Tag Archives: blogging

Goals for 2010

Posted on by
Reply

A little late, but I thought I should take a moment now that we are in the new year to talk about my goals for 2010. 2009 was my first year in competitive blogging and I have learned a whole lot from a lot of very smart internet marketers. Now, I am still not able to make a full time income from blogging activities and that is really the bottom line. So, without a doubt, that is my number one goal for this upcoming year. I want to make $150 a day, every day, for a total of around $4500 a month. At the moment, I am pulling in $7 to $15 a day across a handful of niche blogs. That needs to go up.

How to accomplish this goal?

As I have talked about before there are a couple of ways to make money blogging. The first is to operate a single or handful of dominant, traffic pulling flagship blogs. The second way is to own many, many smaller blogs that target only a keyword or two. I think that in the long term, the first option is vastly more desirable, however it also a lot more time intensive. So, for now, I think that the main goal will be churning out a lot of smaller blogs.

The first step is to start throwing out blogs. I am using the method of targeting keywords that get between 300 to 3000 exact searches a month in the google keyword tool. If I find a good keyword then I check the competition in google. I want to see some pretty weak sites in the first five spots, I am particularly excited if I see some articles in those spots. Then I buy the domain and start about researching content.

On content

There are a lot of diverse opinions on creating content. My take is that I am building sites for long term potential. I would rather get a lower CTR (click through rate) by writing quality content that will stand the test of time. The fact of the matter is that I think creating sniper blogs is somewhat dicey anyway as they could be frowned upon by the big G. But, if the content is excellent, then I think they can stand the test of time. Plus I think they might be able to attract natural links which makes their placement on the top of the listings somewhat self-sustaining.

This strategy is not entirely mine. I have borrowed it from some successful internet marketers who use it. The best proponent of this method is Ben K who has written a succinct guide to this method on his blog, How to Make Money Online Quickly. You can look into his blog if you want to see how he explains things.

Where I am Today

Thus far in 2010 I have created about ten niche blogs. I have not, of yet, put any adsense on them. I will eventually throw some adsense up there but I’d like to start getting some traffic first. Some of these blogs, which I started rolling out in late 2009, are already on the first page or two for their keywords. But many are not. In fact, though all the blogs have been indexed, most appear to be sandboxed. There may be a trick to get blogs ranking immediately but I am simply not aware of it. I have studied the couple of my blogs which shot right to the top of the SERPs and I can not really ascertain why that has happened. It could be niche specific and my other adsense blogs might have some sort of penalty that will disappear with age or content or links or some combination of the three. We shall see.

But, I am not lingering on one site too long. I get the site up, put a couple of thousand words over several posts on it, send a couple of article links to it, and then move on to the next site. Eventually, I intend to circle back around and give these blogs a little more link love. For now I just want to create them.

For the people who are thinking about making money with adsense on your own sites, I do have a little bit of a warning. Be prepared to work. If I am going to get to my goal of $4500 a month this year, then it is going to take a great deal of effort. I have several blogs that have 5-10 posts on them and bring in about $1 a day. In order to make $150 a day, I will need more than 100 of such sites which is hundreds of pages of content. And, remember that if you are going to be doing article marketing of any sort, you will need even more content in which to locate your links. So, it is a lot of work. But, the good thing, is that once you get your blogs up and ranking pretty well, they don’t require a whole lot of maintenance. I have sites that have been bringing in $1 a day since the summer time and I have not worked one minute on them. This leads me to believe that 150 (or more) niche sites will be entirely manageable for me.

The other thing that I am thinking, is that if I get 150 (or more) blogs and they are all drawing traffic, that I might be able to sell some advertising direct across the network. Though, we have to see about that as time goes on. I just think it would be entirely possible.

Traffic

All of my sites depend on the search engines to draw visitors. And I find that my niche sites should be able to draw 25 page views a day on average. To accomplish they will probably have to rank in top three for their keyword. This is why I focus on keywords that have lesser competition and less searches. It is my best guess that if I keyword gets more than 3,000 exact searches a month, that the keyword will eventually some competition. I hope that, for these keywords with smaller numbers, once I get to the top of page 1 that I will be able to stay there indefinitely. We shall see.

Niches

I am trying to spread my net as wide as possible. I am only purchasing one or two domains in each niche that I am targeting. If I find a niche to be particularly responsive, I believe that I can always go back in the future and look for more keywords to target. However, as I am still in the learning stage, I think targeting as many niches as possible is my best strategy. So, I do have to spend a decent amount of time researching to produce the content, as I am not yet an expert in every niche I intend to enter. But, I believe that with proper research I will able to produce stellar content in all of these niches.

Plans

The thing now is for me to budget my time as effectively as possible. Initially, I was planning to post to Paycheck Blogging quite frequently. I have decided to take a longer term view of this project instead. I’d like to post to this blog once or twice a month and not a whole lot more. I also, initially, wanted to do a lot of article marketing for this blog. Those plans are on hold as well until I can get these niche sites up and running. I will maybe do an article or so a week for this blog.

If you are curious, I am having fun being a part time blogger. I am enjoying the process quite a bit and I am really looking forward to the day that I meet my income goals and can myself full time. I am going to do whatever I can to make sure that that happens this year. 2009 was great for learning. 2010 is going to be great for earning.

Why I Like Blogging

Posted on by
Reply

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

Why I Started Paycheck Blogging

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Can I Make Money Blogging?

Posted on by
Reply

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.