Making Money Blogging – Blog Stew

Its been 10 days since my last post, that’s to long and its going to change!

So what the hell have I been doing online since this blog started?

My first goal was to reach the fabled $10 amount on Google Adsense, that was the first major mile stone in my greater online money making plans.  I managed that fairly fast with an average income around $0.10 per day at that time.  That’s nothing great but it was the start I needed.  It showed me how easy it was (in theory) to make good amount of money online from advertising revenue only.  My first angle of attack was to start setting up content driven websites, based on WordPress.  I have a solid understanding of WordPress from some past experiences so it made sense to stick with what I know.  I looked at things in my life which I currently enjoy or have a good interest in, then I began to produce sites based around those subjects.

One of the first criteria in making successful sites is to base the site on subjects you know and understand.  Making content driven sites to produce income is all well and good, but its a hell of a lot more difficult when you have no interest in the given subject.  My advice is to stick to what you know, all day, everyday, then you can’t go wrong!

Eventually I had produced 4 content driven blogs/sites.  Then it was time to learn SEO methods.  I have a good knowledge on the more common easier methods, but I need to expand this knowledge.  That’s what my current focus is aimed at.

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There are many way to make money online.  Sure you can make money from Adsense and other ad networks, but what about selling services you can provide?  Take a hard look in the mirror and decide what you can and can’t do.  The beauty of selling your talents online is you past work acts as the qualifications.  You don’t need fancy degrees in this or that, you just need to know how to complete the work.

The hardest part can be forming a back catalogue of work, known as a portfolio.  If your just starting out then you have nothing to show, so people are less inclined to take you on.  You can either try and push through this phase or produce work for yourself to primarily act as portfolio content.  Once you have a developed portfolio of work you will need somewhere to show it all off.  This would be a good time to find a catchy domain name and develop a site to suit your services needs.

There are many components to making money online, simply putting all your effort into one sector can become boring and maybe not be as profitable as diversifying.

Finding work can also be tricky to begin with.  The best option would be to post on active webmaster forums announcing your services, showing your portfolio off.  You could then move on to job forums, people ask for specific jobs to be completed.  You tender for the job, giving a quote and hopefully given your good portfolio you get taken on by the client.  When I first started to look into offering services that I can provide myself, I was astonished at the sheer amount of money being thrown at things I could do!  It seemed silly to me to ignore this possible stream of income.

So my message is this, sell yourself online.  If you can design logos, code websites etc then look into the market and find a gap for you to fit in.  People want jobs doing all the time, and people pay.  They pay for knowledge and time, that’s ultimately what you are selling.  You’re selling yourself.

I want to move into graphic design, offering my services for logo and banner design.  I have no qualifications in design, no certificates to show I can use Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, yet I have years of experience with both.  So I need to depend upon a solid portfolio of work.  From reading various forums I came across a quote similar to this:

Self taught people have confidence, they had no teacher to help them out during the hard times.

I know people that run small the medium size businesses here in the UK.  They have no degrees in business or anything like that.  They have the drive and focus to succeed.  Confidence is key in this world; you have to be confident in what you can do.  Then you need to get out there and do it!

I wake up this morning to $3 revenue from the two proxy sites I’m running.  As far as advertising goes I’ve only been adding them to proxy toplists.  This performance so far has been fantastic from my point of view.  I fully expect that with today’s income from both sites I will have paid for hosting and so the sites have become self sufficient!

Today’s plan is to add the current two proxies to more toplists.  The best place to find quality toplists is to copy the competition. Using the Tech-FAQ toplist I was able to find active proxies and then using the links they display, add my sites to those toplists.  Hey if they are using them, they must work!

I also want to get another proxy up and running, which should be easy enough.

I also need to look at adding none Adsense adverts to the proxified pages.  These are the pages the site produces when people use the proxy function.  You are not allowed to display Adsense on any sites you do not own, also people may visit sites with content not allowed by Adsense, for example gambling sites.

AdBright and ExitJunction are two I’ll be looking into.

Also on a side note, I’d like to say thanks to free internet media for the write up they have kindly done on Blog Stew, which can be found here Blog Stew It’s What’s For Dinner.

Thanks Guys!

Ok,

So today the plan is to add my sites to Squidoo and all similar sites.  Basically this should help with making money online, since the quality of back links that should be generated to my sites will be of a higher quality.  This means I should rank higher in search engine results, which should mean more clicks on my adds!

I’ve only really been working at trying to monetize my websites for a week or so and the workload has been massive.  There was me thinking I could simply sit down, find a good high traffic keyword then simply make up a page which relates to it, whack up adverts then be done with it.  That’s not the case at all, hell if it was everyone and their dog would be earning off the Internet.

Its still early days, I just can’t wait to see when this starts to pay off.  I also need to start up some more sites, exciting stuff!