggers who make money by recommending products. Johnchow.com is the prime example here. On JohnChow the author recommends certain products claiming that they will help people make money online in some form. For every person that buys one of said products, Mr. Chow earns a commission. His only responsibility is to keep the traffic flowing in and interested in the notion of making money online. He then recommends some service through an affiliate link and is paid a percentage on every sale. Mr Chow claims to make more than $40,000 a month through his blog and he accomplishes this by mainly by pitching products/services for which he is an affiliate.

The other way to make money from a blog is to sell your traffic to others for them to try to convert. The easiest way to do this is to display Adsense on your blog which will show text ads relevant to the content of your content. In other words, if you have an article about consolidating student loans then Google will display ads about student loan consolidation for your visitors to click. Each click takes your visitor away from your site and onto your advertiser’s site. In exchange for diverting your traffic to a third party site you will receive a fee (minus Google’s take) and if you generate enough traffic you can earn a substantial amount of money re-routing traffic.

So the fact remains that most blogs make nothing (or very nearly nothing) a month. But the big problem is that people do not want to do the things that it takes to make money. You can make money from a blog if you are willing to write C+ content. If you write A+ content you might eventually make some money from your blog if you can generate a book deal but, for a very long time, you will simply be writing just to be writing. And, if you are okay with blogging for pleasure than go for it.

On the other hand, if you write content that, while being informative, still leaves the reader with a thirst for more information they might take an action. That could be following through a link on your site in search of a product or information and in some cases you will be able to make money from that action. The thing about it that you have to realize is that reading is not a money making activity. The only way you will make money from your blog is if your readers do something. No money exchanges hands when someone reads your beautiful words and leaves.

What this really boils down to is making choices. Do you want to be a famous blogger or do you want to make money? In many cases they are mutually exclusive and you will have to make a choice. I choose to make money. That’s the reason I write. I don’t think that it either correct or incorrect. I am not among the people that think that you are somehow evil if you are trying to make money from your activities online. The only thing that I am saying is that you need to make decisions in advance. Decide if you want to make money or not. If you do then you need to act like it and if you do not then why are you reading my blog about… making money online.